What Are We Preparing People For?
Career education resources often rest on assumptions that never got named.
Intake processes are designed for a certain kind of job seeker. Someone with a linear work history, a clean timeline, a resume that fits neatly into a format. A lot of the people on a workforce caseload do not look like that on paper. They have gaps, perhaps due to caregiving, or incarceration, or bad luck. They’ve worked across different industries, have incomplete credentials, or never moved beyond the $12/hour mark. Underlying these things, they may have valuable life experience from sources staff do not usually think to ask about.
The useful question is how to guide people through that self-discovery. AI is actually good at distinguishing situations, like when someone has limited work history but a degree, then knowing to ask them to share more about school projects and volunteer work. Or if someone was incarcerated, AI can help create a pathway (not a trap door) to guide them through sharing what work they did inside. Jobs like janitorial, food prep, maintenance may not seem significant to them. But if they showed up to that job for three years, that in itself says something. And they likely strengthened transferable skills they’re not seeing. Staff can use AI to help them see that, and articulate it.
As those tools take shape, the underlying question gets louder: What are we preparing people for?
At the foundation of this work is an assumption: that there will be quality opportunities awaiting someone who takes positive steps. The mindset that will serve people most is not tied to any particular job function.
It's entrepreneurial.
Not in the “go raise money and launch a startup” sense, but “identify a problem and figure out how to address it.” Being able to act like an entrepreneur, even when working as an employee, is becoming more valuable as the corporate world gets more tenuous.
How to shift to this mindset? First, people have to learn to identify the parts of themselves that are most useful to others. Whether it’s a skill they developed, a temperament they innately possess, a way they uniquely delight the people around them. Figuring out how to identify and articulate that is a core skill.
The job market that awaits clients is going to be very different from what staff have seen. And it’ll happen much more quickly than the change earlier generations lived through (the ones who worked at the same company for 50 years) to where we are now.
Before, people had to let go of the idea that an employer owes loyalty. Now, they have to let go of the assumption that anyone owes them a job, that someone else will figure out how to profit from their skills.
This sounds daunting, but the tools to do it have become ridiculously accessible. RS Works is in an AI accelerator with 20 other companies, mostly bootstrapped, all working on solving a pressing problem they identified.
The full-on path of a struggling entrepreneur is not for everyone. Learning to cultivate this way of seeing, as capable of being the bringer of solutions, will be core to what awaits people.
How can programs prepare? By instilling in the people they work with an appreciation of their ideas and strengths. By making the education that surrounds all of this more accessible to them. That does not just mean medical billing, customer service, or data analytics. Those are job functions. It means teaching people how to take an idea they believe in, vet it, and see it to fruition.
This is not a dismissal of the skilled trades. A cabinetmaking program can teach skills as valuable as a master’s degree. Inside all of these pathways should be a consideration of the question: How would someone learning these skills strike out on their own?
Programs can’t rely on private companies to consistently furnish opportunities, and to keep participants steadily and gainfully employed. Aside from a select few, they’re working as fast as possible to automate everything they can. But on the flip side, the tools and methods they’re applying are accessible to anyone.
Staff can be teaching people how to take the skills of production into their own hands.