Эксперт: для рынка труда XXI века необходима новая инфраструктура поддержки карьерных переходов

In my July 20, 2026, column, The Real Problem With Long-Term Unemployment Isn't the Lack of Jobs, I argued that long-term unemployment is fundamentally a transition problem. Better transition support can help people reconnect to work. That support has a name. I call it transition infrastructure—the policies, partnerships, and institutions that help people move successfully between education and work, reenter employment after job loss, and move between jobs. Transition infrastructure isn’t simply a solution for long-term unemployment. It will be a defining feature of a 21st-century labor market where workers will make repeated transitions over the course of their working lives. Our Institutions are Built for a Different Economy Our institutions and systems for preparing people for work were built for a different economy. 20th-century education, workforce, and employer institutions were designed to prepare people to get jobs, not to support repeated transitions throughout a 40-year career. The prevailing assumption was that once employed, workers would remain in their roles with relatively few major transitions. In practice, how long one stayed varied by factors such as race, gender, class, occupation, industry, and union status. But across these differences, the systems themselves were not designed with the expectation that workers would repeatedly transition between jobs, occupations, and periods of learning throughout their careers. Changes in our economy, including corporate restructuring, outsourcing, and the decline of pensions, made employers less able and less willing to offer younger generations the long-term, single-organization careers that were once the norm. Changing jobs increasingly became the way to increase pay and secure promotions. The Economy Changed. The Infrastructure Didn’t The 20th-century employment model was built around a greater expectation of a stable, long-term relationship between employers and workers. That model evolved into one in which companies continuously adapt their capability requirements to keep pace with AI, automation, and rapid technological change. Today, employers expect that the skills required for jobs will change substantially. The World Economic Forum estimates that 39% of workers’ existing skill sets will be transformed or rendered obsolete by 2030. At the same time, workers need to be prepared to make repeated transitions over longer careers. These transitions may occur within an existing job, within an organization, and across organizations. Each of these developments increases the need for transition infrastructure. Our education-to-work system still concentrates learning at the front end of working life, even as workers increasingly need to engage in lifelong learning to develop new capabilities throughout their careers. Yet lifelong learning alone doesn’t produce mobility. Workers need access to infrastructure that connects their learning and demonstrated capabilities to live employment opportunities. What 21st-Century Transition Infrastructure Looks Like Twenty-first-century transition infrastructure should bridge learning and work, enabling people to earn income, gain experience, demonstrate new capabilities, and transition efficiently to their next opportunity. It should acknowledge that transitions will increasingly be a recurring feature of working life. Our education-to-career system often treats learning, qualification, and employment as separate stages rather than overlapping activities. In this new labor market, where employer demand for skills is constantly changing, the rigid separation of these stages is out of step with the way work is changing. Increasingly, workers will need the opportunities to develop the skills and capabilities for their next role while they are in their current role. They may not meet all the requirements of their new role on day one. Like apprentices, they should be supported in developing the necessary skills and capabilities on the job. Workers shouldn’t have to be the architects of their own transitions. As they are learning new skills and capabilities to help them transition to their next role, they should also have access to income, career navigation and counseling supports, internal talent marketplaces, and real work opportunities. It’s time to build the infrastructure that helps people repeatedly translate their skills and capabilities into economic opportunity throughout their careers. We already know how to build parts of it. Its principles are reflected in paid internships, apprenticeships, and internal talent marketplaces. We just haven’t applied these models’ underlying principles broadly enough to bridge workers' transitions throughout their careers.