No Dead Ends

Why No Dead Ends

Our country’s education and workforce systems have not kept pace with the changing needs of learners and workers or the evolving conditions of the labor market.

It’s time to put an end to dead ends at school, at work, and in life.

The Problem

This country’s approach to learning and work was built for a bygone era. It still assumes that most people make a linear journey through life: graduate from high school and, perhaps, college, get a job, raise a family, and retire.

Nowadays, many people change career paths multiple times throughout their lives. Their professional interests may shift. Job sites shutter. New career opportunities emerge. New technologies upend old ways of working, making some skills and job tasks obsolete. Family responsibilities require a rebalancing of priorities and result in career detours.

Yet, as they try to navigate these changing circumstances, people are encountering education and workforce systems that are too rigid, fragmented, and cumbersome to help them move on to new stages of their lives, learn new skills, and discover new careers. Antiquated systems and policies lay all the burdens, risks, and opportunity costs on workers and learners themselves—and often leave them facing dead ends instead of pursuing new opportunities for economic advancement.

We can put an end to these dead ends at school, at work, and in life.

People deserve access to high-quality choice-filled career pathways, skills-based learning experiences, and economic mobility supports.  

Our Vision

Imagine learning and work environments that place:

This vision requires that we re-engineer the nation’s education and workforce systems to promote economic advancement, with the goal of making all high-quality options for learning and work accessible, discoverable, and achievable in the following ways:

This future is within our reach if we, as a nation, pursue bold policy and systems change.

Our Policy Priorities