Targeted Talent Matching

An employer-led talent marketplace seeks to cut through the noise for local businesses and jobseekers. Also, understanding the data infrastructure needed for skills-based hiring, the emerging expert consensus on AI’s impacts on jobs, and an essay on why four-year degree completion matters for working learners. (Subscribe here.)

Employer-Led Talent Marketplace

A growing number of states are working to create data systems that connect learners and employers, with a modest nudge from the Trump administration. As these talent marketplaces take shape, a different approach is emerging in Colorado—an employer-driven, hire-local model.

Colorado is developing its own ambitious, statewide talent marketplace. The new CareerFit Colorado, however, has a narrower focus.

The career platform, launched last fall, seeks to help Coloradans land living-wage jobs with Colorado employers. It covers a handful of high-demand industries and occupations, beginning with business operations, construction and the skilled trades, quantum computing, and advanced manufacturing.

“This is not looking at every single job across the state,” says Christine Heitz, CEO of Colorado Thrives, a nonprofit group of business leaders that created the new platform. Instead, she says, the tool is aimed at “solving industry-specific tension points” by connecting employers with motivated local jobseekers.

So far, more than 380 employers have signed on to the project, which also includes community colleges, public universities, training providers, and business and scholarship groups. The partnership includes data-sharing agreements, so employers have a better sense of the results for specific education and training programs. Likewise, jobseekers and educators get a better sense of which jobs are available, as well as which fields are expanding or shrinking.

The job market overall is contracting in the state and across much of the nation. Heitz says CareerFit Colorado gives residents “warm leads” that translate into real job offers from local employers.

“How do we cut through the noise of those 5K applicants in the first week and spot the Colorado talent?” she says.

The platform is powered by FutureFit AI, which is contributing the skills-matching infrastructure and navigation layer. Jobseekers get personalized recommendations for best-fit job roles as well as education and training options—including internships—that can help them break into specific careers. The project also includes a focus on providing support students need to complete their training, including scholarships and help with childcare and transportation.

CareerFit Colorado is among a growing number of talent-matching plays led by organizations that pull together groups of employers, says Lucas Levine, FutureFit AI’s chief commercial officer. For example, he points to similar efforts like TalentFirst in western Michigan and Upskill Houston from the Greater Houston Partnership.

The defining feature of these emerging regional sector partnerships is employers “taking their talent challenges into their own hands,” Levine says. The targeted industry approach also offers depth into specific occupations, he says, while keeping business partners engaged. “You have to build something that works for them.”

CareerFit Colorado is in its early days. But Heitz says the platform has a critical mass of committed partners, as well as a solid dataset that features daily updates on jobs. At some point, the platform could be consumed by the state’s broader talent marketplace, a scenario Heitz calls a win.

The Kicker: “This work can inform the statewide system,” she says. “How do we use this to make everybody better?”

Inflection Point for Data Infrastructure

Learning and employment records are the connective data infrastructure needed for talent marketplaces and skills-based hiring, says Ian Davidson, chief growth officer at SmartResume.

“If we want skills-based hiring to work at scale, we have to rethink how data moves between platforms—government systems, education providers, employers, and individually controlled technologies,” he says. “No single platform can solve that.”

Yet defining LERs and explaining how all the pieces fit together isn’t easy.

“Historically, people have focused narrowly on their own part of the system,” like digital badges, credential registries, and talent marketplaces, says Dave Wengel, CEO and founder of iDatafy, which is SmartResume’s parent company.

SmartResume just published a guide for making sense of this rapidly expanding landscape. The LER Ecosystem Report was produced in partnership with AACRAO, Credential Engine, 1EdTech, HR Open Standards, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation. It was based on interviews and feedback gathered over three years from 100+ leaders across education, workforce, government, standards bodies, and tech providers.

The tools are available now to create the sort of interoperable ecosystem that can make talent marketplaces a reality, the report argues. Meanwhile, federal policy moves and bipartisan attention to LERs are accelerating action at the state level.

“For state leaders, this creates a practical inflection point,” says the report. “LERs are shifting from an innovation discussion to an infrastructure planning conversation.”

Transformation of Job Tasks

A loose consensus has emerged on the impact AI is having on the job market. Many top researchers, corporate CEOs, and AI lab leaders say the technology so far appears to be substantially affecting tasks within AI-exposed job roles, but not displacing many workers.

That could change soon, however.

“I think we’re going to see this year the beginnings of maybe it impacting the junior level, entry-level jobs, internships,” Demis Hassabis, cofounder and CEO of Google DeepMind, said last week in Davos. “There is some evidence—I can feel that ourselves—like a slowdown in hiring.”

Several other heavy hitters at the World Economic Forum echoed his warning.

If those predictions prove correct, writes Molly Kinder, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, then the “traditional model of developing young talent in knowledge sectors—hiring junior workers to perform routine tasks while they gain expertise over time—won’t survive when AI handles those tasks instead.”

Kinder proposes reimagining the career ladder by drawing from the residency model in medical professions. For his part, Hassabis says college students should lean into using the tech, to pick up skills that can help them leapfrog into professions.

Hassabis also says research and policy attention remain woefully inadequate for dealing with AI’s potential impacts on jobs. Jamie Dimon agrees. “It may go too fast for society,” the chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase said in Davos.

Government and business will need to work together to retrain displaced workers under that scenario, he said, pointing to the potential elimination of 2M truck drivers in the U.S. Dimon also turned heads by saying that governments should offer incentives for companies to slow down broad layoffs due to AI, as well as to provide retraining and income assistance to their affected workers.

For now, JPMC is growing its workforce. But Dimon predicts that the banking and finance giant will have fewer employees in five years.

Another financial titan, Blackstone, has a much smaller workforce than JPMC, with about 5K employees. While the private equity firm’s workers are using AI broadly in their work, the technology is not replacing people, Chris Striano, COO of global finance at Blackstone, says in an interview.

“We often say our people are our greatest asset. We see AI as having the potential to augment jobs, not replace them,” Striano says. “Our goal is to empower our employees with tools that free them up to focus on what matters most—applying judgment and critical thinking to drive solutions.” 

A new analysis from the Burning Glass Institute strikes a similar tone. Using data from millions of job ads, the report argues that the common framing of the debate over automation versus augmentation—jobs that get automated are distinct from jobs that get augmented—obscures what’s happening in the labor market.

In reality, jobs are not yet vanishing en masse, the institute says. But they are changing, and the workers who thrive will be those who change with them.

“The jobs experiencing the most automation are simultaneously experiencing the most augmentation,” the report argues. “AI isn’t eliminating project managers. It’s transforming what project managers do each day.”

Open Tabs

New Accreditors
The U.S. Department of Education announced plans for a spring negotiated rule making to reform accreditation. The Trump administration’s goals for the committee include developing regulations that would simplify the recognition of emerging and existing accrediting agencies. Nicholas Kent, the U.S. under secretary of education, has said that too few accreditors control access to billions in taxpayer funds and to professional licensure opportunities.

Investigation at DOL
U.S. Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer is being investigated by the Labor Department inspector general’s office, according to several news reports. The IG has received at least two complaints accusing Chavez-DeRemer’s two top aides of pressuring staff to direct the awarding of grants to benefit the secretary’s political career and to elevate her standing with donors and consultants, Rebecca O’Brien reports for The New York Times.

Defending Higher Ed
A new national coalition will focus on defending higher education from political interference and promoting democracy. The Alliance for Higher Education, led by Mike Gavin, grew out of his work heading up a network of mostly community college leaders who have been developing strategies to stay focused on equity amid the Trump administration’s DEI purge and similar moves in many Republican-led states. Gavin left his role as president of Delta College in Michigan to start the new alliance.

Experiential Learning
A three-year project from the Association of Community College Trustees will embed virtual work-based learning into short-term workforce training programs at 20 community colleges nationwide. The employer projects will be developed with Riipen, an experiential learning platform, with support from Google.org. The initiative will focus on high-demand fields, including IT, healthcare, advanced manufacturing, business technology, and emerging tech.

Noncredit Programs
New research sheds light on the characteristics and motivations of students in noncredit workforce programs at community colleges—a population that accounts for nearly half of all student enrollments in the two-year sector. Researchers at the Education and Employment Research Center at Rutgers University found that 71% of students interviewed had previously enrolled in credit-based college but were derailed due to financial and life challenges.

Case for Apprenticeship
Estimates of the ROI of apprenticeships in the U.S. offer limited value to employers, because of the wide variation in outcomes and inconsistent definitions of apprenticeships, according to a report from researchers at Brookings Metro. Building a stronger evidence base on the business case for apprenticeships will require more foundational research and better data infrastructure, including shared definitions, standardized metrics, and employer tracking tools.

Job Moves
The Bipartisan Policy Center is seeking to hire a director to lead the nonprofit’s work on workforce and postsecondary pathways.

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