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My nephew Evan is a sophomore at Arizona State University majoring in business. Like seemingly everyone in his generation – including 12 out of 12 participants in a recent New York Times focus group where words used to describe the job market included messy, rough, struggle, horrible, unfair, and scam – he’s hyper-aware that career launch is a roll of the dice, with odds lengthening with each passing year.
Last we heard from Evan, a fraternity brother helped him get a summer job selling pest control services door-to-door. Then in the fall, he assumed the mantle of frat social chair, which led to a teachable moment when he texted me asking for help: the school had just put the kibosh on the alumni tailgate he’d been planning for two months and could I leverage my relationships with ASU leaders?
He must have done a decent job managing this crisis without assistance because he’s now fraternity president and a clear-eyed one at that. When I saw him over spring break, he conveyed that he sees himself as an entrepreneur. His product? Parties. Specifically, parties that attract hundreds of female students. His innovation? Lasers. Specifically, lasers synced to pulsating music. Since taking charge, Evan has invested in eight lasers (some of which may have fallen off the back of a truck, most of which are still working), obtained online certification for safe outdoor usage, paid an expert to teach him how to use the syncing software, and produced sound-and-light dance parties that are the talk of Tempe. According to Evan, the syncing can take 9 hours per hour of music. But he doesn’t need much more than an hour because the police reliably show up in about an hour and shut everything down. Evan’s new favorite saying is “Tempe Police: great at stopping parties, not so great at stopping murders.”
Evan estimates he’s working 50 hours a week for the fraternity. He’s not getting paid and definitely not getting credit. But he is developing valuable skills including managing a team, steering the frat’s relationship with the university, and… lasers. Evan and I brainstormed summer job options that might be a step up from door-to-door sales. I suggested a few new business ideas for summer and beyond. But before going where no man has gone before, Evan wants to see if he can interest other venues in laser syncing because “music always goes better with lasers.” And greater Phoenix has a plethora of jazz clubs, folk coffeehouses, and dueling piano bars that don’t yet know they won’t truly flourish without an Evan laser extravaganza.
Technology is amazing. For Evan, it’s opened a plausible career path. And if Tempe dueling piano bars prove immune to the charms of synced lasers, technology will help him chart a different (if less flashy) course with his new skills. I’m talking about talent marketplaces which soon will provide all career launchers with navigation assistance.
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Everyone is talking about talent marketplaces: new AI platforms that match people with opportunities based on skills. Talent marketplaces are GPS for careers, the labor market digital infrastructure we’ve lacked until now. Job seekers upload or build résumés, complete skills assessments, and are matched to open jobs where they’re an immediate fit as well as provided with an employment roadmap and corresponding upskilling programs for opportunities along the way. More important, talent marketplaces have the potential to become the navigation layer atop our fragmented education and workforce systems.
The U.S. Department of Education is so pumped about talent marketplaces that, last fall, it went out of its way to note that talent marketplaces are an allowable use for $167M in FIPSE (postsecondary education improvement) grants. For another grant program, Trio, which historically had supported college for low-income and first-generation students, ED just announced $175M in new funding and directed applicants to “explore talent marketplaces… as equally viable and often faster routes to economic mobility as traditional college programs.” Finally, a new a $15M talent marketplace challenge completes ED’s talent marketplace trifecta. Grant proposals are due at the end of this month. Up to 10 states will divide the funds and willing states will need to convince ED that their action plan is likely to lead to statewide adoption.
But it’s not as if Linda McMahon came up with the idea. (She did, however, come up with this idea, and this one.) Without any federal support, states have gotten to work. Under the leadership of Nick Moore – not coincidentally now Acting Assistant Secretary at ED – Alabama launched its Talent Triad. Both Triad and Arkansas’ marketplace Launch welcome all job seekers and students. The problem, as Alabama learned when, in year three of Triad, only 1,000 jobs were listed on the platform, is chicken-and-egg: why would companies bother listing jobs on a platform unless there are lots of job seekers? Likewise, why would job seekers use a talent marketplace with relatively few jobs? “Build it and they will come” won’t work for talent marketplaces.
So the most exciting progress has been at workforce agencies which have a built-in audience of job seekers i.e., unemployment insurance claimants required to participate in the workforce system. They also have established connections with companies. Workforce systems already have chickens and eggs.
Equally important, talent marketplaces are a solution for what ails workforce development. If you thought colleges and universities were bureaucratic, allow me to introduce you to America’s workforce system. Workforce agencies aren’t principally set up to place people in good jobs or launch careers, they’re designed to follow the Byzantine rules that accompany workforce dollars. The results for job seekers, companies, and sometimes training providers, can be bewildering.
Brace yourself for one example. When a worker in Fresno, CA, is laid off and searches for job training, he’ll land on the California Employment Development Department (EDD) site which reads: “Looking for New Skills or Training? Check out our no-cost job and training services available across the state!” But there’s no obvious link on the page to training programs. Instead, EDD suggests that the worker:
Below this lies the header Where to Get Training. Sounds promising except the link brings him to the California Eligible Training Provider List, which leads a description of ETPL. One more click reveals a link to the CalJobs site which has a section for job seekers and a link for education and training. This brings up a search page. Searching on nursing yields a list of programs. Clicking on a program provides the following:
But no link to the actual program. Speaking of grievance…
Beyond the unfathomable lack of assistance for those who need it most, workforce UI/UX makes the Fresno DMV look like a paragon of design; each page looks different, often belonging to a different agency or organization. Everything is text-heavy, opaque, and exceptionally hard to navigate. So one primary reason workers aren’t taking advantage of the workforce system to reskill is because current digital resources are workforce word salad. Talent marketplaces are the tonic: an urgently needed navigation layer that allows all constituents – job seekers, companies, and training providers – to get what they need by cutting through stifling bureaucracy and legacy bad design decisions (assuming there were affirmative decisions).
State leaders are beginning to realize they’re not getting what they need. If their workforce systems are accomplishing anything, it’s speed-to-fill into low-skill, high-turnover positions for low-income, unemployed workers. Upskilling and economic mobility aren’t occurring in any measurable way. Talent marketplaces have the potential to break workforce development out of this vicious circle.
Leading the talent marketplace revolution at workforce agencies is FutureFit AI, which – as the name suggests – leverages AI for job and training matching as well as for scraping and platforming all posted jobs in the geography (updated daily, thereby addressing the weaker side of the equation for workforce agencies). The FutureFit experience for a dislocated worker couldn’t be more different. Within minutes of answering a few questions or uploading a résumé, he’ll have a skills profile and a set of realistic career pathways, not just job listings. Clicking into a pathway provides a step-by-step plan with working links to training options and live jobs.
FutureFit’s platform is already powering statewide marketplaces in South Carolina, Connecticut, and Colorado, as well as regional marketplaces in San Bernadino and Washington State. It’s also big in Canada where it runs talent marketplaces at federal, provincial, and local levels. The outcomes are impressive: high percentages of participants hired into relevant, higher wage jobs. In Connecticut, 7,000 job seekers have been trained for jobs in high-growth sectors and over 85% have been placed. I’m not surprised because talent marketplaces do a better job of helping companies ascertain candidate fit and interest than a typical hiring process.
Although federal and state departments of labor haven’t reached U.S. Department of Education-level enthusiasm for talent marketplaces, the problem and solution are so obvious that it won’t be long before state and local workforce agencies are required to leverage technology and implement solutions like FutureFit before receiving workforce dollar one.
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While workforce agencies are the beachhead, talent marketplaces are needed more broadly. With significant AI-driven labor market dislocation around the bend, we need to keep the population requiring workforce assistance from increasing by an order of magnitude. How will talent marketplaces reach college graduates like Evan – to inform him where he should (or should not) be laser-focused – before it’s too late?
Again, the action isn’t at the Department of Education, wherever it might be located. Recognizing that education and workforce navigation is first and foremost a data problem, states have moved quickly to build unified systems that connect education, workforce, and earnings outcomes. California has connected K-12, higher education, financial aid, workforce, and social services data in its Cradle-to-Career data system. Virginia has built the Virginia Longitudinal Data System linking K–12, postsecondary, and wage records. Michigan has integrated education and labor market data through the Michigan Longitudinal Data System. And Arizona has developed its Education Progress Meter to track attainment and workforce alignment, tying educational pathways directly to labor market demand. Other states making progress on data integration include Texas, Indiana, Kentucky, Washington, Florida, Colorado, Ohio, Maryland, and Minnesota. The Education Commission of the States has identified 32 states with active longitudinal systems connecting data across at least two sectors.
This may be the most consequential development in workforce development. Because unified education and workforce data make it much easier for job seekers and career launchers to say yes to talent marketplaces. By opting in, it will be possible to populate their education and work data, match to jobs, and identify new education and training opportunities to advance within and expand their zones of proximal development. Through unified state-level data systems, most Americans (i.e., the 75% of us who’ve never moved to another state) can benefit from a GPS for education and employment decisions. And in so doing, talent marketplaces will evolve from serving workforce agencies to dynamic career navigation systems for everyone, including fraternity presidents with a proclivity for lasers.
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My first book College Disrupted discussed the prospect of talent marketplaces. Although the term I chose was workforce-wonky – competency management platforms – and the technology took a decade to catch up, the idea was right: “Allow job seekers to… upload their resume and transcript… point to a goal job or career… measure the competency gap between where they are and where they want to go… recommend educational options for filling that gap based on available time-to-job… then… map the most efficient path from here to there.” Talent marketplaces were bound to happen because “while digital marketplaces have revolutionized sectors such as consumer goods, real estate and personal relationships… there has not yet been a marketplace for human capital.”
With the emergence of talent marketplaces, it no longer makes sense to make important education and career decisions without technology. As I wrote a decade ago, “students won’t have to be completely in charge of their own education. They’ll be following a path. Granted, that path will be dynamically created by machines rather than handcrafted on an Ivy-covered quad. But it will be different and better than the current DIY path.”
In turbulent times, this is the navigation assistance every young American desperately needs. Because we haven’t trained enough people like Evan to set up lasers to point the way.