The fix isn’t more programs. It’s funding the layer around them as a core component of our education and workforce system. That layer is the connective tissue between programs and the people they’re built for. It’s the messy, tailored work of meeting individual learners where their lives actually are, and individual employers where their hiring needs actually sit. Programs are easier and more attractive to fund. A program is concrete and well-defined — it has a name, a curriculum, students who graduate from it, success stories that come out of it. The layer around it is less tangible — harder for a funder to picture, name, or put in a report. But it’s what makes programs investments actually pay off — and it has to exist on both sides: for learners and for employers.

The layer for learners

On the learner side, this layer is starting to take shape. The vehicle is career navigation. When programs try to serve a broader population of learners — first-generation students, low-income workers, career changers, people managing complex personal circumstances — they run into barriers the programs themselves can’t solve. Navigation is the work of meeting those barriers.

What a navigator actually does is concrete: they make sense of the messiness of a person’s life and goals, surface the desired path among many, translate a confusing credential and career landscape into a specific direction, and connect them with the wraparound supports — case management, transportation help, financial aid coaching, childcare resources — that eliminate the barriers standing between a learner and successful participation in a program. And they help students build the social capital, employer connections, and navigation skills they’ll use every time their career shifts. Navigators don’t replace programs. They make programs accessible and completable for students who otherwise wouldn’t get in, wouldn’t get through, or wouldn’t end up in the jobs the programs were built to prepare them for.

This isn’t the case management the workforce system has always provided — it’s something more deliberate, resourced for depth, and built to operate across program silos rather than inside any one of them. Investment in career navigation so far has been concentrated in postsecondary settings, especially community colleges. It’s still rare in registered apprenticeship, K-12 settings, and the broader array of pathways outside higher ed, where it could be just as valuable. Funding what works has to mean expanding this layer into those settings, not just deepening it inside the ones where it already exists.

The funding momentum behind career navigation infrastructure is real and accelerating. In July 2024, American Student Assistance awarded JFF $25 million to launch the ASA Center for Career Navigation, with a goal of helping 20 million young learners navigate pathways into quality jobs by 2030. The Schultz Family Foundation has made fixing what it calls “the broken marketplace” between learners, training providers, and employers a strategic priority.

I’ve seen first-hand the impact of career navigation through my work supporting the Washington Jobs initiative. Construct a Career Initiative is bringing navigation services into registered apprenticeship — a system where navigation typically doesn’t exist — and has lifted apprenticeship retention from 64 to 90 percent for the populations they serve. JumpStart King County is tailoring its navigation services to a specific population (young people from underrepresented communities in King County) and a specific sector (clean energy), at a level of specificity that generic models can’t match. That tailoring includes the unglamorous specifics — access to transportation, tools, gas cards — that determine whether a young person can actually show up and succeed.

This progress is real. It’s also partial: the navigation layer is still under-resourced almost everywhere, and high-performing organizations typically can’t fund it through existing revenue streams. A recent Harvard Project on Workforce study put numbers to the under-resourcing — one community college career coach they interviewed was responsible for 4,700 students at once. But the field has started to recognize that this work is the work, not overhead on top of programs — what the Harvard authors call “a core component of our education and workforce system,” not a supplemental service. The harder question — and the one I want to spend the rest of this piece on — is why we haven’t extended the same logic to the other side of the system, where the stakes for students are just as high.

The layer for employers

On the employer side, the equivalent layer is just beginning to emerge — at nothing like the scale or investment of the learner side.

Employers across sectors are facing real workforce shortages. They have hiring needs in specific occupations and often can’t meet them — recruiting nationally, poaching from competitors, watching roles sit unfilled. Local training programs exist that could meet many of those needs, but many employers don’t know they exist, can’t easily find them, and don’t have a structured way to engage with them at the scale their hiring requires.

On the other end of the spectrum, employers who are on the field’s radar face the opposite problem: they’re approached by a host of different workforce development programs — a community college asking them to hire from its career pathways, an apprenticeship program asking them to host apprentices, a workforce nonprofit asking them to sponsor student projects, a bootcamp asking for curriculum input or internship slots — each one presenting itself as a solution to the employer’s workforce challenges. The volume is fragmented and hard for any one employer to sort through. And when an employer does engage, the program often doesn’t quite match what they actually need: the graduates are close, but the skills don’t quite line up.

Employers respond the way you’d expect — with low engagement and predictable frustration. The system is asking employers to do the navigating themselves across a workforce landscape that is as complex as the one learners face — and students pay the price when employers disengage, programs lose alignment with real hiring demand, and graduates end up in jobs that don’t use what they trained for.

Employers need exactly what learners need, and for the same reasons. They need the equivalent of a navigator — an employer-led sector intermediary. Sector intermediaries make sense of the workforce landscape for the employers they represent. They surface those employers’ specific hiring needs at the occupational level. And they broker the connections between specific employers and the training providers that can actually meet their hiring needs, replacing the fragmented program-by-program outreach with one coherent relationship. They also give programs the employer-side input that ensures what gets taught actually matches what employers are hiring for. And like navigators on the learner side, sector intermediaries don’t just navigate on behalf of employers — they help employers build the capacity to engage with the workforce system more effectively over time. They make programs work for employers who otherwise can’t find the right talent — and for students who otherwise wouldn’t end up in jobs that match what they trained for.

Through Career Connect Washington, I’ve seen this work begin to take shape. As part of the MAC Welding Project, sector intermediaries from maritime, agriculture, and construction jointly developed an open-source welding framework — shared standards and outcomes that training programs across the state can adopt to align with what employers in those sectors actually need to hire for. Life Science Washington brought Jubilant HollisterStier, a Spokane biomanufacturing employer, together with Spokane Community College to adapt and scale an existing training program from another region — creating a new local pipeline to lab technician jobs that wouldn’t have existed without an intermediary connecting the dots. (More on these examples here.)

Sector intermediaries clearly benefit employers: they make hiring easier, signal demand more cleanly, and reduce the time employers waste on misaligned engagement. But the case for investing public and philanthropic dollars in them is the case for students. Without this layer, programs train students for credentials that don’t pay off and occupations that aren’t in demand. Students accumulate debt. They graduate into fields where the jobs they expected don’t exist. The fix to employer engagement is the same fix to student outcomes — they are the same problem viewed from two ends of the system.

The parallel matters: just as the Harvard authors argue that career navigation should be treated as core infrastructure for the education and workforce system rather than a supplemental service for students, sector intermediaries should be treated as core workforce infrastructure for employers — not optional convenings, not nice-to-haves, but the structural layer that determines whether the system delivers.

Fund the connective tissue

The work that holds messiness — navigators for learners, sector intermediaries for employers — is the connective tissue between programs and the populations they’re supposed to serve. It is exactly what the field has historically been reluctant to fund. It looks like overhead. But If we actually want true scale of participation — a broader population of learners completing programs, a broader range of employers hiring from them — we have to fund the elements that hold the messiness and make tailored solutions possible. The programs alone can’t do it.

The case for investing in sector intermediaries is more timely than ever. AI is reshaping labor markets in ways that make sector intermediaries more necessary, not less — the faster skill demands shift, the more employers need a trusted layer that can interpret those shifts and translate them into responsive changes to training. (I’ve made the longer version of this case here.) AI is also making the work of intermediaries cheaper and more effective — pathway recommendations, labor market analysis, tailored matching to supportive services, and streamlined communications can absorb a meaningful portion of what navigators and sector intermediaries might otherwise do by hand. This is exactly the moment to invest, not to wait.

A specific ask of funders

The argument I’ve made here points to a concrete opportunity. What the workforce field needs is a national employer-led sector intermediary initiative — dollars, applied research, and technical assistance directed at building the structural layer the system has been missing. Three concrete shapes for such an initiative can build on nascent work already happening in the field:

• A competitive capacity-building fund — investment in sector-based organizations themselves. Many industry associations, employer collaboratives, and sector partnerships already convene employers but lack the workforce development expertise to function as true sector intermediaries. A capacity-building fund would support the staffing, data, and facilitation capacity they need to do real intermediary work — particularly for organizations serving high-need occupations like registered nursing, teaching, and skilled trades. This is the most immediate entry point because the organizations already exist.

• State-backed sector leadership pilots — investment in the infrastructure around employer-led sector intermediaries. In states like Colorado and Washington, the political conditions exist to treat sector intermediaries as core workforce infrastructure — built into how the state’s education and training systems set priorities and align with employer demand, rather than as peripheral conveners. Pilots would test what that integration takes and what makes it durable across administrations.

• A national demonstration portfolio — investment in cross-site learning. Multi-state investments paired with centralized research, technical assistance, and a cross-site community of practice would produce evidence about what works in which contexts and translate findings into actionable guidance for the field as a whole. This is where lessons that would otherwise stay siloed inside individual organizations or states become shared knowledge.

None of these investments requires inventing new infrastructure from scratch. The programs exist. The expertise to do this work exists in organizations across the country. What’s missing is the field’s willingness to fund the layer that makes those programs actually deliver — for the broader range of students who could complete them, and for the broader range of employers who could hire from them.

The learner-side momentum proves this works. The employer side is where the next, bigger bet has to come. Until it does, programs will keep falling short of the scale they’re funded to deliver — and the students on the other end of every program decision will keep paying the price.

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Here is a partial inventory of what that “yes” can look like in a single year.

Your local school district asks you to serve on a program advisory committee for its manufacturing CTE pathway. Your regional community college invites you to join a professional-technical advisory committee. The state workforce board sends you an employer workforce needs survey. Your local workforce development board contacts you about hiring from its pool of job-ready candidates. An apprenticeship intermediary approaches you about serving as a training agent. A state agency asks for a letter of support for a grant. A nonprofit asks you to judge a student skills competition. A second nonprofit asks if you’d be willing to host a student intern.

Each of these requests is reasonable on its own. Each comes from someone genuinely committed to building better workforce pipelines. And each arrives without any knowledge of the others.

This is what fragmented employer engagement looks like in practice — and it is not unique to one state, one sector, or one employer. It is a structural feature of how U.S. workforce development ecosystems have been built over decades. This article focuses on one category of engagement that drives a significant share of that fragmentation: advisory structures — the formal committees, boards, and tables that ask employers to weigh in on programs, credentials, and regional workforce plans. These structures have multiplied over decades — and this article makes the case for redesigning them in ways that produce better outcomes for students and businesses alike.

Why advisory structures multiplied

Most employer advisory committees in the U.S. were not designed to be strategic. They were created to satisfy funding requirements.

The three most common structures — CTE program advisory committees, community college program advisory committees (called industry or technical advisory committees in many states), and local workforce development boards — each ask employers to review, validate, or sign off on something: curriculum, credential alignment, regional workforce plans. The ask tends to be reactive: review what the system has prepared, provide input, and sign off.

Each structure exists because a funding stream or policy created an expectation of employer engagement. Perkins drives employer participation in CTE and community college programs; WIOA requires employer-majority representation on workforce boards. Each institution built its own infrastructure to meet these requirements. Over time, these structures didn’t replace one another. They accumulated.

In Washington State, a recent landscape analysis I conducted in collaboration with the Partnership for Learning found an estimated 2,900 standing advisory committees regularly requesting employer input across the state — generating roughly 9,000 meetings per year. These structures span more than 300 public institutions: 295 school districts, 34 community and technical colleges, 12 local workforce development boards, and more. You can explore that landscape analysis here.

These numbers reflect one state’s count — but they are directional evidence of a national pattern. Advisory structures have proliferated not because of strategic design, but because of policy layering. Well-intentioned requirements, stacked over decades, produced a system that no one designed and no one is fully responsible for coordinating.

What this costs

The volume alone would be manageable if the engagement were high-quality and consequential. In many cases, it is neither. Three patterns explain why.

Input is raise-your-hand, not representative by design. The employers who show up to advisory committees tend to be individuals with personal connections to a school or program — the local HR manager who attended the community college, the business owner whose student went through the CTE pathway. Their input is real and often valuable. But it doesn’t represent a sector. These are individuals, not sector voices — and no mechanism typically exists to ensure that the perspectives in the room reflect the full range of employers actually hiring in that field.

Much of what happens in these meetings is compliance, not strategy. In many cases, the work advisory committees do — reviewing program documentation, signing off on curriculum updates, approving regional plans — exists primarily to satisfy federal reporting requirements. Employers are often handed materials written in the language of education policy or government regulation, asked to weigh in on frameworks and terminology that don’t map easily to how they think about their workforce, and expected to provide input on decisions that fall outside of their day-to-day experience. When the ask is fundamentally administrative, it’s difficult to generate the kind of substantive, forward-looking guidance that would actually improve outcomes for students and employers alike.

Information doesn’t travel. Even when advisory committees produce useful guidance, it rarely surfaces above the local level. The same questions are asked in parallel across hundreds of separate structures. Answers stay within each structure. The system never synthesizes what it hears into coherent, sector-wide intelligence. Information capture is abundant. Information flow is nearly nonexistent.

The result is a system that generates the appearance of engagement — filled seats, completed surveys, signed reports — without generating what engagement is supposed to produce: employer input that actually shapes what gets built, approved, and funded. What the system produces instead is input of uneven quality — individual voices, not sector voices — that stays siloed within each local structure and is never synthesized into coherent guidance at the district, regional, or statewide level.

None of this is a criticism of the people running these structures. In interviews, I’ve consistently heard that advisory committee leaders are working hard to keep employers engaged — searching for ways to bring the right content to the table, solicit meaningful input, and encourage ongoing participation. They care about their students and jobseekers and are doing their part within a system they didn’t design. But the result is inefficiency on all sides — for the educators investing time to convene and run these committees, and for the employers being asked to show up.

The inefficiency is real — but that’s not the cost that matters most. When the workforce development ecosystem isn’t shaped by meaningful employer guidance, students bear the consequences. They train for occupations that aren’t in demand and graduate with skills that don’t match what employers need. They accumulate debt in programs that can’t deliver on their promise of leading to a good job. And when that happens at scale, it’s not just a waste of public investment — it undermines young people’s ability to succeed in an increasingly complex economy, and contributes to the growing erosion of trust in educational institutions and the widening sense that the American dream is out of reach.

One way to think about reorientation

I don’t think the answer is to eliminate local advisory committees — but I do think it requires rethinking their purpose and how different types of work are distributed across the system. Here is how I’m currently thinking about it, and I’m genuinely curious where this logic holds up and where it doesn’t.

Local employers have something genuinely valuable to offer — they know their regional labor market, they can tell you whether a statewide recommendation applies in their context, and they are the ones who will ultimately hire students and host work-based learning. That connection matters and should be preserved.

What might change is the purpose each structure serves — and the level at which different types of work happen. Here are some ideas about what that might look like in practice:

Move the generative work up. Strategic advisory functions — identifying priority occupations, validating curriculum frameworks, recommending which credentials carry real labor market value — should happen at the regional or sector level, where input can be aggregated across many employers and synthesized into representative guidance. Industry associations and sector intermediaries are well positioned to lead this work. I’ve written extensively about what that looks like in practice. Rather than asking every local committee to answer the same sector-wide questions independently, the sector-level body does that work once — and does it well.

Reorient local committees toward what they do best. Once strategic guidance exists at the sector or regional level, local committees play a genuinely valuable role: validating whether that guidance applies in their specific labor market, flagging distinctions that matter locally, and encouraging employers to hire program graduates and provide work-based learning opportunities. This is meaningful, consequential work — and it plays to the real strength of local relationships. The local employer isn’t being asked to generate sector strategy; they’re being asked whether the strategy holds up where they operate. That’s a better use of their time, and a better use of the committee.

Shift compliance functions away from individual employers. Much of what advisory committees currently do — reviewing program documentation, approving curriculum updates, providing sign-offs for federal reporting — could be handled by sector bodies or regional structures rather than requiring the time of individual business leaders. States have more flexibility here than they typically exercise. Many advisory committee requirements are the product of institutional habit and state policy, not hard federal mandates. States willing to examine their Perkins implementation with fresh eyes, for example, may find significant room to shift compliance functions without changing federal law.

If this logic holds, these three moves don’t reduce employer involvement — they right-level it. Local employers remain engaged, but in roles suited to their knowledge and proximity. Sector-level bodies do the work that requires representative, aggregated input. And the compliance machinery that currently consumes both is moved to structures better designed to handle it. But I suspect there are cases where this thinking breaks down, and I’m interested in understanding where.

What makes this possible now

Reorienting advisory structures has been a good idea for a long time. What’s new is the combination of practical infrastructure and policy momentum that makes it actionable.

Sector intermediaries are the vehicle. Sustained, funded sector intermediaries — industry associations, chambers of commerce, employer collaboratives — can absorb the strategic advisory functions that are currently fragmented across hundreds of local committees. They can represent sector-wide employer perspectives, reduce the compliance burden on individual employers, and ensure the guidance that reaches education and training providers reflects genuine industry consensus rather than whoever happened to attend last month’s meeting. This infrastructure doesn’t exist everywhere, but states investing in it now are creating the conditions that make reorientation possible. I’ve described some of the momentum I’m seeing with this kind of sector-based leadership here.

System redesign is possible, and Colorado is signaling what it can look like. The state is currently executing on a Governor’s Executive Order to reorganize its postsecondary talent development system — bringing together agencies that have historically operated independently. This work has been driven in part by a desire to provide a “single front door” for employers — a cleaner, simpler pathway into the state’s workforce and education systems rather than navigating a fragmented, multi-agency landscape. While the work of determining what that looks like in practice is just beginning, a move like this can create a real opportunity in any given state to reevaluate the role and function of the many employer advisory tables that exist in parallel — streamlining how employers are engaged, improving the quality of input those tables produce, and ensuring that input travels across institutional silos rather than staying contained within each one.

Federal flexibility is underused. Perkins gives states meaningful discretion in how they implement employer participation requirements. States that treat their current advisory structures as fixed — as the inevitable consequence of federal law — may be underestimating the room they have to act. Reevaluating how Perkins implementation works in practice, and whether regional or sector-level bodies can satisfy advisory requirements that are currently met through hundreds of local committees, is one of the higher-leverage levers available to state CTE leaders. It doesn’t require waiting for federal reauthorization. It requires the willingness to ask whether the current approach is the only one the law allows.

The question underneath the table

Even a well-designed advisory structure — representative, right-leveled, low-burden — can still be a one-way channel. Systems ask. Employers respond. Across the advisory committee landscape, the agenda is often set by the system.

There is a deeper design question that reorienting advisory structures alone doesn’t answer: what happens when employers have something to bring to the system? When a sector identifies a licensing barrier blocking entry into a field. When a training gap exists that no current program addresses. When AI is rewriting what employers need from new hires — and no program has caught up.

Advisory committees could, in theory, serve exactly this function — giving employers a standing channel to surface emerging priorities and bring them to the system. But the patterns described above work against it. When the agenda is shaped by compliance requirements, when participation is individual rather than sector-representative, and when input stays contained within each local structure rather than traveling up, employers don’t have a reliable channel through which to collectively surface priorities to the system.

The goal of reorienting advisory structures shouldn’t just be fewer meetings. It’s creating the conditions for employers to bring what they collectively know — about where their industries are heading, what skills matter, and what the system is missing — to the decisions that shape what students learn. The point isn’t to give employers more influence for its own sake — and this argument isn’t about employer bottom lines. It’s about the students on the other end of every program decision.

When employers aren’t genuinely shaping what gets built, programs train students for credentials that don’t pay off and occupations that aren’t in demand. Students accumulate debt. They graduate into fields where the jobs they expected don’t exist. That’s an individual harm — and at scale, it’s one of the drivers of the widening sense that public systems aren’t delivering on their promise. The students enrolling in these programs deserve to graduate into jobs that actually exist, with skills that employers actually need. That outcome depends on a workforce system willing to listen before it builds — and on giving employers a genuine way to be heard.

I’m sharing this argument because I think it’s worth pressure-testing. If you’ve seen a version of this work — or fail — in practice, I’d genuinely like to hear about it. And if you think I’m missing something important about why the current structures exist or what it would actually take to change them, that perspective is equally welcome.

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A note on the Washington State data referenced in this article: The employer touchpoint landscape analysis was conducted as part of a collaboration with the Partnership for Learning and the Washington Roundtable. Figures are directional estimates intended to illustrate scale. Explore the landscape analysis here.

If we want students to leave education and training programs with a real shot at employment, employers need to play a more meaningful role in shaping those programs. In many workforce ecosystems today, employers are still asked mainly for feedback – through surveys, advisory committees, or occasional meetings with policymakers. Those interactions can be useful, but they rarely shape the decisions that matter most for student outcomes: which pathways are built, which credentials are prioritized, how programs are designed, and where state resources are directed.

In an earlier piece, I argued that real employer leadership emerges when employers move beyond providing feedback and instead exercise collective influence over how the system responds to workforce demand. That does not mean employers control the workforce system. It means they help shape the decisions that determine whether training aligns with real hiring demand.

That shift is becoming more important as policy changes such as Workforce Pell and outcomes-based funding place greater emphasis on hiring and employment outcomes. If states want better results, they should pay close attention to the models that successfully embed employer voice into system decision-making.

Encouragingly, across the country we are beginning to see new models emerging that make this kind of employer leadership in workforce development ecosystems possible. In practice, I’m seeing three high-level models of employer leadership emerge:

1. Catalytic employer coalitions organized around a shared problem

2. Standing sector tables that continuously shape regional programs

3. Formal structures that embed employer voice into state systems

Each offers a different way to address the same core challenge: ensuring students gain the skills, experience, and credentials they need to compete successfully for jobs after graduation.

Catalytic employer coalitions

The first model emerges when employers face a shared workforce constraint and organize collectively to solve it. Rather than simply raising concerns about talent shortages, employers align around a clearly defined problem and work together to propose a solution to the workforce development ecosystem.

These coalitions are typically time-bound and outcome-oriented. Employers may seek to launch a new training pathway, expand program capacity for a critical occupation, or change the policies that govern workforce programs. Because the challenge often spans multiple institutions and agencies, the coalition usually works through a trusted intermediary – such as an industry association or chamber of commerce – that can convene employers and translate their shared priorities into action across the system.

The defining feature of this model is that employers are not simply responding to existing programs. Instead, they are defining the workforce problem and driving toward a concrete outcome that requires system change.

Alabama’s nursing apprenticeship initiative illustrates this approach. Facing severe nursing shortages, the Alabama Hospital Association and the Alabama Nursing Home Association organized employers across the healthcare sector to design a new earn-and-learn nursing pathway. Employers worked with the state apprenticeship agency to design the training model and scope of practice needed to make apprenticeships viable in clinical settings. They also helped secure legislative authority for the Board of Nursing to establish a new student nurse license, enabling apprentices to work while completing training. The pathway now includes more than 1,000 apprentices across nearly 90 employers, demonstrating how coordinated employer leadership can catalyze system change and better align training with real hiring opportunities for students.

Standing sector tables shaping programs

A second model of employer leadership takes a more continuous form. Instead of organizing around a single workforce challenge, employers participate in standing sector tables that shape workforce programs over time.

These tables are typically regional and program-specific. Employers meet regularly with education partners to flag evolving skill needs and adapt curriculum and program structures to remain aligned with industry practice. Because the table is ongoing rather than time-bound, it creates a durable feedback loop between industry and educators. Unlike typical CTE or community college advisory committees, these tables are not primarily about reviewing programs, meeting institutional requirements, or ensuring compliance with federal funding. They are employer-led structures in which representatives of an industry come to the system with a collective point of view and help shape how programs adapt over time.

This model is less about launching a new initiative and more about sustaining alignment between industry and training programs over time. Employers guide how programs evolve, while educators maintain responsibility for delivering instruction and credentials.

The Federation for Advanced Manufacturing Education (FAME) provides one of the most established examples. Through regional employer chapters, manufacturers proactively collaborate with community colleges to operate Advanced Manufacturing Technician programs that combine classroom instruction with paid work experience. Employers within each regional chapter help define the competencies technicians must master, shape how the earn-and-learn model operates, and ensure the program reflects real manufacturing environments. FAME provides the national framework and curriculum, while local employer chapters work with colleges to adapt the program to regional needs. The result is a model of employer leadership that has helped connect roughly 2,700 students to jobs across 500 employers nationwide.

Employer voice embedded in state systems

A third model embeds employer leadership directly into the structure of statewide workforce development ecosystems.

In this approach, states create formal mechanisms through which organized employer groups can influence system priorities and decisions. Employers are typically organized through sector intermediaries such as industry associations that aggregate employer demand and translate it into recommendations for policymakers and public agencies.

Washington State’s Career Connect Washington initiative illustrates how this can work. The state has designated sector intermediaries – known as Sector Leaders – to organize employers within key industries and translate their workforce needs into recommendations to the state for expanding career-connected learning programs. By connecting organized employer groups directly to statewide strategy and investment decisions, the model provides a clear pathway for employer priorities to influence system action.

Employer voice can also be embedded in more targeted ways. In South Carolina, for example, Technical Advisory Committees bring employers together to review and recommend which industry credentials should be embedded within career and technical education programs. By giving employers a formal role in credential alignment, the state ensures that the certifications students earn reflect real labor market demand.

In both cases, the system creates formal channels through which organized employer voice can shape the decisions that influence whether education and training investments and programs translate into real employment opportunities for students.

What these models reveal

Taken together, these examples point to two important shifts underway in workforce development.

First, employers – often supported by effective intermediaries – are increasingly developing the capacity to organize and speak to the system with one voice. Industry associations, chambers of commerce, and sector partnerships are helping employers move beyond individual, fragmented feedback and articulate clear demand signals about workforce priorities.

Understanding how these coalitions form – and learning from places where they are working well – will be critical if we want more sectors and states to build similar employer leadership capacity. That capacity will matter more than ever as policies like Workforce Pell and outcomes-based funding put greater pressure on programs to demonstrate that students are not just completing training, but successfully getting hired.

Second, as employers become better organized, it becomes imperative to ensure that workforce systems can respond to that voice.

That means creating clearer channels through which employer coalitions can influence decisions about programs, funding, and policy priorities. Without those channels, even the most organized employer groups will struggle to move beyond advisory roles.

The emerging models described here offer early examples of what those channels can look like. In the months ahead, I’ll be writing more about these models – what makes them effective, what kinds of intermediary capacity they require, and what states, funders, and system leaders can do to make employer leadership more actionable. If employers are learning to speak to the system with one voice, the next challenge is learning how to build systems that can truly listen and respond.

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Thanks to Kelly Vedi for her thought partnership in defining these three models of employer leadership.

In workforce development, we’ve grown accustomed to a particular model of “employer engagement”: we ask employers to participate in our committees, initiatives, and programs, and we become frustrated when they decline – or bow out over time. In response, we bring real effort and passion to the work of “engaging employers” – launching new forums, hosting new convenings, and refining our outreach strategies to convince them to show up.

That urgency makes sense. A lot is riding on alignment between training systems and real jobs, and most people doing this work care deeply about getting it right. But too often, our energy is aimed at participation rather than influence: we add more employer tables, backfill seats as they turn over, and keep asking for fresh input – without changing the system's design so that employer input actually shapes decisions.

In my recent piece, From Input to Authority: Rethinking the Role of Employers in Workforce Systems, I argued that this dynamic has become the default – and that it's increasingly misaligned with the moment we're in. Employers are invited to participate and advise, but rarely given real authority or shared accountability for outcomes. We ask for feedback, but we don’t build systems that are required to respond.

The solution isn't more engagement – it's a different kind of relationship, one where employers have defined roles and shared responsibility for whether the system actually performs. What that shift looks like in practice is best understood as a spectrum:

This spectrum illustrates the difference between a system that collects employer voice and one that is built to act on it.

Where my previous piece focused on what employer leadership looks like as part of this spectrum, this one asks why it matters, why it matters now, and why the path forward requires fewer tables – not more.

Why does employer leadership matter?

Misalignment in our workforce ecosystems is not an aberration, it is the norm.

Workforce systems across the U.S. routinely struggle to stay aligned to real demand. Training programs can be high quality and well intentioned, yet still graduate learners into roles that don’t match employer needs, don’t connect to family-sustaining wages, or don’t exist at the scale communities require. In many regions, employers face persistent shortages in sectors that matter to daily life – healthcare, infrastructure, IT, manufacturing, and energy – and system responses remain incremental.

Meanwhile, the pace of change has outgrown our feedback loops. AI, automation, and other technologies are reshaping skill requirements faster than most state and regional systems can adapt. Entry-level pathways are shifting, tasks are being reorganized, and new roles are emerging faster than education and training partners can build clear on-ramps. When the system relies on advisory input that may or may not be used, and on program updates that may take years to implement, misalignment becomes structural rather than occasional.

This is why employer leadership is attractive as more than a philosophical idea. It is a pragmatic response to two persistent weaknesses: the difficulty of maintaining alignment to real jobs and the inability to adapt at the speed of the labor market.

The argument for employer leadership is a call for shared governance, not employer takeover. Industry partners need formal influence over the skills taught and standards learners must meet – paired with accountability, not just the opportunity to complain when outputs miss the mark.

Why elevate the need for employer leadership now?

If the case for employer authority is longstanding, why does this feel like a particularly important moment to elevate it? At this point, it’s fair for workforce development professionals to feel cynical. Many workforce leaders have spent their careers trying to engage employers meaningfully in our education and training systems – and too often they’ve encountered more bureaucracy and roadblocks than results.

From my perspective, four shifts are converging today that create a fresh opportunity to move systems toward more industry leadership.

1) Policy change is creating openings

Across states and at the federal level, policy and funding shifts are creating new moments to re-examine how workforce systems are governed and how decisions get made. This includes changes that redefine the set of postsecondary pathways eligible for public support, shifts toward outcomes and accountability, and a broader push to streamline and coordinate across agencies and funding streams.

Not every policy change automatically translates into better alignment, but collectively these shifts create a window that doesn’t come along often: a chance not just to add programs, but to redesign how systems decide what to fund, what to scale, and what to retire.

2) The narrative is shifting – and there’s more openness to employer leadership

A few years ago, “employer authority” would have triggered immediate skepticism in many workforce circles – and some of that skepticism remains warranted. But the conversation is moving.

As misalignment has become harder to ignore – and as employers and learners alike question the ROI of postsecondary pathways – there’s more willingness to consider the idea that the system may need a stronger demand signal than advisory models can provide. There’s also growing recognition of the difference between ad hoc, individual employer input and employer voice that is structured, representative, and unified – and therefore far more likely to translate into better outcomes for employers and jobseekers alike.

Even as skepticism around corporate influence is at a justified, all-time high, many workforce leaders appear more willing than ever to ask a serious question: What would employer leadership with real authority look like if it were collective, transparent, bounded, and accountable to the public good?

3) Promising examples are emerging

We’re no longer talking about employer leadership purely as theory.

Across the country, states and regions are experimenting with structures that move beyond one-off employer advisory roles toward more durable mechanisms for employer leadership. Some of these examples involve sector-based entities helping shape statewide strategies and investment priorities. Others involve employer collectives building real solutions together rather than simply reacting to agency agendas. Still others involve fundamental redesigns of state agencies to address fragmentation across workforce development ecosystems and employer engagement mechanisms.

These experiments aren’t all “the answer,” and they’re not all replicable as-is. But they show that the concept of employer leadership is moving from speculative to practical. They also offer something the field badly needs: real-world learning about what works, what doesn’t, and what guardrails matter most.

4) Employer capability and mindset are catching up to the ambition

This fourth shift is the one I think we talk about least, and it may be the most important.

Even if the perfect governance model appeared overnight, it wouldn’t matter if employer-facing organizations didn’t have the skills and capacity to lead responsibly. What feels different about this moment is that we’re seeing the capability, discipline, and shared language for employer leadership being developed across many parts of the ecosystem.

In fact, the capability required for employer leadership is catching up to the ambition. Industry talent associations in Indiana are strengthening sector-level coordination. Sector intermediary models in Washington State have matured from convening to strategy and execution. Regional employer collectives led by organizations like FAME and CareerWise are getting more sophisticated about defining shared needs, setting expectations, and co-investing in solutions. And methodologies such as Talent Pipeline Management (TPM) have helped normalize the idea that employers can organize around hiring demand in disciplined, structured ways – rather than relying on ad hoc feedback.

In other words: it’s not only that models are emerging. It’s that the field of employer-facing organizations is building the muscles required to take the next step – to move from employer “engagement” to employer leadership.

A different approach

If these four trends create an opening to elevate employer leadership within our education and training systems, they’re also creating a risk: a surge in employer engagement is producing more “employer tables,” not more employer authority. New structures are being created in parallel across CTE, higher education, workforce boards, sector partnerships, regional collaboratives, nonprofit coalitions, TPM networks, and more. The attention is real, and much of it is positive.

But when tables operate in parallel, with no mechanisms to share information or coordinate, the side effects are predictable. Employers face overlapping asks and duplicative meetings. They weigh in on one lane of the system – and when that input doesn’t travel across silos, its impact is diluted and results are hard to see. Over time, employers start opting out. As participation drops, systems double down on “engagement” just to keep tables staffed. The result is a lot of motion and not much signal, and “employer voice” increasingly becomes whoever happens to show up when decisions get made.

That’s why a different approach is needed – one that is cross-cutting in nature.

If states want stronger employer leadership, the goal cannot be “more engagement everywhere.” The goal has to be coherent engagement – aligned across systems, with employer time focused on the decisions that most shape outcomes.

That requires stepping back and asking questions that cut across programs and funding streams:

• Which tables are we asking employers to join, and where does employer voice genuinely shape outcomes?

• What decisions most shape system performance – priority programs, credentials, quality standards – and what would it take to embed employer leadership there?

• Where are we duplicating asks and creating parallel structures that compete for attention?

• How do we build coherence so that employer priorities get translated across system silos?

This doesn’t replace the work happening in specific systems or geographies. It makes that work easier and more effective.

A cross-cutting approach isn’t a new employer engagement methodology. It’s not a new set of tables. And it’s not about asking employers to do more. It’s a mindset shift in system design: reduce duplication, align expectations, and reserve employer time for the highest-leverage decisions – the ones that actually change what the system funds, scales, and improves.

A closing thought – and an open invitation

In my previous article, I wrote that the essential work ahead is defining which tables employers are invited to join, what authority they share, and the guardrails that make such a system both effective and equitable.

I still believe that. But I’d add one more layer now: the essential work ahead is also reducing the number of tables – and designing employer leadership in a way that cuts across systems rather than multiplying in parallel.

If this idea resonates, I’d love to hear where you’re seeing momentum – and where you’re seeing risk. Are employer tables proliferating in your state or region? Are they producing real alignment, or mostly producing fatigue? And if you could focus employer leadership on just one or two high-impact decisions, what would you choose?

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But what if we turned the concept on its head? What if “employer engagement” wasn’t about extracting input – but about granting authority?

I know – alarm bells may already be going off. In an era of justified skepticism about corporate influence, few people are eager to hand more power to private industry. But bear with me. Let’s run a quick thought experiment: What might change if employers held formal leadership roles within state workforce ecosystems? And what additional responsibility might they assume if they also held real decision-making authority?

Today, most employer participation in U.S. workforce systems is advisory at best. Employers are invited to offer input – through advisory councils, curriculum reviews, or oversight boards – but rarely hold defined roles, formal power, or shared accountability. We ask employers for feedback, yet place few expectations on public systems to act on that feedback. Workforce responsibility is distributed across multiple agencies, but employers are almost never responsible for system outcomes.

This model is increasingly misaligned with the world we live in. Training programs routinely graduate students into roles that no longer exist or do not match employer needs. In many regions, there are only 50-60 workers for every 100 open jobs, creating structural shortages across healthcare, infrastructure, IT, manufacturing, and energy. At the same time, AI and automation are transforming skill requirements faster than state systems can adapt, erasing entire entry-level job categories while creating new ones that lack clear training pathways.

In this environment, employer advisory models – built for a slower, more stable economy – struggle to keep pace. Employers grow fatigued by repeated requests for input that rarely result in visible changes, and systems fall further behind evolving labor-market needs.

What would it look like to move beyond this status quo? One way to reimagine employer engagement is as a spectrum – four levels that reflect increasing degrees of agency, authority, responsibility, and impact. Some of this is happening already. Much of it is not.

Each level reflects increasing agency and responsibility for employers – and greater responsiveness from the system in return. In this post, I explore what each of these levels looks like in practice, and what it might take to move employers up the engagement ladder.

Participate: Attend when asked

At this level, employer involvement is driven almost entirely by compliance requirements. Schools, colleges, and workforce agencies must convene advisory committees, collect employer feedback, or document employer participation and approval for state and federal reporting. Participation typically comes from a small set of willing individual employers, rather than a broad or representative cross-section of a sector. These employers may serve on CTE advisory committees, provide letters of support for grants, greenlight regional workforce plans, or review curriculum updates – but their role is largely oriented toward validation and sign-off, not shaping system design or direction.

Because employer participation is reactive and often perfunctory, its impact is limited. Input is collected and boxes are checked, but employers are rarely positioned to influence substantive changes to programs, priorities, or incentives. Implementation varies widely, and repeated requests for approval or feedback without clear pathways to action or visible results often lead employers to disengage over time.

Advise: Responding to system-defined questions

At the next level, employers are asked not simply to attend but to advise. They react to questions, proposals, and agendas set by education partners or state agencies. This may occur through state commissions, task forces, or advisory councils. While these structures can elevate employer perspectives, they remain primarily reactive: employers provide input on issues defined by the system.

Despite lacking formal authority, employers can still shape priorities here. They help identify critical workforce shortages, recommend standards and curriculum, and highlight promising training models. But the system determines whether to act on this information. Influence depends on timing, politics, and agency discretion, which means alignment remains uneven.

In short, employers may contribute valuable insights – but the system still sets the terms of engagement.

Recommend: Driving policy and investment priorities through structured employer voice

Here, the state creates formal mechanisms through which employers – often represented collectively via sector intermediaries, councils, or associations – make proactive recommendations that shape state decisions. The key shift is that employers are not merely responding to questions; they are invited into processes designed explicitly to solicit, organize, and elevate employer guidance.

This authority remains advisory, but it is structured, intended to be influential, and grounded in sector-wide perspectives rather than isolated employer opinions.

Examples include recommending credentials for statewide lists, proposing priority occupations or pathways for investment, participating in structured grant review panels, or submitting sector strategies that inform statewide plans. The state retains final decision-making authority, but employer guidance meaningfully shapes outcomes.

As I describe in my guide to sector-driven workforce systems, Washington State represents an early model of this approach. Through Career Connect Washington’s sector intermediary infrastructure, the state designates sector intermediaries in ten industries to gather employer input, develop statewide strategies, and participate in grant review processes. Intermediaries recommend where the state should invest in career-connected learning and which models it should scale. State agencies retain ultimate authority, but employer voice influences decisions systematically and credibly.

This level of engagement flips the traditional script: instead of asking employers to adapt to existing programs and policy, the system adapts to evolving hiring demand.

Decide: Holding shared authority and shared responsibility for system outcomes

The highest level of employer engagement – shared governance – is rare in the United States. Here, employers do not merely influence the workforce ecosystem; they co-own it. Through sector intermediaries or employer-designated bodies, they share formal authority over credential approval, program eligibility, investment priorities, and system accountability.

Critically, this authority is not individual – no single employer decides what happens. It is sectoral, representative, transparent, and bounded by public-purpose guardrails.

With authority comes responsibility. Employers are expected to contribute to training capacity, offer high-quality work-based learning, and articulate clear pathways and competencies needed for advancement. They help determine program quality but also participate in sustaining it – through funding, equipment, clinical placements, and on-the-job training.

While the U.S. has historically lacked formal employer-led workforce structures, real momentum is emerging, driven by states experimenting with sector intermediaries, employer-led oversight, and unified talent system design.

For example, Tennessee’s Executive Order 109 elevated the State Workforce Development Board – a majority-employer body established under WIOA – as the “central strategic leadership body” overseeing not just WIOA funding but the coordination of all workforce programs and grants across the state. While the Governor retains final authority, this move meaningfully shifts employers into a role resembling shared governance.

Global models go even further. In Switzerland, employer associations co-govern apprenticeship pathways and set national occupational standards while also hosting apprentices and co-investing in training. In Singapore, employers help govern SkillsFuture, shaping credential frameworks and curriculum updates while driving system responsiveness. These systems work because employers aren’t just engaged – they are embedded and accountable.

In a compelling speculative illustration, Kelly Vedi imagines a near-future in which employer associations vote on which CTE programs a state should expand, sustain, or sunset. Authority and responsibility rise together: employers help shape the system and help sustain it.

A shift toward shared employer governance would reflect more than just a change in employer roles. It would accelerate broader shifts in:

• Agency: from reactive participation to proactive leadership

• Responsibility: from attendance to contribution to shared accountability

• Representation: from individual employer input to sector-wide perspectives

• Impact: from misalignment and slow adoption to systems closely tied to actual hiring demand

Most U.S. states remain concentrated at the first two levels. A smaller number, like Washington and Tennessee, are experimenting with structures that move employers into greater positions of influence or authority. For states seeking to build agile, demand-driven systems capable of keeping pace with technological change, moving up this continuum will be essential.

A closing thought – and an open invitation

How we engage employers determines what our workforce systems can achieve. Inviting employers to participate or advise may surface useful insights. But enabling them to recommend or decide? That’s where I believe we will begin to see durable alignment, stronger programs, and better outcomes for learners, workers, and businesses alike.

If this resonates – or if you have examples that challenge or complicate this framework – I hope you’ll share your perspective. Reach out, comment, or engage others in the conversation. While I imagine most of us agree that employers belong at the table, the essential work ahead is defining which tables they are invited to join, what authority they share, and the guardrails that make such a system both effective and equitable.

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The case for sector-led workforce systems

Workforce ecosystems across the country are full of strong programs – apprenticeships, credentials, internships, and training models that change lives. Yet few of these programs reach the scale needed to meet employer demand or serve student needs. Too often, they compete for employer attention, operate in silos, and lack the infrastructure that makes it easy for businesses to adopt them.

Sector-led workforce systems are the missing link – the system-level capacity that aligns strong programs with real hiring needs and helps them scale. At its core are sector intermediaries – trusted, employer-connected organizations that:

• Translate industry needs into actionable strategies

• Broker partnerships across education, training, and community providers

• Guide the development and scale of responsive programs

• Make it easier for employers to say yes

A sector-led workforce system provides the state-level infrastructure, supports, and connective tissue needed for sector intermediaries to succeed and thrive. It includes the funding models that sustain intermediary work, the policy tools that support implementation, and the alignment mechanisms that ensure local strategies add up to statewide progress. While intermediaries do the day-to-day work of engaging employers and shaping programs, a sector-led workforce system is what supports and connects their efforts – making that work possible, scalable, and durable.

This post explores why sector-led workforce systems are more essential than ever in the age of AI – and how sector intermediaries can help states and employers navigate disruption with focus, speed, and coordination. It examines how AI is transforming skill demands across industries, how trusted intermediaries can separate signal from noise in an era of rapid change, and how integrating an AI lens into a sector-led workforce infrastructure can make systems more adaptive, equitable, and future-ready.

Sector-led workforce systems are even more essential in the age of AI

Artificial intelligence is rapidly reshaping the world of work. Across every sector, AI is reshaping job functions, skill requirements, and business models. The disruption is no longer theoretical. Employers are rethinking their talent strategies, education providers are launching AI-driven training models – some promising, many unproven – and workers are unsure what this shift means for their careers.

This moment demands more than scattered experimentation. It calls for responsive, strategic, and coordinated leadership. But most systems and sectors aren’t equipped to respond with the urgency, nuance, and scale this disruption requires. That’s where sector-led workforce systems come in.

Just as sector intermediaries have helped build talent pipelines in fields like healthcare, construction, and manufacturing, they can now play a critical role in helping states and regions navigate the workforce implications of AI. In fact, the need for high-functioning intermediaries is even greater in an era of rapid technological change. When the ground is shifting this quickly, we need trusted guides – grounded in real-time insight and positioned to act. Sector-led workforce systems aren’t just still relevant in the AI era – they may be the best model we have built to keep up.

AI will deepen the need for sector-specific workforce infrastructure

AI is not a one-size-fits-all disruptor. Its impact varies significantly by sector:

• In healthcare, AI may automate administrative tasks or augment diagnostics, but it’s unlikely to replace patient-facing care roles in the near term.

• In manufacturing, predictive maintenance and robotics are already reshaping frontline operations and supervision needs.

• In construction, tools that optimize schedules and detect blueprint errors are shifting the role of project managers and estimators.

• In marketing and software development, AI is transforming entry-level white-collar jobs – prompting widespread restructuring.

AI will impact not only different sectors differently, but also occupations and tasks within those sectors. Some jobs will evolve, others will disappear, and entirely new roles will emerge – demanding hybrid skill sets that don’t yet exist at scale. This creates a dual challenge:

• An urgent need to define the future of work at the sector level – identifying which skills are changing, which roles are emerging, and where training is most critical.

• A rapid influx of AI-focused and AI-enabled training programs, tools, and credentials – with no clear way to distinguish what’s credible, effective, or aligned to actual employer demand.

In this environment, the value of trusted, employer-connected intermediaries multiplies. Sector intermediaries are well positioned to:

• Listen to employers and frontline workers

• Analyze evolving skill demands

• Support updates to curriculum and credentials

• Vet new AI tools and training programs

• Coordinate collaboration where AI’s impact crosses sector boundaries

Put simply: AI disruption makes sector-based workforce infrastructure not just valuable – but essential.

AI as an enabler: Improving how sector intermediaries operate

AI isn’t just reshaping the labor market. It can also improve how sector intermediaries do their work – increasing quality, speed, and strategic clarity. Examples include:

• Streamlined program mapping: AI can assist with landscape scans and pathway analyses, freeing up staff time for strategy and partnerships.

• Faster signal detection: AI can synthesize job postings, training provider catalogs, and labor market projections – helping identify skills gaps in real time.

• Smarter employer input: AI tools may offer new ways to gather employer insights more efficiently than traditional roundtables – providing a welcome shift from overused meetings.

• Curriculum alignment: Large language models can help convert employer input into updated, sector-relevant training materials.

• Operational support: AI can help small teams draft reports, track meetings, generate visuals, and translate technical content into plain language.

To be clear: AI won’t replace the relationships, trust, or strategic judgment that intermediaries bring. But it can extend their reach, increase their responsiveness, and sharpen their insight – if they are equipped to use it wisely.

AI raises the bar: What disruption demands from intermediaries

If AI is to improve workforce systems, it also raises expectations for what those systems – and their intermediaries – must deliver.

Against the backdrop of AI, key demands of sector intermediaries will include:

• Faster responsiveness: Strategies, tools, and partnerships will need more frequent updates.

• Stronger curation: With a flood of AI products and training programs entering the market, intermediaries must help separate signal from noise.

• Greater attention to equity: AI can widen gaps if not used thoughtfully. Intermediaries must monitor for bias and ensure inclusion is built into solutions.

• More cross-sector collaboration: Because AI often impacts multiple sectors simultaneously, intermediaries must build bridges across industries and with adjacent fields.

AI will stress-test the workforce infrastructure we’ve built. Intermediaries must be ready – and supported – to rise to the challenge.

Three ways to embed an AI lens into sector-led workforce systems

As states build or refine their state-level sector intermediary infrastructure, they must also determine how to incorporate AI. Below are three approaches to consider – each with distinct benefits and tradeoffs.

1. Empower each intermediary to define its own AI approach.

In this model, states offer flexibility and light-touch guidance, allowing each intermediary to define how it explores and responds to AI as part of its work. This strategy customizes efforts to the sector’s context and pace of change, encourages innovation, and respects domain expertise. However, it can also lead to inconsistent efforts across sectors, with missed opportunities to share insights or build collective capacity. In some cases, intermediaries may lack the fluency or bandwidth to take on AI work independently.

2. Layer in AI as a statewide, cross-sector priority

A second approach is to embed AI as a shared, cross-sector priority at the state level. Here, states offer centralized support – such as funding, technical assistance, vetted tools, or shared frameworks – to help some or all intermediaries integrate AI into their work. This creates a consistent baseline while still allowing sector-specific customization. It also enables states to track results and scale promising practices. The challenge is that it requires dedicated state resources or capacity and risks adding pressure to already stretched intermediary teams. If not implemented flexibly, it could veer into a one-size-fits-all model.

3. Fund a dedicated AI sector intermediary

Instead of embedding AI within every sector, or alongside that effort, states could establish a standalone intermediary dedicated to AI – one that focuses on employers in the AI space and the broader, cross-sector impacts of the technology. This model offers concentrated capacity and deep technical expertise, and it creates a central resource to support both sector intermediaries and statewide workforce initiatives. However, this approach poses the risk of isolating AI work from broader sector strategies and duplicating existing efforts. It may also be challenging to define the scope of the intermediary’s work – particularly when it comes to determining who counts as an “AI employer.”

Each of these models offers a pathway for embedding AI into workforce systems. The right choice depends on a state’s goals, capacity, and where its intermediaries are starting from.

This work is urgent – and sector-led infrastructure makes it possible

AI is already transforming the world of work. But workforce systems, by and large, aren’t built to respond at the pace required.

If ever there was a time to invest in durable, adaptive, sector-led workforce systems, this is it. With the right support, sector intermediaries can serve as translators of disruption, curators of quality, and coordinators of real-time solutions – helping more workers find stable paths forward, and helping more employers find the talent they need to adapt and grow.

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Ashley Carter is the Founder and Principal of Pathfinder Strategies, a consulting firm that helps states, intermediaries, and philanthropic partners build workforce strategies and systems that respond to employer needs while expanding access and success for students and jobseekers. Her work blends strategy development, systems design, and on-the-ground implementation, informed by over two decades of experience across the public, private, and nonprofit sectors.

Since 2023, Ashley has served as a lead technical assistance provider to Washington State sector intermediaries and agencies working to expand career-connected learning. She has supported nearly 20 industry intermediaries across 10 sectors, helping shape statewide strategy, advising on implementation, and developing tools to translate employer demand into aligned, sector-based workforce efforts.

Ashley was the founding Chief Operating Officer of CareerWise Colorado, where she helped bring the organization’s early vision to life and led efforts to scale youth apprenticeship programs across a range of industries. She guided organizational growth strategy, built core operational systems, and supported other states in launching youth apprenticeship programs through the formation of CareerWise USA.

Earlier in her career, Ashley worked at the Boston Consulting Group, advising Fortune 500 companies and philanthropic foundations. In 2001, she founded Daring Girls, a nonprofit organization that supports girls’ education and entrepreneurship training across East Africa. Now more than 25 years old, the organization’s programs received UNESCO’s Prize for Girls’ and Women’s Education in 2022.

Ashley holds a BA from Harvard and an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. She lives in Boulder, Colorado.

👉 Read the full guide here

The case for sector-led workforce systems

Workforce ecosystems across the country are full of strong programs – apprenticeships, credentials, internships, and training models that change lives. Yet few of these programs reach the scale needed to meet employer demand or serve student needs. Too often, they compete for employer attention, operate in silos, and lack the infrastructure that makes it easy for businesses to adopt them.

Sector-led workforce systems are the missing link – the system-level capacity that aligns strong programs with real hiring needs and helps them scale. At its core are sector intermediaries – trusted, employer-connected organizations that:

• Translate industry needs into actionable strategies

• Broker partnerships across education, training, and community providers

• Guide the development and scale of responsive programs

• Make it easier for employers to say yes

A sector-led workforce system provides the state-level infrastructure, supports, and connective tissue needed for sector intermediaries to succeed and thrive. It includes the funding models that sustain intermediary work, the policy tools that support implementation, and the alignment mechanisms that ensure local strategies add up to statewide progress. While intermediaries do the day-to-day work of engaging employers and shaping programs, a sector-led workforce system is what supports and connects their efforts – making that work possible, scalable, and durable.

This post unpacks how sector intermediaries convert employer pain points into practical, scalable solutions – bridging the gap between individual programs and the system-level responses needed to drive lasting change.

Turning employer insights into action

At its core, a sector-led workforce system relies on credible sector intermediaries – trusted entities that lead workforce development strategy on behalf of industry. That might be:

• An industry association

• A community college center of excellence

• A nonprofit organization

• A labor-management partnership

In practice, industry associations often make strong sector intermediaries – because their legitimacy and revenue streams are tied to employer satisfaction and trust.

👉 Read more about the characteristics of a strong sector intermediary

As described here, sector intermediaries are game‑changing when it comes to employer engagement. Their credibility within the industry, ability to translate workforce goals into clear business value, and coordination across partners turn employer interest into real commitments and lasting partnerships.

Credible intermediaries earn employer trust by starting with listening. They begin with the employer’s problem and then shape a strategy in response.

Too often in workforce development, we see programs in search of a strategy, asking employers to “get involved” without first confirming the need. When we start with the problem, the path to the right mix of programs becomes much clearer.

Listening is not just a starting point – it’s the foundation. Sector intermediaries gather insight from employers to identify where the most pressing workforce challenges exist and then shape responses accordingly. That listening may lead to recommendations for individual workforce programs or broader, sector-wide strategies that bring multiple programs and approaches together to meet shared needs.

Crucially, sector intermediaries can “listen” in ways that are difficult for individual programs to replicate – both because of the trust they’ve built with employers, and the structured mechanisms they use to gather insight. These mechanisms include:

• One-on-one conversations, often on site with the employer

• Employer committees, boards, or focus groups designed for structured input

• Short, targeted surveys to validate workforce challenges

• Data gathered from other ecosystem partners

In my experience, the best sector intermediaries prioritize one-on-one, on-site engagement. These visits surface deeper context and nuance. When asking about talent, strong intermediaries move past surface-level concerns to understand the specific dimensions of the challenges employers face.

Common refrains sector intermediaries hear from employers include:

• “No one knows what good jobs we have in our sector.

• “I can’t find enough talent to meet entry-level hiring demand.”

• “I see very few applicants that have the skills we need.”

• “Too many entry-level applicants and employees don’t have the soft skills they need to succeed.”

• “The pace of technological change requires workers to come in with entirely new skillsets.”

• “Applicants don’t have the work experience they need to be successful in entry-level jobs.”

• “My workforce doesn’t reflect the customers we serve.”

Once they’ve heard the challenge, the best intermediaries go a layer deeper – identifying likely root causes. It’s only then – armed with insights across many employers and a clear understanding of what’s behind the pain points – that they begin to recommend targeted solutions, either for individual employers or the sector as a whole.

Below is a synthesis of what I’ve seen in practice: common employer concerns, the root causes driving them, and the types of interventions that intermediaries are well positioned to recommend or facilitate.

Every sector faces workforce challenges – but not all root causes are the same. While some barriers are shared across industries, others are shaped by the nature of the work, the pace of change, or historical patterns of access and exclusion. Sector intermediaries are uniquely positioned to surface these challenges, understand what’s driving them, and guide employers toward the right-fit solutions.

Here are a few examples of how these workforce challenges often show up differently by sector – and the role sector intermediaries can play in addressing them:

“No one knows what good jobs we have in our sector.”

This concern is especially common in sectors like advanced manufacturing and agriculture, where outdated perceptions keep young people away, and in sectors like life sciences and clean energy, where students and educators often aren’t aware of career opportunities at all. Sector intermediaries often address this by coordinating industry tours, classroom presentations, and immersive events, and marketing campaigns – because in most cases, someone has to see it to believe it.

“I can’t find enough talent to meet entry-level hiring demand.”

This is a common refrain in sectors with high volumes of entry level jobs, such as healthcare, education, and construction, where the scale of workforce need is significant and growing. While a lack of awareness may play a role, the more pressing barriers often lie elsewhere: there aren’t enough training programs to meet demand, licensure and equipment requirements limit access, or prospective candidates face practical challenges that prevent them from enrolling or completing programs. Sector intermediaries can help address these barriers by mapping the existing ecosystem, expanding program capacity, and brokering partnerships to provide critical wraparound supports – such as career coaching, transportation assistance, and exam prep – to help more individuals complete training and enter the field.

“I see very few applicants that have the skills we need.”

This refrain is especially common in fast-evolving fields like tech and advanced manufacturing, where curricula can quickly fall out of date. Intermediaries often help to close this gap by working with training providers and employers to update or co-develop programs, align competencies to actual hiring needs, and put processes in place for industry validation and visibility.

“The pace of technological change requires workers to come in with entirely new skillsets.”

While this is closely related to the broader challenge of skills gaps, it warrants a separate focus. This issue is most common in sectors that rely heavily on machinery – and, to a lesser extent, software – such as advanced manufacturing, maritime, technology, and clean technology. In addition to updating curriculum in partnership with employers, effective strategies also ensure that training programs have access to up-to-date equipment and software, so learners are trained using the tools and standards currently used in the field.

“Too many entry-level applicants and employees don’t have the soft skills they need to succeed.”

This is a common challenge across nearly every sector, but it is especially pronounced in industries with many customer-facing roles or jobs requiring strong collaboration – such as finance, technology, and construction. While most employers expect the education and training system to address this issue, soft skills are often best developed on the job, where learners face real-world situations and consequences. Sector intermediaries can play an important role in helping employers understand the limits of classroom-based instruction and in facilitating internships, mentorships, and internal training programs that support the real-time development of soft skills.

“Applicants don’t have the work experience they need to be successful in entry-level jobs.”

While employers in some sectors – like construction – are often willing to train anyone who shows up with the right attitude and a willingness to learn, others expect entry-level candidates to arrive with prior work experience, creating a catch-22 for early-career professionals. This expectation is especially common in technology, where competition for jobs is fierce, and in sectors like life sciences, where even entry-level roles may involve regulated lab environments that demand precision and compliance. These are precisely the situations where apprenticeship models excel – and where intermediaries can play a critical role in helping employers reduce the time, cost, and complexity of launching work-based learning programs.

“My workforce doesn’t reflect the customers we serve.”

This challenge exists across nearly every sector, but it tends to be most acute in fields like finance, life sciences, technology, and education – where historical barriers to entry and credential-based hiring practices have limited access. While previously mentioned strategies such as awareness-building, wraparound supports, and mentorship programs are important tools, helping employers transition from credential-based to skills-based hiring can also significantly expand access. This shift opens doors for individuals who face steep barriers to obtaining traditional credentials but have the potential to succeed with the right support.

These examples make one thing clear: context matters. A strategy that works well in one sector may fall flat in another. That’s why sector intermediaries are so valuable. They’re close enough to understand the nuance, connected enough to engage the right stakeholders, and trusted enough to broker practical, sector-specific solutions that actually address root causes.

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Ashley Carter is the Founder and Principal of Pathfinder Strategies, a consulting firm that helps states, intermediaries, and philanthropic partners build workforce strategies and systems that respond to employer needs while expanding access and success for students and jobseekers. Her work blends strategy development, systems design, and on-the-ground implementation, informed by over two decades of experience across the public, private, and nonprofit sectors.

Since 2023, Ashley has served as a lead technical assistance provider to Washington State sector intermediaries and agencies working to expand career-connected learning. She has supported nearly 20 industry intermediaries across 10 sectors, helping shape statewide strategy, advising on implementation, and developing tools to translate employer demand into aligned, sector-based workforce efforts.

Ashley was the founding Chief Operating Officer of CareerWise Colorado, where she helped bring the organization’s early vision to life and led efforts to scale youth apprenticeship programs across a range of industries. She guided organizational growth strategy, built core operational systems, and supported other states in launching youth apprenticeship programs through the formation of CareerWise USA.

Earlier in her career, Ashley worked at the Boston Consulting Group, advising Fortune 500 companies and philanthropic foundations. In 2001, she founded Daring Girls, a nonprofit organization that supports girls’ education and entrepreneurship training across East Africa. Now more than 25 years old, the organization’s programs received UNESCO’s Prize for Girls’ and Women’s Education in 2022.

Ashley holds a BA from Harvard and an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. She lives in Boulder, Colorado.

👉 Read the full guide here

The case for sector-led workforce systems

Workforce ecosystems across the country are full of strong programs – apprenticeships, credentials, internships, and training models that change lives. Yet few of these programs reach the scale needed to meet employer demand or serve student needs. Too often, they compete for employer attention, operate in silos, and lack the infrastructure that makes it easy for businesses to adopt them.

Sector-led workforce systems are the missing link – the system-level capacity that aligns strong programs with real hiring needs and helps them scale. At its core are sector intermediaries – trusted, employer-connected organizations that:

• Translate industry needs into actionable strategies

• Broker partnerships across education, training, and community providers

• Guide the development and scale of responsive programs

• Make it easier for employers to say yes

A sector-led workforce system provides the state-level infrastructure, supports, and connective tissue needed for sector intermediaries to succeed and thrive. It includes the funding models that sustain intermediary work, the policy tools that support implementation, and the alignment mechanisms that ensure local strategies add up to statewide progress. While intermediaries do the day-to-day work of engaging employers and shaping programs, a sector-led workforce system is what supports and connects their efforts – making that work possible, scalable, and durable.

This post breaks down what sector intermediaries do in a sector-driven workforce system and what makes them effective.

The anatomy of a high-quality sector intermediary

At its core, a sector-led workforce system relies on credible sector intermediaries – trusted entities that lead workforce development strategy on behalf of industry. That might be:

• An industry association

• A community college center of excellence

• A nonprofit organization

• A labor-management partnership

In practice, industry associations often make strong sector intermediaries – because their legitimacy and revenue streams are tied to employer satisfaction and trust.

So what makes a strong sector intermediary? Let’s start with the fundamentals – the characteristics that define high-quality intermediaries and set them up to lead sector strategy effectively.

The characteristics of a strong sector intermediary

From what I’ve seen across multiple sectors, the most effective intermediaries share foundational capabilities that position them to lead on behalf of employers and earn credibility across the workforce ecosystem:

• Established employer base and built-in accountability: Credible intermediaries already have direct relationships with a defined set of employers – often through an existing membership base. These employers expect value and hold the organization accountable to results. This mandate keeps the focus on real business problems and provides a ready path to program adoption.

• Workforce as a core organizational priority: Strong candidates for the sector intermediary role already treat talent development as central to their mission –because it’s a core need for its employer partners. This focus shows up in their strategic plans and the staff and leadership roles assigned to workforce efforts.

• Ability to translate between industry and education: Effective intermediaries know how to turn employer pain points into actionable guidance for training partners. They understand which roles are hardest to fill, what skills matter most, and how to translate that into aligned curriculum, tools, and supports.

• Trust across the ecosystem: Leading intermediaries are already trusted by both industry and public partners. They’ve built strong relationships across K–12, higher ed, workforce boards, and agencies – positioning them to accelerate alignment and move efforts forward when others stall.

The roles sector intermediaries play

Sector Intermediaries can play many important roles in a sector-driven workforce system. Below are some of the most important roles they play in advancing workforce development solutions and programs for employers in their sector:

• Build comprehensive knowledge of the sector’s education-to-employment landscape

• Develop a sector workforce strategy

• Facilitate partnerships to address shared needs

• Support employer participation and program adoption

• Enable program alignment, expansion, or development

• Contribute to the broader ecosystem

In some systems, sector intermediaries may also be granted formal decision-making authority – such as setting quality standards for programs, reviewing and validating approved industry-recognized credentials, or identifying programs of study that should be eligible for Perkins or state CTE funding in their sector. These additional levers help ensure that public investments prepare students for high-demand careers – aligning education and training with the evolving needs of the labor market.

Sector intermediaries aren’t born ready to operate at the highest level – they grow into the role. With targeted funding, technical assistance, and peer learning, they build the capabilities needed to lead effectively. Over time, that growth often looks something like the following:

Peer-to-peer learning accelerates this progression. A regular cadence and infrastructure in which intermediaries compare notes on what’s working, pressure-test tactics, and co-solve common challenges consistently unlocks ideas that travel faster than any single organization can manage alone.

The behaviors of high-performing sector intermediaries

Capabilities are important – but day-to-day habits often matter just as much. The intermediaries that progress toward maturity in both their work and results tend to operate in consistent, intentional ways:

• Convene broadly, engage deeply: High-impact intermediaries use large group meetings to establish shared employer priorities and generate momentum – then follow up with targeted one-on-one conversations that build trust, clarify roles, and turn ideas into real participation.

• Balance listening with action: They gather meaningful employer input – but don’t linger in advisory mode. Instead, they translate feedback into next steps, clearly define partner roles, and make engagement easy and actionable.

• Prioritize responsiveness over rigidity: While grounded in a clear strategic direction, strong intermediaries flex to employer timing – jumping on opportunities to co-design pilots, adjust tools, or respond to shifts in funding.

• Make participation easy: They reduce friction for employers by offering clear, well-scoped roles, short time commitments, and plug-and-play resources. This lowers the barrier to entry and accelerates adoption.

• Pilot with urgency, then plan for scale: They move fast to test new ideas – even imperfect ones – when opportunity strikes. But they also plan ahead, building toward scalable, sustainable models and braided funding to reduce reliance on any single partner or grant.

• Show up for others’ priorities: They actively support initiatives beyond their own, demonstrating that they’re not just seeking help – they’re offering it. That generosity earns long-term trust and deepens cross-sector collaboration.

When these pieces come together – the traits, the day-to-day habits, and a clear path to maturity – sector intermediaries become the missing link between strong programs and broad-based employer participation. They anchor employer needs in plain terms, translate them into actions schools and training partners can deliver, and keep everyone moving in the same direction as tools and roles evolve. That’s how good programs exit the cycle of one-on-one business engagement – and start scaling across entire sectors.

But scaling doesn’t happen without trust. At the center of this model is meaningful employer participation – not just showing up to meetings, but contributing to solutions they believe in. That kind of engagement isn’t automatic. It’s earned. And the best sector intermediaries know how to earn it.

👉 Read more about how intermediaries secure meaningful employer engagement

Leave a comment

Ashley Carter is the Founder and Principal of Pathfinder Strategies, a consulting firm that helps states, intermediaries, and philanthropic partners build workforce strategies and systems that respond to employer needs while expanding access and success for students and jobseekers. Her work blends strategy development, systems design, and on-the-ground implementation, informed by over two decades of experience across the public, private, and nonprofit sectors.

Since 2023, Ashley has served as a lead technical assistance provider to Washington State sector intermediaries and agencies working to expand career-connected learning. She has supported nearly 20 industry intermediaries across 10 sectors, helping shape statewide strategy, advising on implementation, and developing tools to translate employer demand into aligned, sector-based workforce efforts.

Ashley was the founding Chief Operating Officer of CareerWise Colorado, where she helped bring the organization’s early vision to life and led efforts to scale youth apprenticeship programs across a range of industries. She guided organizational growth strategy, built core operational systems, and supported other states in launching youth apprenticeship programs through the formation of CareerWise USA.

Earlier in her career, Ashley worked at the Boston Consulting Group, advising Fortune 500 companies and philanthropic foundations. In 2001, she founded Daring Girls, a nonprofit organization that supports girls’ education and entrepreneurship training across East Africa. Now more than 25 years old, the organization’s programs received UNESCO’s Prize for Girls’ and Women’s Education in 2022.

Ashley holds a BA from Harvard and an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. She lives in Boulder, Colorado.

👉 Read the full guide here

The case for sector-led workforce systems

Workforce ecosystems across the country are full of strong programs – apprenticeships, credentials, internships, and training models that change lives. Yet few of these programs reach the scale needed to meet employer demand or serve student needs. Too often, they compete for employer attention, operate in silos, and lack the infrastructure that makes it easy for businesses to adopt them.

Sector-led workforce systems are the missing link – the system-level capacity that aligns strong programs with real hiring needs and helps them scale. At its core are sector intermediaries – trusted, employer-connected organizations that:

• Translate industry needs into actionable strategies

• Broker partnerships across education, training, and community providers

• Guide the development and scale of responsive programs

• Make it easier for employers to say yes

A sector-led workforce system provides the state-level infrastructure, supports, and connective tissue needed for sector intermediaries to succeed and thrive. It includes the funding models that sustain intermediary work, the policy tools that support implementation, and the alignment mechanisms that ensure local strategies add up to statewide progress. While intermediaries do the day-to-day work of engaging employers and shaping programs, a sector-led workforce system is what supports and connects their efforts – making that work possible, scalable, and durable.

This post unpacks what makes sector intermediaries so effective at engaging employers – and how their credibility and coordination power can turn promising programs into lasting, scalable systems.

How trusted intermediaries secure meaningful employer engagement

At its core, a sector-led workforce system relies on credible sector intermediaries – trusted entities that lead workforce development strategy on behalf of industry. That might be:

• An industry association

• A community college center of excellence

• A nonprofit organization

• A labor-management partnership

In practice, industry associations often make strong sector intermediaries – because their legitimacy and revenue streams are tied to employer satisfaction and trust.

👉 Read more about the characteristics of a strong sector intermediary

One of the most important – and difficult – aspects of an intermediary’s work is securing meaningful, sustained employer engagement. No matter how well a program is designed, it won’t go anywhere unless employers are truly at the table. Let’s take a closer look at why program-led employer engagement so often falls short – and how trusted intermediaries change the equation.

In workforce development, we typically ask employers to engage in one or more of the following ways:

• Inspire: Speak in classrooms, host site visits, or offer job shadows to build awareness and spark interest in sector careers

• Inform: Help shape curriculum to ensure it aligns with real hiring needs

• Teach: Evaluate student projects or serve as a subject matter expert, mentor, or guest instructor in classroom settings

• Train: Offer work-based learning or on-the-job training

• Hire: Recruit and retain from priority candidate pools

These asks seem straightforward. But delivering them well – at scale, across diverse businesses – is anything but straightforward.

Why employer engagement fails

Most employers aren’t opposed to workforce partnerships. They’re just pressed for time, wary of wasted effort, and need to understand the business value. In practice, three core reasons explain why engagement falters:

• They’re focused on the urgent: Most business leaders are solving immediate challenges, not planning five years out. Even when they believe in building talent pipelines, the day-to-day fire drills of hiring and operations usually win out.

• They face complex internal processes: Even if one leader says yes, full participation often requires HR, legal, and multiple levels of buy-in.

• The landscape is crowded and confusing: Without a guide, many employers face overlapping outreach from schools, programs, nonprofits, and agencies – all asking for time, all making different requests.

Unfortunately, well-intended efforts often make these realities worse – by pitching too early, speaking in education jargon, or making vague asks without clear business value. A few avoidable missteps show up again and again in program-led employer outreach and, over time, erode trust and momentum.

• Program-first messaging: Too many outreach efforts begin with “here’s our program,” instead of asking, “what hiring challenges can we help solve?” When the pitch starts with selling instead of listening, the message doesn’t land.

• Education speak over business language: Leaders from K-12, higher ed, or nonprofit sectors often use frameworks and terminology that don’t translate to employers. When outreach is full of education jargon, it creates confusion – or signals that the program may not be built with business needs in mind.

• No clear ROI: Programs sometimes show up with asks – time, participation, funding – but without showing how employer involvement will pay off. If hiring, retention, or team performance won’t measurably improve, employers may participate once, but they won’t stay engaged over the long haul.

• Implied moral obligation: A subtler misstep is leading with messages about responsibility – implying that businesses should engage regardless of business value. This ignores the basic reality that companies must justify investments to their employees, customers, and shareholders. Dismissing that need as “corporate greed” damages trust and weakens long-term partnership.

• Asks that are too big – or too vague: Programs often request open-ended participation – advisory roles, mentorship, curriculum feedback – without scoping the time required, defining outputs, or showing how the work connects to business needs. Vague or oversized asks are easy for employers to ignore.

• One-size-fits-all outreach: A small business and a Fortune 500 firm don’t need the same support. Urban and rural employers face different constraints. But too often, programs use the same message, format, or entry point for every employer – instead of doing the research to tailor their approach.

• Turning partnership into meetings: For many employers, “partnership” starts to look like showing up to meetings with no clear purpose or outcome. Programs get value from these sessions – but without a tangible next step, employers don’t. Over time, this drains goodwill and leads to disengagement.

• Slow or complicated follow-through: Nothing erodes trust faster than slow response times, unclear points of contact, or confusing next steps. When a program can’t follow through in a timely, business-friendly way, the next “yes” becomes harder to earn.

Why sector intermediaries change the game

Strong sector intermediaries change the equation. They can succeed in bringing employers to the table where programs struggle because they offer trustworthiness, simplified engagement models, and sector fluency.

Trustworthiness

Employers are far more likely to engage when the invitation comes from someone they know and trust. Strong sector intermediaries are accountable to employers – through membership dues, governance roles, or long-standing relationships – which gives their outreach credibility. When an invitation comes through an intermediary, it feels like an opportunity, not an obligation. The messenger matters: employers know the intermediary understands their world and trust that they have vetted the opportunity.

Strong intermediaries also build confidence by elevating peer voices. When respected employers in the sector are already engaged, others are more likely to follow. And as neutral brokers, intermediaries can do what individual programs can’t: bring competitors to the table, align on common standards, and coordinate shared curricula. When businesses see sector-wide collaboration, the effort feels more credible and worthwhile.

Simplified engagement models

Intermediaries also make it easy to participate. For time-scarce employers – especially small and mid-sized businesses – they offer a single front door to a wide range of workforce programs and partnerships. They serve as a trusted point of contact, curate a manageable menu of opportunities, and streamline participation with clear next steps and plug-and-play materials. When employers know their time will be respected and the process will be simple, they’re more likely to say yes – and stay engaged.

Sector fluency

Strong intermediaries speak the language of business – and of ROI. Where many workforce programs inadvertently use education jargon, intermediaries can describe program opportunities using sector-specific and business-relevant terminology.

They don’t just describe programs – they articulate the value. Without a compelling business case, even well-intended partnerships won’t stick. ROI doesn’t always have to be financial – value can take many forms (see examples below) – but participation won’t last if the business case isn’t clear.

Examples of ROI that workforce development programs can provide to employers:

A strong sector intermediary isn’t just a messenger – it’s the connective tissue that helps good programs scale. They turn employer interest into real commitments and pilot participation into lasting partnerships.

If employer engagement is the bottleneck, the answer isn’t louder outreach – it’s trusted messengers, clearer asks, and simpler ways to participate. When sector-driven strategies set the direction, strong programs do the work, and credible intermediaries carry the message, employer adoption becomes far more likely – and scaling becomes possible.

But scaling only happens when employer insights lead to action. That’s where strong intermediaries shine – not just gathering input, but translating it into tangible strategies that training partners can deliver and employers will adopt.

👉 Read more about how sector intermediaries design responsive, scalable solutions

Leave a comment

Ashley Carter is the Founder and Principal of Pathfinder Strategies, a consulting firm that helps states, intermediaries, and philanthropic partners build workforce strategies and systems that respond to employer needs while expanding access and success for students and jobseekers. Her work blends strategy development, systems design, and on-the-ground implementation, informed by over two decades of experience across the public, private, and nonprofit sectors.

Since 2023, Ashley has served as a lead technical assistance provider to Washington State sector intermediaries and agencies working to expand career-connected learning. She has supported nearly 20 industry intermediaries across 10 sectors, helping shape statewide strategy, advising on implementation, and developing tools to translate employer demand into aligned, sector-based workforce efforts.

Ashley was the founding Chief Operating Officer of CareerWise Colorado, where she helped bring the organization’s early vision to life and led efforts to scale youth apprenticeship programs across a range of industries. She guided organizational growth strategy, built core operational systems, and supported other states in launching youth apprenticeship programs through the formation of CareerWise USA.

Earlier in her career, Ashley worked at the Boston Consulting Group, advising Fortune 500 companies and philanthropic foundations. In 2001, she founded Daring Girls, a nonprofit organization that supports girls’ education and entrepreneurship training across East Africa. Now more than 25 years old, the organization’s programs received UNESCO’s Prize for Girls’ and Women’s Education in 2022.

Ashley holds a BA from Harvard and an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. She lives in Boulder, Colorado.

Workforce ecosystems across the country are full of strong programs – apprenticeships, credentials, internships, and training models that change lives. Yet few of these programs reach the scale required to meet employer demand or serve student needs. Too often, they compete for employer attention, operate in silos, and lack the infrastructure that makes it easy for businesses to adopt them.

Sector-led workforce systems are the missing link. They provide the system-level capacity that ensures strong programs can scale by aligning them with real hiring needs. At the core of sector-led workforce systems are sector intermediaries – trusted, employer-connected organizations that:

• Translate industry needs into actionable workforce strategies

• Broker partnerships across education, training, and community providers

• Guide the development and scale of responsive workforce programs

• Make it easier for employers to say yes

A sector-led workforce system provides the state-level infrastructure, supports, and connective tissue needed for sector intermediaries to succeed and thrive. It includes the funding models that sustain intermediary work, the policy tools that support implementation, and the alignment mechanisms that ensure local strategies add up to statewide progress. While intermediaries do the day-to-day work of engaging employers and shaping programs, a sector-led workforce system is what supports and connects their efforts – making that work possible, scalable, and durable.

This guide explores what sector-led workforce systems look like in practice, why they matter, and how to build them. Grounded in real-world examples from Washington State, it offers a practical roadmap for funders, policymakers, and practitioners ready to move beyond fragmented programs and build durable, coordinated systems.

The perspectives I bring to this work are shaped by a career spent at the intersection of education and employment: co-creating CareerWise Colorado’s youth apprenticeship system, consulting for leading private-sector employers while at the Boston Consulting Group, and advising states, funders, and nonprofits on scaling workforce models through my consulting practice. This guide is not intended to be an all-encompassing review of sector-driven work nationwide. Instead, it captures lessons from Washington State’s system-building efforts, with the hope that these insights can inspire others to identify what a sector-led workforce system might look like in their own context.

This guide uses the term sector-led workforce systems intentionally to signal something broader than the Department of Labor–administered workforce system. It encompasses a state’s entire talent ecosystem – education, workforce, and industry partners – working in concert to meet shared economic and equity goals. The distinction matters because scaling what works requires connecting, not compartmentalizing, these systems.

This guide is organized into five sections, each exploring a critical dimension of sector-led workforce systems.

1. Why sector-led workforce systems are essential
   So often, programs alone rarely scale. This is because they compete for employer attention, operate in silos, and are rarely connected to the systems-level infrastructure that enables broader adoption. Sector-led workforce systems answer this by aligning employer demand with program design, enabling delivery at scale, and ensuring that solutions stick through supportive infrastructure.

2. Case studies in scaling strong programs into systems
   Examples from Washington State show what it looks like to move from isolated programs to cohesive, sector-level strategies. These case studies show how trusted sector intermediaries take promising models and integrate them into broader system change – ensuring they’re not just implemented, but sustained and scaled.

3. What makes sector intermediaries effective
   Strong sector intermediaries are the linchpin of sector-led workforce systems. This section explores the characteristics that make intermediaries effective, how they engage employers and translate insights into action, and how supportive infrastructure helps them mature into high-functioning ecosystem leaders.

4. Scaling what works statewide
   Sector-led workforce systems should be organized at the state level to enable intermediaries to access key levers – including funding streams, data systems, and agency partnerships – that shape how workforce strategies are designed, supported, and scaled. This section outlines three example models for structuring sector intermediary infrastructure statewide.

5. Sustaining sector-led workforce systems
   Durability requires more than good ideas – it requires supportive infrastructure. This section outlines how funders and state leaders can move from pilots to policy by embedding sector-led workforce infrastructure into public systems. It offers practical guidance on funding models, governance structures, and institutional homes that can sustain this work over time.

My hope is that these lessons spark action to build sector-driven workforce systems that are scalable, durable, and ready for the future.

1. Why sector-led workforce systems are essential

Making the case for systems that align employers, programs, and policy

Our workforce systems are full of programs – but few have the infrastructure they need to scale. We’ve made real progress building training pathways, from apprenticeships to short-term credentials, but we haven’t yet built the scaffolding that makes it easy for employers to adopt them. And without meaningful employer participation, even the best programs struggle to scale.

I’ve spent my career building and scaling workforce models – from co-creating CareerWise Colorado’s youth apprenticeship program to advising nearly 20 sector intermediaries in Washington State. Across these vantage points, I’ve noticed a pattern: our approach to employer engagement is often fragmented, duplicative, and draining for the very partners we need most.

Why is that? Too often, state agencies and funders invest in programs – and for good reason. Programs are tangible. They produce measurable outcomes. They’re tied to compelling stories. But without coordination or a shared strategy, dozens of well-intentioned programs end up competing for employer attention – and the result isn’t scale. It’s confusion. Here’s what that looks like in practice:

• Employers are overwhelmed. They’re asked to engage in too many uncoordinated ways, often by programs that don’t speak the language of business.

• Program leaders are under-resourced. They’re expected to do everything – including employer engagement – without the tools, relationships, or strategic support to succeed.

• Systems are noisy. Great programs get lost in the clutter. Even when impact is high, replication is hard – especially if employers weren’t involved from the start.

This is where sector-led workforce systems come in – a model designed to connect strong programs with the strategies and infrastructure they need to scale.

What I mean by “Sector-Led Workforce Systems”

At its heart, a sector-led workforce system is designed to create the conditions for strong programs to align with real hiring needs – and to scale with lasting impact.

When I use the term “sector-led workforce systems,” I mean more than a new approach to convening, an added layer of bureaucracy, or changes to the federally defined “workforce system.” I mean a broader talent ecosystem that invests in trusted, sector-specific entities – sector intermediaries – that translate employer needs into actionable workforce strategies and guide the development and scale of responsive programs. And just as importantly, it means building the state-level infrastructure that equips those intermediaries to succeed: the funding, policy alignment, and coordination that connect their work, sustain it over time, and make system-level impact possible.

At its core, this model relies on credible sector intermediaries – trusted entities that lead workforce development strategy on behalf of industry. That might be:

• An industry association

• A community college center of excellence

• A nonprofit organization

• A labor-management partnership

In practice, industry associations often make strong sector intermediaries – because their legitimacy and revenue streams are tied to employer satisfaction and trust.

Sector intermediaries start with employer-validated needs – identifying roles that are hard to fill, the skills required to succeed, and the tools used on the job. In response, they develop sector strategies that bundle together actionable, employer-endorsed solutions: career awareness experiences, work-based learning, curriculum and equipment updates, credential alignment, and wraparound supports. As part of this process, intermediaries identify the specific education and training programs best aligned with their strategy – and recommend where to develop, adapt, expand, or replicate those models to enable greater scale and impact. Critically, intermediaries don’t just design solutions for a single employer – they broker alignment across competitors, enabling sector-wide agreement on shared needs and approaches.

Strong intermediaries can and often do lead effective efforts on their own – but sector-led workforce systems provide the infrastructure, credibility, and support needed to scale and sustain their impact. These systems equip sector intermediaries with:

• Dedicated, sustained funding to support internal capacity and sector strategy implementation

• Engagement with aligned ecosystem partners (including state agencies, education and training providers, and regional leaders)

• Authority to influence public investment and make recommendations – or, in some cases, decisions – that shape the design and delivery of workforce solutions

• Access to policy levers that drive lasting change

• Technical assistance and peer learning to strengthen capacity

Taken together, these elements create a system where strong programs don’t just launch – they scale. It begins with credible sector intermediaries: trusted representatives of industry who gather real employer input, translate it into employer-validated workforce strategies, and identify the education and training solutions most likely to meet hiring needs. But strategy alone isn’t enough. When those intermediaries are supported by dedicated funding, agency partnerships, state policy levers, and a network of peers, they gain the capacity and authority scale employer-aligned solutions and accelerate adoption. The result is a workforce ecosystem where programs are embedded in statewide systems in ways that expand and sustain their impact – and where employers are at the table every step of the way.

To make that concrete, here’s a quick side-by-side showing how sector-led workforce systems and workforce programs play different – but complementary – roles in getting from employer need to learner success:

Fund both, and you get alignment, adoption, and scale; underfund either, and the system underperforms.

I’ve found the state level to be the right unit for sector-led workforce development – close enough to reflect local realities and big enough to matter.

At the state level, an intermediary can:

1. Work through regional partners – like workforce boards, community colleges, chambers, trusted CBOs, or regional consortiums – to surface local differences and tailor delivery.

2. Align the big levers – credential policy, funding streams, statewide standards, and data systems – so effective solutions become standard practice across districts, colleges, and employers.

3. Serve as a single point of contact for national sector intermediaries or initiatives, making it easier to translate national momentum into aligned state and regional action.

State-level intermediaries create a powerful feedback loop: surfacing local realities, shaping statewide strategy, incorporating national best practices, and scaling what works across regions. When paired with strong infrastructure, they help turn high-impact solutions into standard practice across education, training, and industry.

When taken together, the elements of this model give employers something they rarely have in traditional workforce efforts: a real seat at the table. Through sector intermediaries, employers gain a collective voice and a formal role in setting workforce priorities, shaping investment decisions, and co-designing scalable solutions. They are not just consulted – they help lead. That level of influence is essential to securing and sustaining meaningful employer participation over time.

Sector-led workforce systems: What they’re not

Sector-led workforce systems have several close cousins – including next-generation sector partnerships, Talent Pipeline Management (TPM) initiatives, pre-defined program-scaling partnerships, and independent “employer tables.” Each of these models can be highly effective for the purposes they’re designed to serve. Sector-led workforce systems differ in a few key ways:

Certainly, a sector-led workforce system might result in the formation of a regional Next Gen Sector Partnership, recommend the creation of a program scaling partnership, or adopt a methodology like TPM to guide its approach to employer engagement. But that’s not the starting point.

Why Sector-Led Workforce Systems matter – now more than ever

The results of sector-led workforce development take time – but they’re powerful. As I’ll describe in the next section, I’ve seen sector intermediaries participating in this style of workforce development help design new high-school CTE pathways with employers committing to interview course graduates; universities and companies co-build biotech experiences that lead to internships and jobs; and cross-sector work that aligns welding curricula and assessments so multiple programs meet shared standards and employers across sectors hire with confidence.

Not every initiative succeeds – and I’ll be candid about the pitfalls in the sections to come – but the pattern is clear: pairing great programs with sector-led infrastructure is what can enable scale, even as technologies and tools evolve.

This is not an argument to stop funding programs. Programs are essential. It’s an argument to also fund the infrastructure that lets those programs take root, grow, and keep delivering results. When you invest in both – strong programs and strong sector-led workforce infrastructure – you increase the odds that employer engagement becomes consistent, scalable, and sustained.

This opportunity is also timely. AI disruption makes the development of sector-led workforce systems not just useful – but urgent. Across every sector, AI is reshaping job functions, skill requirements, and business models. Employers are rethinking their talent strategies, education providers are launching AI-driven training models – some promising, many unproven – and workers are unsure what this shift means for their careers.

This moment demands more than scattered experimentation. It calls for responsive, strategic, and coordinated leadership. But most systems and sectors aren’t equipped to respond with the urgency, nuance, and scale this disruption requires. Sector-led workforce systems can help.

The sections that follow highlight what great sector intermediaries do, provide concrete examples from the field, and describe the type of infrastructure that can power this work at scale.

2. Case studies in scaling strong programs into systems

Lessons from Washington’s sector-led workforce system

Having introduced the case for sector-led workforce systems, this section brings the idea to life with case studies that show what it looks like in practice. I’ll share four examples – all drawn from my work between 2023-25 supporting Career Connect Washington (CCW), a public-private partnership launched in 2019 to expand career-connected learning opportunities for young people in Washington state.

CCW was established with strong support from Governor Jay Inslee and codified in law through the Workforce Education Investment Act. Housed within the Washington Student Achievement Council, it is funded through a mix of public and private sources, including the Workforce Education Investment Account (WEIA), legislative appropriations, federal grants, and philanthropy. This structure gives CCW the authority and resources to coordinate statewide strategy, support sector and regional intermediaries, and scale career-connected learning across the state.

As part of its work, Career Connect Washington built a sector-led workforce system by identifying 10 sector intermediaries across high-priority sectors for the state – each charged with growing career connected learning in their respective sector. To support their success, CCW provided a cohesive, state-level infrastructure that included:

• Dedicated funding for each intermediary to lead sector strategy and engage employers

• A shared framework to guide the development of sector-specific strategies that expand career connected learning

• Supplemental funding to implement promising programs and initiatives identified through those sector strategies

• Technical assistance (this is where I came in) to help intermediaries design and execute effective strategies, and to support the initiative overall

• Connections to CCW’s network of state agency and regional partners to align efforts across the system

• A community of practice to foster peer learning, shared tools, and collaboration across sectors

The examples I provide below are a result of this work and show how credible sector intermediaries – supported by strong infrastructure – can help high-impact programs scale. Each reflects a very different approach to meeting a workforce need. Together, they illustrate how a credible sector intermediary can design and implement a sector strategy to build on what’s working, address what’s missing, and scale employer-aligned programs.

Banking on awareness: Scaling financial pathways through high school CTE

The Washington Bankers Association (WBA) served as Career Connect Washington’s 2023-25 sector intermediary for finance. WBA brought deep credibility to the role – more than a century as the state’s banking association, broad membership across Washington banks, and a longstanding track record running training and education for the industry. That foundation gave WBA the trust and credibility it needed to lead on behalf of employers in the sector.

Through conversations with its members, WBA surfaced a set of workforce challenges shared by banking employers across the state:

• Many young people are unaware of the good jobs that exist within the sector.

• The workforce often doesn’t reflect the communities and customers it serves, in part due to historic barriers that have excluded underrepresented groups from banking careers.

• Too many young people enter the workforce without basic financial literacy or the soft skills needed to succeed in entry-level roles.

WBA used its position as a trusted sector intermediary to help solve these challenges at scale. It started by supporting and expanding BankWork$ – a training program that prepares young adults, including many from underrepresented communities, for entry-level roles in banking. But WBA didn’t just grow the program. It also persuaded leading employers to treat BankWork$ graduates as competitive candidates – removing a credential barrier that had previously excluded talented applicants without four-year degrees.

At the same time, WBA led a coordinated, statewide effort to embed financial services education into high school Career and Technical Education (CTE) – an initiative ultimately funded by Career Connect Washington and bolstered by its strong relationships with key partners across the state. This effort included translating the BankWork$ curriculum into a high school-ready format – the first of its kind for the sector in Washington – mapping existing offerings, and supporting districts in adopting the new coursework. The result: more students gaining early exposure to banking careers and developing industry-relevant skills through a program directly aligned with employer hiring needs statewide.

Without a credible sector intermediary like WBA, a high-impact program like BankWork$ would likely have remained a standalone effort. And without the infrastructure that Career Connect Washington provided – including dedicated funding and access to its networks – WBA would not have had the platform or capacity to translate that work into CTE curriculum at scale. Within a sector-led workforce system, the program is now poised to reach a much broader population of students – and is recognized by a larger number of employers as a viable and trusted hiring pipeline.

Lab-ready talent: Building regional biotech pathways

As part of Career Connect Washington, Life Science Washington (LSW) served as the 2023–25 sector intermediary for the state’s life sciences industry. A long-standing statewide industry association, LSW brought credibility, a strong track record of brokering industry-academia partnerships, and deep relationships with employers across research, biotech, medical devices, and AI applications in life sciences.

Through conversations with employers, LSW surfaced persistent hiring challenges:

• Smaller non-profit research institutions and employers outside urban hubs struggle to retain experienced workers due to competition with large firms.

• Too few industry-aligned training programs exist that lead to jobs in the sector – particularly those that prepare students for the high-volume lab technician roles local employers need to fill.

• Entry-level candidates often lack industry-relevant, hands-on lab experience, a critical requirement for jobs in highly regulated life science settings.

LSW developed a strategy to address these challenges, balancing urgency with long-term sustainability. One element of this strategy was to support the expansion of a proven community college training program from one region of the state to another. Working with employers and education partners, LSW helped adapt Shoreline Community College’s 10-week Biomanufacturing program to meet growing demand in a new region — including from Jubilant HollisterStier, a biomanufacturing employer preparing to hire at scale as it expands operations.

LSW convened Jubilant HollisterStier, Spokane Community College, and other regional employers and partners to adapt and launch the curriculum locally – creating a new local on-ramp to high-demand lab and production roles. Without a credible sector intermediary at the table, Jubilant HollisterStier and other local employers would have had limited ability to scout and adapt a program from another region – and Shoreline would have had no reason or capacity to do so on its own. LSW connected the dots, accelerated the match, and helped a proven model reach new students and new employers.

Career Connect Washington’s infrastructure enabled LSW to assign dedicated staff capacity to seize this opportunity quickly and effectively – serving as the vital connector that translates industry needs into actionable education strategies. This kind of responsive coordination would have been far harder without a funded intermediary model in place.

Grow your own: Expanding inclusive teacher pathways

In the education sector, the Center for Strengthening the Teaching Profession (CSTP) served as the 2023-25 Career Connect Washington sector intermediary. An established nonprofit focused on elevating the teaching profession in Washington, CSTP brought deep relationships with educators, school districts, and state agencies – along with a strong reputation for advancing equity and inclusion.

Through its work with partners, CSTP identified several interconnected challenges:

• The educator workforce does not reflect the racial and geographic diversity of Washington’s student population.

• High barriers to entry – especially the cost and inflexibility of traditional teacher preparation – limits who can enter the profession.

• Rural districts and high-turnover schools face persistent teacher shortages, with few resources to grow talent from within their communities.

In response, CSTP developed a sector strategy focused on scaling “grow your own” programs – local teacher preparation models that blend classroom learning with school-based experience. Rather than starting from scratch, CSTP helped elevate and expand a number of high-impact programs already operating across the state – programs that were often underfunded, underrecognized, or siloed from broader efforts. These programs help paraprofessionals, high school students, and other local candidates enter the profession through pathways that are more accessible, affordable, and deeply connected to their communities.

CSTP played a catalytic role: mapping existing efforts, surfacing promising models, and guiding state-level partners to invest in and replicate what was already working. At the same time, CSTP helped school districts and policymakers understand why traditional preparation routes alone wouldn’t solve the shortage – and what it would take to build a more inclusive, resilient, and locally rooted teacher pipeline.

Without a credible sector intermediary like CSTP, many of these “grow your own” programs may have remained isolated and underfunded. CSTP brought the visibility, coordination, and sector-level strategy needed to elevate local innovations into statewide solutions. Career Connect Washington’s infrastructure offered both the funding and the regional relationships needed to elevate and expand these “grow your own” programs – turning local innovations into scalable solutions.

Welding a shared standard: Aligning programs across sectors

In the skilled trades, multiple Career Connect Washington sector intermediaries – including those representing maritime, agriculture, and construction – identified a shared pain point: employers in their sectors can’t find enough qualified entry-level welders to meet demand. Too few training programs exist, especially in rural and underserved communities, and those that do often vary widely in quality and structure. Without clear expectations, open-source curricula, or consistent pathways, students struggle to break into the field, and employers face persistent hiring gaps.

Through Career Connect Washington’s sector intermediary infrastructure, these intermediaries came together to address the issue. The result was the MAC Welding Project – a collaborative effort to expand the number of high-quality welding programs statewide and bring coherence to how they are delivered. Drawing on employer input and existing curriculum models, they developed an open-source cross-sector welding framework: a shared set of standards and outcomes that K-12 and postsecondary partners can adopt to align training with real-world hiring needs. At the same time, the project was designed to tackle other structural barriers like insufficient professional development for instructors and limited career exploration opportunities for students.

The resulting framework was designed not as a new program, but as an overlay that existing training providers could adopt – bringing greater coherence and employer alignment to programs already in place. By lifting up what was working, identifying gaps, and aligning expectations across sectors, the effort created a new level of clarity for educators, employers, and jobseekers alike.

This kind of cross-sector coordination would have been difficult – if not impossible – without trusted intermediaries at the table. The welding framework didn’t come from a single program or employer; it emerged through a peer-to-peer learning infrastructure that enabled sector intermediaries to compare notes, surface common challenges, and co-design a statewide solution – with funding from Career Connect Washington helping bring the vision to life.

From innovation to infrastructure

These examples show how a sector-led workforce system works in practice – and why it’s effective. In each case, a credible sector intermediary served as the connective tissue linking employers, training providers, and state agencies. Rather than creating something entirely new, each intermediary built on what was already working: elevating proven models and helping scale them across regions and institutions. Career Connect Washington made this possible by providing the infrastructure – funding, access to a statewide network of partners, and technical assistance to connect the dots and lift up best practices.

This is the power of a sector-led workforce system: it transforms isolated successes into durable, scalable solutions. It provides what many programs seek but rarely achieve on their own – employer engagement at scale, alignment across systems, and strategic investment in what works.

3. Why sector intermediaries are key to scaling workforce solutions

Turning employer insight into coordinated solutions

Having seen why sector-led workforce systems matter and how they operate in practice, this section focuses on the organizations at the center of the model: sector intermediaries.

By “sector intermediary,” I mean a credible, trusted industry representative – for instance, an industry association, community college center of excellence, nonprofit, or labor-management partnership – that employers trust and that the education and training ecosystem will follow. Their job is to translate what companies actually need into concrete workforce strategies that education and training programs can deliver. While many organizational forms can serve in this role, those directly accountable to employers – such as industry associations – often bring a built-in advantage: their reputation and revenue depend on delivering value to the businesses they represent.

Strong sector intermediaries are powerful players within the workforce ecosystem: they can build trust with employers in ways that are challenging for individual programs – and they have the expertise to translate employer needs into workforce solutions that training partners can deliver and employers can adopt. In this section, we will explore why that is the case, and how to set up sector intermediaries for success in a sector-led workforce system.

The characteristics of a strong sector intermediary

So what makes a strong sector intermediary? From what I’ve seen across multiple sectors, the most effective intermediaries share foundational capabilities that position them to lead on behalf of employers and earn credibility across the workforce ecosystem:

• Employer base: They maintain direct relationships with a defined set of employers – often through a membership base – who expect real value and results. This keeps the focus on business needs and creates a clear path to adoption.

• Workforce as a core priority: Talent development is already central to their mission, reflected in strategic plans and dedicated staffing capacity.

• Translation between industry and education: They understand critical hiring challenges and have the knowledge and experience to convert employer feedback into actionable guidance for training partners.

• Fluency in labor market data: They know where and how to access the best labor market data, how to interpret it in context, and how to combine it with employer input to generate actionable strategies.

• Trust across systems: They’re respected by both employers and public partners, with strong relationships across education and workforce institutions that help align efforts and move strategies forward.

When sector intermediaries bring these capabilities to the table, they are well positioned to support the adoption of high-impact programs among employers.

👉 Want to go deeper? Read more here about the characteristics of a strong sector intermediary.

How intermediaries engage employers when programs can’t

One of the hardest challenges in workforce development is securing meaningful, sustained employer engagement. Even when programs are well‑designed, they rarely scale without employer buy-in and participation.

Employers are inundated with requests from schools, nonprofits, and agencies – all asking for time and participation. Most are not opposed to helping, but they’re busy, cautious about return on investment, and often unclear about how a given program adds value. Outreach often falters because programs lead with their own agenda (“join our advisory board”) rather than the employer’s problem (“what hiring challenges can we help you solve?”). As a result, programs often struggle to secure an audience with employers who may otherwise be good partners.

Strong sector intermediaries change the equation. They can succeed in bringing employers to the table where programs struggle because they combine trustworthiness, sector fluency, and simplified engagement models.

First and most importantly, sector intermediaries engage employers from a position of trust and accountability – often representing a membership base or coalition that already expects results. When an invitation comes through an intermediary, it feels like an opportunity, not an obligation. The messenger matters: employers know the intermediary understands their world and trust that they have vetted the opportunity.

Strong intermediaries also speak the language of business. While workforce programs often use language and frameworks rooted in the education and training landscape, intermediaries deeply understand the sector and the unique workforce needs of the employers in it. As a result, they can translate workforce concepts into clear, concrete value propositions that get employers’ attention: reduced time‑to‑hire, better retention, stronger talent pipelines.

At the same time, strong intermediaries make participation easy. For time-scarce employers – especially SMBs – intermediaries offer a single front door to a wide variety of workforce program offerings. They provide a trusted point of contact, a curated set of opportunities, and a manageable list of ways to engage. Employers are more willing to come to the table when they know their time will be respected.

In short, sector intermediaries can access and engage employers in ways most programs can’t on their own – and when employers aren’t at the table, programs stall, unable to reach their growth potential.

But the best sector intermediaries don’t stop at getting employers to the table. They know how to translate employer input into tangible workforce strategies that training partners can deliver and employers will adopt.

👉 Want to go deeper? Read more here about how sector intermediaries effectively secure employer engagement.

How intermediaries turn employer pain points into action

In addition to being able to more easily engage with employers, the best sector intermediaries know how to transform employer pain points into practical, scalable solutions that secure and sustain employer participation.

Through structured one‑on‑one conversations, site visits, focus groups, labor market data analysis, and short surveys, intermediaries surface patterns across employers to understand not just what challenges exist, but why. These insights lead to sharper, sector‑specific workforce solutions. Common refrains sector intermediaries hear from employers include:

“No one knows what good jobs we have in our sector.” This concern is especially common in sectors like advanced manufacturing and agriculture, where outdated perceptions keep young people away, and in sectors like life sciences and clean energy, where students and educators often aren’t aware of career opportunities at all. Sector intermediaries often address this by coordinating industry tours, classroom presentations, and immersive events, and marketing campaigns – because in most cases, someone has to see it to believe it.

“I can’t find enough talent to meet entry-level hiring demand.” This is a common refrain in sectors with high volumes of entry level jobs, such as healthcare, education, and construction, where the scale of workforce need is significant and growing. While a lack of awareness may play a role, the more pressing barriers often lie elsewhere: there aren’t enough training programs to meet demand, licensure and equipment requirements limit access, or prospective candidates face practical challenges that prevent them from enrolling or completing programs. Sector intermediaries can help address these barriers by mapping the existing ecosystem, expanding program capacity, and brokering partnerships to provide critical wraparound supports – such as career coaching, transportation assistance, and exam prep – to help more individuals complete training and enter the field.

“I see very few applicants that have the skills we need.” This refrain is especially common in fast-evolving fields like tech and advanced manufacturing, where curricula can quickly fall out of date. Intermediaries often help to close this gap by working with training providers and employers to update or co-develop programs, align competencies to actual hiring needs, ensure training equipment and tools are up-to-date, and put processes in place for industry validation and visibility.

“Too many entry-level applicants and employees don’t have the soft skills they need to succeed.” This is a common challenge across nearly every sector, but it is especially pronounced in industries with many customer-facing roles or jobs requiring strong collaboration – such as finance, technology, and construction. While most employers expect the education system to address this issue, soft skills are often best developed on the job, where learners face real-world situations and consequences. Sector intermediaries can play an important role in helping employers understand the limits of classroom-based instruction and in facilitating internships, mentorships, and internal training programs that support the real-time development of soft skills.

“Applicants don’t have the work experience they need to be successful in entry-level jobs.” While employers in some sectors – like construction – are often willing to train anyone who shows up with the right attitude and a willingness to learn, others expect entry-level candidates to arrive with prior work experience, creating a catch-22 for early-career professionals. This expectation is especially common in technology, where competition for jobs is fierce, and in sectors like life sciences, where even entry-level roles may involve regulated lab environments that demand precision. These are precisely the situations where apprenticeship models excel – and where intermediaries can play a critical role in helping employers reduce the time, cost, and complexity of launching work-based learning programs.

“My workforce doesn’t reflect the customers we serve.” This challenge exists across nearly every sector, but it tends to be most acute in fields like finance, life sciences, technology, and education – where historical barriers to entry and credential-based hiring practices have limited access. While previously mentioned strategies such as awareness-building, wraparound supports, and mentorship programs are important tools, helping employers transition from credential-based to skills-based hiring can also expand access. This shift opens doors for individuals who face steep barriers to obtaining traditional credentials but otherwise have the potential to succeed.

These examples make one thing clear: context matters. A strategy that works well in one sector may fall flat in another. That’s why sector intermediaries are so valuable. They’re close enough to understand the nuance, connected enough to engage the right stakeholders, and trusted enough to broker practical, sector-specific solutions that actually address root causes.

👉 Want to go deeper? Read more here about how sector intermediaries can design responsive, scalable workforce solutions.

How strong infrastructure amplifies intermediary impact

Intermediaries can’t drive systemic change on grit alone. Without the right infrastructure, even the strongest intermediary will hit limits – unable to access funding, coordinate partners, or scale promising models. Sector-driven workforce infrastructure provides the scaffolding they need to thrive: dedicated funding, technical assistance, peer learning, and access to public‑system levers and partners.

Within that type of environment, sector intermediaries are supported to:

• Build comprehensive knowledge of the sector’s education-to-employment landscape

• Develop a sector workforce strategy informed by labor market insights and employer demand

• Facilitate partnerships to address shared needs

• Support employer participation and program adoption

• Enable program alignment, expansion, or development

• Contribute to the broader ecosystem

In some systems, sector intermediaries may also be granted formal decision-making authority – such as setting quality standards for programs, reviewing and validating approved industry-recognized credentials, or identifying programs of study that should be eligible for Perkins or state CTE funding in their sector. These additional levers help ensure that public investments prepare students for high-demand careers – aligning education and training with the evolving needs of the labor market.

Sector intermediaries aren’t born ready to operate at the highest level – they grow into the role. With targeted funding, technical assistance, and peer learning, they build the capabilities needed to lead effectively. Over time, that growth often looks something like the following:

Peer-to-peer learning accelerates this progression. When intermediaries share lessons, compare tactics, and co‑solve problems, insights travel faster than any one organization could manage alone. Over time, they build the collective muscle that allows entire sectors – not just individual programs – to move in sync.

With that maturity, sector intermediaries become the missing link between strong programs and broad‑based employer participation. They anchor employer voice, translate needs into solutions, and sustain alignment across institutions and funding streams.

That’s what enables workforce systems to shift from isolated programs to coherent, sector‑aligned strategies – and why building and supporting sector intermediary infrastructure is the key to scaling what works.

4. Scaling what works statewide

Models for organizing sector-led workforce infrastructure at the state level

With the building blocks of a strong sector-led workforce system in place – including credible intermediaries, aligned programs, and supportive infrastructure – this section zooms out to explore how these elements come together at statewide scale. Drawing on Washington State’s experience, it outlines three distinct approaches to organizing workforce infrastructure around sector intermediaries.

Model 1: Building state-level sector intermediary infrastructure

Washington State recognized early that strong programs alone weren’t enough to meet evolving workforce needs. The state needed something more: durable infrastructure that could connect real-time industry demand to high-quality training – at scale and over time.

Through its Career Connect Washington (CCW) public-private partnership, the state set out to build exactly that – not a short-term grant program, but a sustained, sector-driven workforce ecosystem. After extensive interviews with industry and workforce leaders, the state selected ten “Sector Leaders” in 2022 through a competitive process. These organizations were chosen to grow career-connected learning in their sectors, with a mandate and platform to:

• Understand employer workforce needs

• Develop sector strategies to address those needs

• Align, grow, or develop relevant programs

• Facilitate partnerships across education and industry

• Support the broader CCW ecosystem

Washington State’s 10 “Sector Leaders,” 2023-25

To support the success of each Sector Leader – and the system as a whole – CCW provided a cohesive infrastructure that included:

• Dedicated funding to support each intermediary’s capacity to lead sector strategy and employer engagement

• A shared framework to guide the development of sector-specific strategies that expand career connected learning

• Supplemental funding to help implement promising programs and initiatives surfaced through those sector strategies

• Technical assistance (this is where I came in) to help sector intermediaries design and execute effective strategies, and to support the initiative overall

• Connections to CCW’s network of state agency and regional partners to help align efforts across the system

• A community of practice to foster peer learning, shared tools, and collaboration across sectors

Based on my experience supporting CCW’s Sector Leaders over a two-year period, I observed several conditions that made this infrastructure effective:

• Investing in the capacity of existing organizations to serve as sector intermediaries

• Providing sufficient funding for dedicated capacity, with the most effective Sector Leaders assigning a full-time staff member and ensuring active leadership support

• Including contract guardrails that required a common set of activities while still allowing flexibility for implementation of sector-specific strategies

• Selecting Sector Leaders to operate statewide, enabling efforts that work well in one region to be replicated in others

• Funding the training programs or initiatives recommended by sector intermediaries as part of the strategies they developed

• Hiring centralized technical assistance to guide the overall effort, set strategy, and support knowledge-sharing across sectors

At the same time, the work had to overcome challenges along the way:

• Limited employer networks: When Sector Leaders lacked strong relationships with employers, progress slowed and outcomes diminished.

• Conflicts of interest: In cases where intermediaries ran their own training programs, tensions sometimes arose between organization-level priorities and advancing sector-wide solutions.

• Early ambiguity: While early flexibility helped the model take shape, clearer expectations and performance metrics ultimately accelerated progress.

• Harder-to-measure outcomes: Because many initiatives took 1-2 years to bear fruit – and some impacts, like raising awareness, were hard to measure – it was difficult to convey value and impact to legislators and funders early on.

By 2025, Sector Leaders had surfaced dozens of new initiatives, from regional pilots to statewide frameworks to program expansion, and had built stronger employer-provider partnerships. The model showed clear momentum.

But that year, Washington faced an $8 billion budget shortfall. While CCW and its Sector Leader network remained in place, the initiative’s operating budget was significantly reduced. Sector Leaders continued their work – but with fewer resources, their ability to sustain and accelerate momentum was constrained. The experience underscored a central truth: infrastructure of this kind requires steady investment to reach its full potential and deliver lasting, statewide impact.

Model 2: Accelerating solutions through sector strategy teams

As CCW Sector Leaders developed their strategies, they often uncovered challenges that no single program could fix. Many issues were systemic or cross-sector in nature – spanning multiple regions, employers, or education systems. Addressing them required coordination, creativity, and multi-pronged solutions.

To address this, CCW piloted a “sector strategy accelerator,” funding a select group of intermediaries to lead targeted initiatives around clearly defined problems. These were not new training programs; they were coordinated solutions led by trusted sector intermediaries.

Unlike program grants, these accelerator projects were nimble, problem-specific, and sector-led. The sector intermediary was in the driver’s seat, responsible for rallying stakeholders and driving solutions forward.

Examples of accelerator projects included:

The accelerator approach worked because it gave sector leaders the flexibility, resources, and responsibility to tackle acute, well-defined, systems-level workforce challenges head-on. By bringing employers, training providers, and educators together around a clearly defined problem, these initiatives moved quickly and delivered visible results.

This model is especially effective when:

• A specific workforce challenge is clearly defined and widely acknowledged

• A trusted sector intermediary is in place to lead the charge

• Time-limited funding is available to support both coordination and solutions

• A state-level sector intermediary infrastructure exists to ensure results sustain over a long time horizon

For other states, this approach offers a valuable option. It can complement a broader sector intermediary infrastructure – or serve as a stand-alone approach where such infrastructure doesn’t yet exist, offering a proof of concept that can justify more sustained investment over time. In the latter case, states could establish “Talent Solution Teams”: short-term, well-funded, sector intermediary-led groups tasked with solving a clearly defined workforce challenge. With the right intermediary in place, these teams can deliver high-impact results while also laying the groundwork for the development of a sustained sector-led workforce system.

Model 3: Aligning sectors around a shared target

A third sector-led workforce infrastructure model emerged as part of CCW’s work to support the Washington Jobs Initiative (WJI), funded by the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Good Jobs Challenge. This effort set clear, ambitious targets: train 5,000 participants and place 3,000 into good jobs across five priority sectors.

To reach those goals, the state identified eight “backbone organizations” – sector intermediaries charged with coordinating employer partnerships, aligning training providers, and delivering enrollment and placement results. Unlike the more permanent infrastructure built under the Sector Leader model, this effort was inherently grant-funded and time-bound. The state invested in a temporary infrastructure to strengthen implementation, including technical assistance, a shared data system to track and report progress, and a peer learning community to foster continuous improvement across the backbone network.

Each intermediary worked with employers to identify a workforce need, select or design training to meet it, and reach placement goals. Unlike the accelerator model, this approach started with the outcome – placement targets – and asked intermediaries to build backwards from there.

For example, the Spokane Workforce Development Council aimed to place 350 individuals in good healthcare jobs. As one component of their strategy, they partnered with a CNA training program and added English instruction, job coaching, and wraparound services to better serve a local immigrant population. The result was a new talent pipeline for employers and an expanded opportunity for jobseekers. The model is now being replicated for phlebotomy and other roles.

This model that aligned sector intermediaries around a shared target demonstrated some strengths as a sector-driven approach to workforce development:

• Clear, measurable goals: Shared statewide targets for enrollment and placement made progress easy to track and communicate to funders and state and federal agencies.

• Direct employer benefit: Because programs addressed urgent hiring needs, employer buy-in was in some cases easier to secure.

At the same time, this approach to developing sector-led workforce infrastructure faced challenges that limited longer-term impact:

• Short-term focus: Because performance metrics were tied to specific outputs like enrollments and job placements, sector intermediaries had limited flexibility to invest in early-stage pipeline strategies or longer-term system-building efforts.

• Prescribed solutions: In some cases, intermediaries advanced pre-defined training approaches in order to meet near-term performance metrics, limiting their ability to co-design more responsive solutions with employers.

• Regional silos: Many initiatives remained confined to specific geographies, with no follow-on federal funding available to support broader adoption or statewide scaling of successful models.

This model shows how aligning sector-driven efforts to clear, statewide goals can produce meaningful near-term results for both employers and jobseekers. But it also highlights the limits of a grant-dependent approach to sector-driven workforce development. Without a durable infrastructure designed to outlast the funding period, high-impact efforts face challenges in scaling or sustaining over time.

Beyond the Career Connect Washington model

The Career Connect Washington model offers a compelling proof point: with the right support, sector intermediaries can drive alignment, broker partnerships, and scale solutions. But the model stops short of granting these intermediaries true decision-making authority. In Washington, sector leaders advise on strategies and recommend investment in promising programs, but state agencies ultimately control program design and funding.

A more ambitious approach could go further – establishing formal sector councils with the authority to act on behalf of employers in their industries. These trusted, representative intermediaries would do more than inform state priorities; they’d help govern them. With formal authority and the right guardrails, they could validate approved credentials, set program quality standards, and recommend which programs of study should be eligible for Perkins and state CTE funding.

This shift would elevate employer engagement from advisory input to shared governance. It would ensure that workforce investments align with real labor market demand and that education and training programs prepare learners for high-opportunity, high-need roles across the state. By giving employers a structured, sustained role in decision-making, this model would deepen their commitment to – and accountability for – workforce outcomes.

Educators, workforce boards, and state agencies would remain essential partners. But employers – through intermediaries they trust – would help lead from the start, driving solutions that are responsive, scalable, and rooted in cross-sector consensus.

For a compelling vision of what this could look like in practice, see Kelly Vedi’s article here. For states ready to take a bold step forward, this kind of governance shift offers a promising path toward a responsive, durable, and employer-aligned workforce system.

Lessons for other states

This section has described three approaches to building a sector-led workforce system: (1) durable, state-level infrastructure led by sector intermediaries; (2) time-limited accelerators focused on clearly defined challenges; and (3) outcome-driven initiatives organized around shared statewide targets. Each approach carries important lessons for states looking to connect employer demand to high-quality training more effectively.

When supported by the right conditions – credible intermediaries, a patient funding model, and long-term commitment – the durable sector intermediary model offers the strongest foundation. Its focus on building enduring infrastructure enables coordination across regions, sustained employer engagement, and the scaling of successful models over time. Future iterations of this model could be made even more powerful by granting sector intermediaries formal decision-making authority to move employer engagement from advisory input to shared governance – helping ensure that state investments stay tightly aligned with labor market demand.

The accelerator and shared-target models can also be powerful, especially when time-sensitive challenges or urgent workforce gaps demand immediate attention. These efforts demonstrate how short-term investments can generate momentum, build trust, and produce measurable outcomes that benefit both employers and workers. In many cases, they can also provide the proof points needed to justify broader investments in a state-level sector intermediary infrastructure.

These statewide models demonstrate the potential of sector-led workforce systems – but they also underscore the importance of leadership and sustained commitment. The next section turns to the role funders, policymakers, and state leaders can play in ensuring this work thrives for the long term.

5. Sustaining sector-led workforce systems

How funders and leaders can build and sustain durable workforce infrastructure

Beyond program leaders and intermediaries, funders, policymakers, and state leaders play a pivotal role in establishing durable sector-led workforce systems. This section examines how their decisions can ensure sector-driven efforts last beyond a few years and become embedded in systems.

The considerations described below may come into play as stakeholders engage in a variety of ways:

• Funders may support early pilot efforts or help launch networks of states developing sector-led workforce systems.

• State leaders and policymakers may determine how to integrate sector-led infrastructure into broader education, workforce, and economic systems.

• Implementation and research partners may support or study implementation and identify best practices to guide current and future efforts.

Regardless of role, each stakeholder has a part to play in shaping systems that are durable, strategic, and responsive. The sections that follow outline practical steps for stakeholders to consider as they design, fund, and support sector-led workforce systems.

Anchoring the infrastructure

For any sector-led workforce system to succeed, states must ensure the work is anchored in the right institutional home and led by the appropriate system actors.

Where this work lives matters. Sector-driven workforce efforts require a home that reflects their cross-cutting nature and strategic urgency. While they may originate in workforce or education agencies, they must be led by an entity with the legitimacy to convene, the authority to align systems, and the responsiveness to employer, labor, and economic needs.

States have organized similar efforts in a variety of ways. Some have housed the work within a single state agency, embedding it in established state structures. Others have placed it in the governor’s office or an interagency workforce board to ensure cross-system alignment. Still others have created dedicated teams or public-private partnerships to drive sector strategy, while keeping the work closely connected to public agencies.

What matters most is choosing a lead entity with both neutrality and legitimacy – one that can serve as a credible convener, hold the vision, manage resources, and ensure accountability across partners. The right structure depends on the political landscape, agency capacity, and existing initiatives. But in every case, the work must be positioned to drive alignment, not compete with or duplicate other efforts.

Alongside choosing the right home, states must also establish clear, empowered leadership. Someone must be explicitly responsible for the system – empowered to make decisions and held accountable for results. At the state level, designated leadership is needed to maintain strategic focus, resolve cross-sector challenges, and keep the work moving forward.

Early on – or over time– states must determine how the infrastructure can outlast a single administration. This might be achieved, for example, by embedding the sector intermediary role in state statute. But statutes should define roles broadly enough to allow adaptation over time. Locking in a structure that cannot evolve risks irrelevance as employer and workforce needs change. In some cases, it may be better to legislate only after early pilots help clarify what’s needed and what works.

Designing the approach

For a sector-led workforce system to succeed, states need a clear design framework as they begin the work.

First, states need clear, objective criteria to determine which sectors warrant investment. Rather than defaulting to legacy programs or politically connected stakeholders, states should use a transparent framework to identify where state-level support is most likely to deliver impact. One sample framework might include:

States may choose to pilot the work in a small number of sectors first, then expand the number of focus sectors as infrastructure matures. Over time, states may wish to build toward a more comprehensive structure by aligning their sector intermediary infrastructure with national frameworks, such as the 14 Advance CTE career clusters.

Next, selecting the right intermediaries is essential. These organizations must be trusted by employers, connected across the training ecosystem, and committed to a sector-wide perspective. Appointing an organization just to fill the role – without the necessary credibility or capacity – can lead to poor outcomes and erode trust with employers and policymakers. Funding should not go to a sector intermediary unless it is truly well-positioned to lead. Sample selection criteria might include:

• The sector intermediary has an established employer network – such as a membership base, coalition, or board – that it can readily access and engage, with employer endorsements affirming trust in the intermediary’s ability to represent their workforce needs.

• The intermediary is directly accountable to employers – either through a membership or revenue model, formal governance structure, or other established mechanisms that ensure employer voice and value drive its work.

• The intermediary’s workforce role aligns with its core mission and strategic priorities, not as an add-on or secondary focus.

• The intermediary has a demonstrated track record of success in education, training, and workforce development initiatives.

• Executive leadership and senior staff will be directly involved in the work, with dedicated full-time capacity assigned.

• If the intermediary operates its own workforce or training programs, it has policies and practices in place to ensure its sector leadership role supports the full ecosystem of workforce opportunities, not just its own offerings.

• The intermediary is data-savvy – able to interpret labor market trends, identify gaps, and translate findings into strategies aligned with employer input.

• The intermediary is staffed, motivated, and equipped for intensive employer and stakeholder engagement – with a focus on action and implementation, not solely research or analysis.

In addition to selecting the right organization, states must clearly define what the sector intermediary is being asked to do. That definition should strike a balance: flexible enough to allow for sector-specific strategies, but clear enough to stay focused on workforce outcomes. In Washington, for example, intermediaries were tasked with “growing career connected learning” in their sectors – a broad but workforce-specific mandate tied to a long-term vision that included measurable goals. Without that kind of focus, efforts can drift toward adjacent but less targeted priorities, like general economic development or business climate initiatives. A well-scoped charge helps ensure that intermediary energy is directed toward the workforce challenge at hand – and that success can be measured accordingly.

As states scope the work, it’s important not to overextend expectations at the outset. For instance, sector intermediaries don’t need to serve every region or solve every problem on day one. States should allow intermediaries to make strategic bets early – choosing demonstration sites where they can test approaches, build momentum, and generate proof points to guide future scale. Starting narrow and expanding over time allows for more effective learning and more durable progress.

Finally, states should identify potential pitfalls and build in guardrails to protect against them. Without guardrails, sector-driven efforts may risk training for low-quality or soon-to-be-obsolete jobs, neglecting equity outcomes, or drifting away from employer-validated needs. Guardrails can be embedded through performance metrics, strategy reviews, and targeted technical assistance – ensuring sector intermediaries stay focused on quality, relevance, and equity.

Connecting sector intermediaries to the broader ecosystem

To achieve the scale and sustainability that sector-led workforce systems promise, intermediaries must have access to the broader ecosystem shaping education and workforce policy. This requires intentional structures that connect them with the agencies, institutions, and regional leaders whose decisions influence standards, credentials, funding, and programs. While the approach will differ by state, successful systems create consistent mechanisms for coordination, shared problem-solving, and mutual accountability among all partners.

States can start by identifying the ecosystem partners sector intermediaries will likely engage in order to implement their strategies: state agencies overseeing K-12, CTE, higher education, labor, and economic development; education and training providers like community colleges and school districts; and regional actors such as workforce boards and chambers. They should then define how sector intermediaries will reliably connect with these stakeholders – through regular meetings, shared metrics, or formal collaboration structures. These structures help intermediaries both tailor efforts to local realities and influence key levers like credential policy, funding, and data systems – turning successful programs into statewide practice.

As one example, Career Connect Washington coordinated sector intermediaries, agencies, and regional partners around a set of shared goals: universal student access to career exploration and preparation programs and 60% youth participation in work-based learning by 2030. A core leadership team met weekly, with subgroups advancing specific strands of work. Each agency created a work plan tied to these goals, and coordination was jointly led by the Employment Security Department, Washington Student Achievement Council, Washington Roundtable, and Washington STEM. This structure ensured sector intermediaries had access to key decision-makers and system leaders. Other states pursuing this model will need their own connective tissue – a structure that gives intermediaries seat at the table and the ability to influence systems, not just programs.

Funding the infrastructure

Even the strongest system design will fail without reliable funding. States must secure resources for two essential components: (1) the core capacity of sector intermediaries and the infrastructure that supports them, and (2) the education and training solutions those intermediaries recommend.

First, sector intermediaries need sustained operating support – along with the connective infrastructure that enables their work. This includes funding for staff capacity, strategy development, technical assistance, and performance management. Start-up support should be guaranteed for at least four years to allow time for trust-building, strategy development, and early results. Over time, states can pursue more durable models such as multi-year appropriations, baseline budget inclusion, dedicated revenue streams (such as surcharges on specific goods or sectors), or public-private co-investment to sustain intermediary capacity and system infrastructure.

Second, intermediary-led strategies must come with implementation dollars. Otherwise, sector leaders risk being paper tigers – producing strategies that can’t be acted on. While employers should be expected to co-invest – especially in response to urgent hiring needs – private contributions are typically tied to shorter-term returns. Building longer-term training pipelines requires public funding to de-risk upfront investment, support shared infrastructure (like curriculum or credential alignment), and expand access to underrepresented communities.

Funding implementation doesn’t always require entirely new revenue streams. States can often braid existing funding across workforce, education, and economic development systems. When aligned around shared sector strategies, these resources can stretch further – enabling implementation without duplicating efforts or launching brand-new initiatives. In fact, sector-led systems can position states to attract new federal investments that reward coordinated, industry-driven approaches, and can be leveraged to guide how emerging funding streams – such as Workforce Pell – are deployed to meet sector needs

Philanthropy can also play a catalytic role. Foundations can help launch pilots, fund early-stage strategy development, support targeted solutions, or bridge timing gaps between public funding cycles – giving sector-led models the flexibility and momentum they need to take root.

Public and philanthropic investments play a critical role in launching or expanding high-impact workforce programs. But in a sector-led workforce system, it’s the sector intermediary that ensures those investments deliver lasting value. Once a pilot is launched or a new program is in place, the intermediary brings together the partners needed to sustain momentum – ensuring employer participation, regional engagement, and continued alignment with industry needs. That’s the power of a sector-driven system: it doesn’t just fund programs – it sustains their results.

Supporting the work

Once the right intermediaries are in place, the state’s role should shift from control to enablement.

That starts with clear expectations. Every intermediary should develop a strategy that aligns with sector needs, is validated by employers, and includes measurable goals. The state can support this process by offering technical assistance and convening expert reviewers to provide feedback and formally approve the strategy. Once approved, performance metrics should be co-developed to reflect the strategy – ensuring accountability while avoiding micromanagement.

Critically, states must trust the sector intermediary to lead. If an intermediary has been carefully selected and vetted, the state should be prepared to support its strategy – even if it doesn’t align with a preferred program model or familiar approach. That means remaining program-agnostic and resisting the urge to direct specific solutions when the intermediary has identified a more responsive path forward based on employer needs.

Oversight should be light-touch and focused on progress, not paperwork. The goal is to ensure alignment and impact while leaving room for creativity and responsiveness.

States should also invest in centralized technical assistance and peer learning. This helps intermediaries learn from one another, align their efforts, and connect to broader state initiatives.

Adjusting for learnings

Even in well-designed systems, some intermediaries will falter. They may struggle to earn employer trust, prioritize their own programs, or simply underperform.

When that happens, state leaders must have the courage to act. Contractual tools should allow for course correction – including replacing intermediaries when necessary. The cost of inaction is high.

At the same time, mistakes are opportunities to learn. Sector-led systems require room to test, adapt, and learn. Strong leadership and technical assistance can help identify problems early, share lessons across sectors, and improve the model over time. A culture of continuous improvement – paired with the understanding that some failure is not only expected but essential to innovation – will help these systems evolve and endure.

To support continuous improvement, states should invest in implementation research to understand what’s working, where challenges emerge, and how strategies evolve. This also supports public communication to build support and sustain investment.

Adapting for change

Sector-led workforce systems must be built to evolve. As labor markets shift, states may need to refine the focus of a given sector, phase out support where demand declines, or introduce new intermediaries in response to emerging opportunities.

AI illustrates the need for this kind of flexibility. AI is reshaping job roles, business models, and skill requirements across sectors – making trusted intermediaries more essential than ever. Their ability to surface real-time insights, vet training solutions, and align stakeholders positions them to guide responsive action as industries adapt.

AI also offers tools to strengthen intermediaries themselves – accelerating scans of workforce programs, synthesizing labor market data, and streamlining day-to-day operations. States may consider reflecting AI in their sector-led infrastructure through approaches such as: (1) enabling each intermediary to define its own AI strategy, (2) layering AI as a cross-sector statewide priority with shared resources, or (3) funding a dedicated intermediary focused on AI’s cross-sector impacts.

👉 Want to go deeper? Read more here about how sector-led workforce systems can adapt in the age of AI.

As technologies like AI continue to reshape the economy, sector-led workforce systems must be prepared not only to respond – but to evolve in real time alongside the industries they serve.

Systems that endure

Building durable systems means investing in the infrastructure that sustains them. That includes long-term funding strategies, clear institutional homes, and governance models that can evolve with the work. When these elements are in place, sector-led workforce systems are far more likely to withstand leadership transitions, economic shifts, and changing priorities – and continue delivering value over time.

Conclusion: Building what lasts

Workforce programs change lives – but without the right infrastructure, they rarely scale. This guide has shown why sector-led workforce systems are essential: they anchor employer needs at the center, elevate what works, and create durable systems that adapt as industries evolve.

The stakes are high. Employers face persistent shortages, students and workers navigate uncertain pathways, and technological disruption – particularly AI – is reshaping jobs faster than systems can respond. Sector-led workforce systems offer a way forward: trusted intermediaries that listen to employers, translate needs into solutions, and connect strong programs with the systems required to scale.

My hope is that this guide serves as both a roadmap and an invitation. For funders, it points to investments that endure beyond the life of a grant. For policymakers, it highlights structures that can turn fragmented initiatives into statewide systems. And for practitioners, it underscores the value of building together – across employers, educators, and community partners – with intermediaries leading the way.

If used well, this guide can help more states and sectors move from pilots to policy, from programs to systems, and from scattered efforts to lasting infrastructure. The result: more people on pathways to good jobs, more employers with the talent they need, and a workforce system built to thrive in an era of constant change.

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This series was developed with the thought partnership of Ingrid Stegemoeller at the Partnership for Learning, the education foundation of the Washington Roundtable. I’m also grateful to Andy Ferrera and Ryan Gensler for their thoughtful feedback and input.

Ashley Carter is the Founder and Principal of Pathfinder Strategies, a consulting firm that helps states, intermediaries, and philanthropic partners build workforce strategies and systems that respond to employer needs while expanding access and success for students and jobseekers. Her work blends strategy development, systems design, and on-the-ground implementation, informed by over two decades of experience across the public, private, and nonprofit sectors.

Since 2023, Ashley has served as a lead technical assistance provider to Washington State sector intermediaries and agencies working to expand career-connected learning. She has supported nearly 20 industry intermediaries across 10 sectors, helping shape statewide strategy, advising on implementation, and developing tools to translate employer demand into aligned, sector-based workforce efforts.

Ashley was the founding Chief Operating Officer of CareerWise Colorado, where she helped bring the organization’s early vision to life and led efforts to scale youth apprenticeship programs across a range of industries. She guided organizational growth strategy, built core operational systems, and supported other states in launching youth apprenticeship programs through the formation of CareerWise USA.

Earlier in her career, Ashley worked at the Boston Consulting Group, advising Fortune 500 companies and philanthropic foundations. In 2001, she founded Daring Girls, a nonprofit organization that supports girls’ education and entrepreneurship training across East Africa. Now more than 25 years old, the organization’s programs received UNESCO’s Prize for Girls’ and Women’s Education in 2022.

Ashley holds a BA from Harvard and an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. She lives in Boulder, Colorado.