True scale in workforce development? Fund the connective tissue.

The workforce field has a scale problem — and the way we’ve been chasing scale is making it worse. From what I’ve seen across more than a decade in workforce development, we’ve been investing in individual programs and asking each of them to scale on their own. We expect scale in terms of the number of individuals reached, the diversity of learners and employers served, and the outcomes they deliver. We’ve placed the burden of achieving this type of scale on thousands of individual programs, and when they fall short of any of those expectations, we tend to read it as a program failure.

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.