Each year, as the Chamber Foundation hosts the Talent Forward national workforce conference, we focus on talent—educating and training, talent tech and data, recruiting, hiring, and upskilling. With no shortage of talent challenges, the opportunities for informative discussion are endless. While a day devoted to dissecting talent-related topics could focus solely on the problems, Talent Forward is all about the solutions.

As the labor market tightens and the pace of technological change continues to accelerate, it’s becoming an increasingly common theme that the traditional “one-and-done” model of education is over. As a result, employers, policymakers, and analysts alike are increasingly calling for new approaches to lifelong learning that will help upskill and re-skill individuals to compete and succeed in a fast-changing economy. In this shifting landscape education and workforce organizations are joining forces to experiment with new models with the potential to create pathways to opportunity and economic mobility. 

In the United States, 44 million adults lack basic educational and workforce readiness skills, and 28 million do not have the basic digital skills needed for our ever-growing. digitally-enhanced workforce. For these people, getting on track for a job that comes with a livable wage starts with adult education.