Skills and opportunity pathways: Building an inclusive workforce for the future

Artificial intelligence and emerging technologies have enabled automation to scale and pose legitimate workforce threats. However, these innovations are creating new jobs and recreating old ones that together shape the building blocks of a future workforce. This dynamic opportunity engine is driven in large part by a fast expanding innovation ecosystem that combines a bevy of thriving, scaling, and nascent startups and their emerging workforce needs.

As the geography of innovation continues to evolve, the signals emerging from innovation clusters around the country provide crucial opportunity signals that policymakers should harness rather than ignore. Intriguing horizon workforce opportunities, for example, are embedded within this dynamic tapestry of startups and job creation. However, deliberate policies are required to ensure that underrepresented groups are fully included.

The U.S. must consider what innovation and new jobs mean for marginalized groups as innovation changes employers’ demands for workforce talent and shapes the geography where new opportunities are most likely to emerge.

This report presents a framework that engages education policymakers and workforce planners in innovative ways. It assesses the scale and breadth of emerging trends across local job markets and intersects these data with regional innovation hubs to enhance the capacity of policymakers to design data-driven policies tailored to the strengths of individual ecosystems.