Shift to Skills

Ivy Tech Community College charts a path for creating more skills training on-ramps for Indiana’s growth industries. Also, the University of Michigan and Google Public Sector partner on a major AI teaching assistant project, and a report describes how to close a key funding gap in the education-to-work pipeline.

Employers as Co-Developers of Talent

Indiana will need to upskill or reskill more than 82K working learners with nondegree credentials every year for the state to meet its workforce demands and ensure economic growth.

That’s the bottom-line finding of a new study from Ivy Tech Community College, the state’s two-year college system, and TEConomy partners, a research firm. Ivy Tech currently enrolls 25K learners annually in skills training and other workforce-related programs, such as apprenticeships. So the system will need to dramatically ramp up those programs to meet the expected workforce demand.

A workforce crisis is driving the urgency in Indiana, with both a shrinking working-age population and inadequate labor force participation. As a result, only 72 workers are available for every 100 open jobs in the state, a problem that’s hitting small and midsize businesses the hardest. 

“Simply put, the availability of skilled and credentialed talent does not match the pace of Indiana’s growing innovation and digital economy,” the report says.

The good news is that Ivy Tech and the state’s K-12 schools have been pushing hard on employment-aligned education paths in recent years. Meanwhile, employers in Indiana increasingly realize they can no longer wait for talent to arrive fully skilled, according to the report, with many transitioning from being reactive consumers to “co-developers” of talent.

The two-year college system has seen a big jump in demand among employers for customized skills training, says Molly Dodge, Ivy Tech’s senior vice president of workforce and careers, and landed roughly 1,600 contracts for those programs during the last couple years. That has been the primary driver of Ivy Tech’s skills training enrollments.

“​​Employers are feeling the pressure to stay competitive as the economy continues to evolve,” Dodge says. “What’s driving the demand for our customized training is our ability to get workers job-ready with targeted, hands-on programs built around exactly what each company needs.”

Firms across advanced manufacturing, business, and healthcare are leading the way on skills training partnerships with Indiana’s community colleges. Dodge says the biggest training contracts include robotics with Cummins, pharmaceutical manufacturing process with Eli Lilly and Company, and welding and office productivity tools with Lippert Components.

Strength in Numbers: The system has had success in getting employers to the table through industry-sector partnerships and talent associations, where multiple employers join forces to create shared training cohorts. For example, the campus in Anderson is launching a countywide manufacturing academy in May, with eight companies having signed on. The academy’s initial two-week bootcamps will lead to industry certifications and college credits.

Dodge says this approach lets employers shape the curriculum based on real job needs while building a stronger regional talent pipeline.

“It’s smarter and faster when companies train together,” she says. “They share the cost of training, shape the curriculum, and build a stronger talent pool for everyone.”

The report used data from federal sources, Lightcast, and the World Economic Forum to identify demand for skills education and training. Much of the growth will come from four key industry sectors: advanced manufacturing, transportation and logistics, healthcare, and IT.

“Many of the most in-demand roles in Indiana’s key sectors don’t require a full degree but do need a certificate or technical certificate—often just 18 to 34 credit hours,” Dodge says.

The research also identified ways the system could more directly embed industry-specific training. For example, the report said, Ivy Tech could bundle courses for intensive, short-term training programs—ones that could be completed in two to four weeks, or even two days.

There’s no single solution to meeting the annual demand for 82K skills credentials, Dodge says. Apprenticeships will be a big part of the mix. Led by an unusually broad coalition of educators, employers, and philanthropists, the state recently set an ambitious goal for creating 50K youth apprenticeships over the next decade.

That sort of partnership will be needed for Indiana to meet its workforce goals, as Ivy Tech won’t be able to do it alone. But Dodge is confident that the two-year system will pull its weight. 

The Kicker: “Companies know we can deliver training that fits their industry, their schedule, and their talent goals.”

Experimenting With AI Teaching Assistants

The University of Michigan is partnering with two dozen institutions to test whether AI teaching assistants can help close gaps in learning and improve outcomes—one of the largest deployments of an AI agent in higher education to date.

The university’s Ross School of Business, together with Google Public Sector, launched the project this week. Over the next two years, it will test virtual teaching assistants’ impact on the engagement and academic performance of 9K students in courses across 26 institutions. The project is focused on business courses for now, but the goal is to better understand how colleges can adopt AI for learning more broadly.

The virtual TAs, which are powered by Google’s Gemini model, can be customized to suit each course but generally will be designed to give students 24-7 access to course-specific support, offer more problem-solving exercises, and give faculty real-time insight into students’ interests and where they are struggling.

Jun Li, a professor of technology and operations at Michigan who is a leader in the project, had been experimenting with AI assistants and saw some promising results. In one of her classes, students who interacted with the virtual TA saw a two-percentage-point bump in their final grades. The tool especially seemed to boost the engagement of women and Black students, Li says, some of whom volunteered that they felt uncomfortable asking questions in class but were happy to ask the virtual TA.

Li helped build out the larger pilot project after she kept hearing from professors across the country who were doing something similar.

“We were saying, ‘We have all of these internal, small-scale experiments—so can we do this on a larger scale in a properly designed and randomized experiment to really learn how generative AI technologies can be used in higher education?’” she says.

In designing the virtual TAs for the larger rollout, Li says it was paramount to ensure security and data privacy, to protect intellectual property, and to design an agent that would enhance learning rather than simply doing the work for students. That’s a big part of why they wanted to work with Google Public Sector, which already had a lot of the necessary protocols and capabilities in place.

For Google, the project is part of a broader push to help colleges and universities—whether in research, teaching, or career navigation—deploy AI tools securely and at scale. It recently launched Career Dreamer, which taps Gemini to help users navigate job searches and explore career possibilities. 

“Really, our goal is to lean heavily into this moment of AI as an enabler,” says Charles Elliott, head of industry architects on the rapid innovation team at Google Public Sector. —By Elyse Ashburn

The Missing Middle in Education-to-Work Funding

The education-to-work pipeline is broken and traditional funding mechanisms are poorly suited to address the problem. That’s where “catalytic capital” comes in, according to a new analysis by Tyton Partners.

Such investment capital allows for flexibility and lower, slower returns. It could thus fill an important middle ground between grant funding—which can’t provide enough ongoing capital relative to the need—and market-rate investment capital, which requires higher returns than most education and workforce solutions can provide. 

But that middle-ground funding is underused in the education-to-work sector today, according to the analysis, which was based on a review of existing research and interviews with 15-plus impact investors.

Key funding opportunities for catalytic capital include market areas that are:

• Nascent: Product areas, like student-friendly loans for workforce training, where there are few or no market players and traditional capital has been unwilling to step in.

• Subsidized: Markets, like skills training for those facing career barriers, that are heavily reliant on nonprofit or public funding.

• Broken: Areas, like mentoring and support for first-generation students, where the market incentives are fundamentally misaligned with social interests.

The authors recommend that impact investors move beyond the binary of grants or market-rate capital; consider larger, more highly focused investments; and pool both their knowledge and capital to have more impact in targeted areas. —By Elyse Ashburn

Open Tabs

Workforce Credentials
More than half (56%) of community college credentials issued in the U.S. in 2022–23 were workforce or career-technical credentials designed to prepare students to secure jobs or develop job skills—versus those aimed at transfer or exploring general education coursework—found an analysis by the Community College Research Center at Columbia University’s Teachers College. For associate degrees, 35% fit that definition.

Career Education
California rolled out the final version of its Master Plan for Career Education, which seeks to remove degree requirements for many state jobs, create a “career passport” that emphasizes skills over degrees, and expand efforts to translate work and military experience into college credits. The plan is designed to expand access for a wide variety of learners while also freeing up resources to provide more customized support for specific populations.

Research on Workforce Education
West Virginia University has partnered with RAND to tap research to develop practical solutions for workforce development and education. The university and the nonprofit research organization will devise policy recommendations on state and federal workforce strategies, with a focus on apprenticeships, CTE courses, and career mapping that includes stackable credentials and job transitions. Initial research findings are expected by the end of the year.

Manufacturing Academy
Michigan State University is collaborating with Apple to create a manufacturing academy in Detroit. The university says the academy will be operational this summer. It will offer in-person and virtual education programs across a wide range of skill areas. The academy will be open to companies nationwide. Apple engineers and experts from Michigan State will consult with small- and midsize companies on AI and smart manufacturing techniques.

Sectoral Training
Government-supported workforce development in the U.S. has evolved alongside the economy, with an increasing focus on sector-specific training compared to the previous federal emphasis on target populations, write two experts from the Brookings Institution. They call on Congress to improve efficiency of the federal workforce system by eliminating redundancies, as well as for the expansion of apprenticeships and other sectoral workforce policies.

Data Centers
President Trump’s tariffs could drive up AI costs and data center construction prices while complicating supply chains, reports Lucinda Shen for Axios. The tariffs are expected to increase prices for construction, electrical equipment, and metal products, which could hold back the data and electrical infrastructure needed by AI. Meanwhile, Microsoft scuttled $1B in planned data centers in Ohio amid other canceled projects in the U.S. and Europe.

EV Manufacturing
More clean energy projects were canceled in the first quarter of 2025 than in the last two years combined, Shannon Osaka reports for The Washington Post, citing data from Atlas Public Policy. EV-related tax benefits and other incentives from the Biden era may be repealed by congressional Republicans. In response, companies that were investing in manufacturing American EV parts are canceling projects, like a $1.2B battery factory in Arizona.

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