Artificial intelligence is transforming the economy at a remarkable speed. Advanced manufacturing is returning to the United States. Biotechnology, quantum computing, and other emerging technologies are creating the industries that will shape the next generation of economic growth. Recent tax reforms encouraging capital investment, restoring research and development expensing, and strengthening advanced manufacturing will help accelerate that transformation.
Those policies matter, but capital investment alone will not determine America’s success. Every investment in technology should be matched by an equally ambitious investment in the people who will deploy it.
Recommended Stories
America has a strategy for building tomorrow’s industries. Now it needs an equally ambitious strategy for building tomorrow’s workforce. The challenge before us is not creating opportunity. It is preparing enough Americans to seize it.
For many Americans, these changes create understandable anxiety. They worry that technology will replace their jobs, make their skills obsolete, or leave them behind. History tells a different story. Every major technological revolution changed the nature of work. Some occupations disappeared. Many more evolved. Entirely new industries emerged while productivity, living standards, and opportunity continued to rise. The World Economic Forum projects that technological change will reshape millions of jobs while creating significant demand for new skills and new career opportunities. The greatest risk is not innovation itself. It is failing to prepare enough Americans to seize the opportunities innovation creates.
America’s strongest periods of economic growth shared one defining characteristic: we invested in new industries and in the people who transformed those opportunities into productivity, innovation, and prosperity. Every generation prepares the next generation to seize the opportunities created by economic change. Today, those investments are becoming disconnected.
For too long, we have treated education, workforce development, innovation, industrial policy, and economic development as separate conversations. Universities focus on degrees. Employers focus on hiring. Workforce agencies focus on training. Economic developers focus on investment. Each serves an important purpose, but they rarely operate as one coordinated strategy. America does not have a talent problem. It has an alignment problem. Education, workforce development, and industry are pursuing the same objective, but too often, they pursue it separately rather than together.
The good news is that successful models already exist. We do not have to invent a new approach. In Montgomery, Alabama, Sara Beck and her team at MECO strengthened their workforce pipeline through partnerships with trade schools and educational institutions. In Taylors, South Carolina, David and Glen Calder of Mauldin Paving Products partnered with their local career center, helped shape curriculum, and created work experiences that frequently led to full-time employment. Rather than waiting for the labor market to solve their workforce challenges, they built the talent pipeline themselves. Those examples demonstrate what is possible when education and industry work together. They should become the national model.
Building tomorrow’s workforce will not happen by accident. It requires a coordinated strategy built around five priorities: building regional talent pipelines, making work-based learning the national standard, preparing the workforce to deploy artificial intelligence, embracing lifelong learning, and measuring educational success by workforce outcomes rather than graduation rates alone. Together, these priorities create stronger connections between education, opportunity, and long-term economic growth. That’s how opportunity becomes productivity, productivity becomes economic growth, and economic growth becomes lasting prosperity.
UNION WORKERS ARE FUNDING LAVISH LIFESTYLES FOR UNQUALIFIED BIG LABOR BOSSES
Building tomorrow’s workforce is about much more than preparing people for jobs. It is about expanding America’s productive capacity. Today, the nation’s labor force participation rate is approximately 61.5%. Even modest improvements in workforce participation, skills development, and productivity would expand America’s economic capacity while helping businesses fill critical workforce needs. Every American who successfully connects to a productive career strengthens the productive capacity of the country. Workforce development is not simply an education strategy. It is an economic growth strategy.
America’s greatest competitive advantage has never been technology alone. It has always been our ability to prepare each generation to build upon the achievements of the last. Lasting prosperity depends not only on the industries we create, but on preparing people to seize the opportunities those industries make possible. America’s next era of economic growth will be built by the decisions we make today and the people we prepare to seize the opportunities of tomorrow.
Dan Varroney is an economic strategist, founder and CEO of Potomac Core, and author of Rethinking Economic Growth.