Reporting from San Diego, I’m happy to be home after a few weeks on the road. 🌇
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Why it matters:
The most consistent thing I heard from the stage at the JFF Horizons conference in DC last week reflected the uncertainty of the moment in history we’re all navigating. Across keynotes, panels, and policy sessions, speaker after speaker said some version of the same thing: we don't know what's coming, and most directly, “None of us know the experiences or industries of the future.”
For leaders who have been waiting for the forecast that finally makes the plan obvious, it isn’t arriving. And our task is to both act and design experiences that prepare learners for that reality; and the answer might be closer to home than you think.
Go deeper:
A few themes stood out from keynotes, panels, and hallway conversations with folks I spent time with last week.
Predictions aren't helpful. Make the next decision.
Aneesh Raman, Chief Economic Opportunity Officer at Linkedin put to words something I’ve been feeling in my bones the last year or so: predictions aren't helpful in this moment. We have to make the next decision.
That could sound like a shrug, or like permission to stop thinking ahead. It's neither. The people saying it were describing something with more discipline in it than most strategic plans have: hold an outcome you care about, move toward it, and check what you're learning against the real needs of real people. Then decide again (with discipline in the learning and testing that guides you).
The alternative is the one most of us were trained in. Structure out every part of a plan, get it approved, and execute. That works when the environment is stable enough to predict. Nobody in that building believed we're in one.
The goal isn't to plan longer. It's to learn sooner. What was different at Horizons was hearing it from economists, employers, foundations, educators, and policy leaders rather than from designers.
Entrepreneurial mindset is what we need most, and we're mostly teaching it wrong
Aneesh Raman of LinkedIn opened with the five C's from his book with Ryan Roslansky, Open to Work: curiosity, courage, creativity, compassion, and communication. Not one of those is a skill for executing a plan. They're what you need when the path is unclear. (I’d even go so far as to say that they’re skills that design uniquely can help cultivate).
Here's where I'd push, though. The problem isn't that institutions have missed this. Almost every campus I work with has entrepreneurial mindset as an aspiration somewhere: a course, a certificate, an innovation center, a module in a first-year seminar. The intent is everywhere.
The gap is in how it gets integrated. When entrepreneurial mindset lives inside a course with a rubric, a due date, and a defined deliverable, students practice completing an assignment about initiative. They rarely get the thing that actually develops it, which is an ambiguous situation, a real stake, and a decision that belongs to them.
You can't build navigation skills on a route that's already mapped, and as one panelist said referring to the support for career navigation (and true here as well), “ Navigation is a lifelong skill, not a moment in time.”
AI's impact lands at the task level, and we're deciding badly about it right now
Layoffs are real and I'm not going to wave at them. But the more useful conversation about where AI actually changes work happens below the job title. Jobs are bundles of tasks, and the tasks are moving at different speeds.
The panels I sat in kept sorting them: what gets automated, what gets augmented, what stays human. Physical work. Trust. Judgment. And a finding worth taking seriously, especially for anyone serving students who won't finish a four-year degree: exposure isn't distributed evenly. Roles that require less formal credentialing carried higher replacement risk. One speaker called it a double burden given the lack of access to upskilling.
My own read, which I didn't hear said this way on stage: risk concentrates where the completion path is legible. The more clearly a task can be described, and the more data we hand over about how it gets done, the more available that task becomes.
Which is why the question I'd want every leader carrying out of this deserves more room than it's getting:
What do I need a human to do here, and what can AI do?
Right now that question mostly isn't being asked, or it’s being addressed with a different emphasis and intent. AI is being pushed into every place it can go, at speed, and humanity is the thing being traded. Executives are making these calls this quarter, and many of them are making them poorly, because the decision is being framed as a productivity and profit question when it's really a reflection of values.
Institutions have a real advantage here if they want it. You can afford to ask the question deliberately. The organizations that do will end up with workflows that reflect what they care about. The ones that don't will end up with whatever the vendor's default configuration produced.
More credentials aren't solving the signal problem
We’re living the result of a proliferation of credentials across the last 10 years. New ones, stackable ones, verified ones, industry-aligned ones. But what I think we keep missing is that a credential's usefulness isn't determined by the institution that issues it. It's judged by whoever receives and evaluates it. And employers have largely stopped being able to make sense of the landscape.
When there are ~1.9 million credentials in circulation, and 45% of applicants with skilled credentials, panelists described the market as “noisy, and loud.” A hiring manager doesn't experience more information, they experience dissonance. So they've gone looking for other evidence. Isaac Agbeshie-Noye at SHRM Foundation put simply:
“Employers care less about where someone got the skill than whether they can replicate it for them.”
And across the hall, Scott Pulsipher at WGU shared why this should matter to us in the ways that it supports students as well
“Until you have a chance to apply what you’re learning academically into a job, you don’t know if you like it.”
And it may be a good part of why work-integrated learning, project-based courses, and employer-partnered experiences keep gaining ground while credential inflation keeps accelerating. Employers want to watch the skill get used.
Which raises a question institutions are unusually well positioned to answer and largely aren't. Who is best able to say how well someone uses a skill? The people who watched them use it. A supervisor. A project partner. A faculty member who saw the work develop. That's an endorsement, and endorsements live in networks.
We keep manufacturing signals and doing almost nothing to organize the networks that really validate them as part of the process. Or we rely on our own validation of them within a course without explanation or collaboration with employers as part of closing real hiring gaps. I wrote in October that the biggest missed opportunity in higher education isn't content, it's connection…
Which is a regional problem, and we should build like one
Especially on a national stage we talk about talent like it's a national market and fill lots of airspace with large employers who are leading multi-institutional efforts and aiming (understandably) at a future consumer base. But for most institutions hiring isn’t a national problem, it’s a regional one.
From another project I’ve surfaced insight that I’ve intuitively observed but now have a reference for: Research from the Upjohn Institute found that about half of recent graduates live and work in the metro area nearest the institution they attended, and about two-thirds stay in state. That varies a lot by institution type, and selective universities send graduates much further. But for the regional publics, the community colleges, and the small privates doing most of the educating in this country, the labor market that matters is close enough to drive to.
The employers in that market are mostly small. Small businesses employ 45.9% of private-sector workers and account for 43.5% of GDP. Most of them have no internship program, no recruiting calendar, and nobody whose job is to call a career center.
Put those two things next to each other and you get a conclusion neither study set out to test, so I'll own it as mine. If half of graduates work near where they studied, and half of private-sector employment sits with small businesses, then helping regional employers develop student talent isn't community engagement. It's literally how we form a graduate outcomes strategy.
This is where I get uneasy about how much energy goes toward the recognizable names. Large employers offer real things: established programs, clear roles, efficient recruiting.
They aren't bad partners. The problem is that a finite set of national programs can't reach everyone, while the employer down the road with actual work to be done stays invisible because they don't have the infrastructure to look like an opportunity. And I’ve been encouraged to see more initiatives putting qualifiers in their funding expectations for working locally as well as courting large, well established partners and recruiting operations. Eric Beane launched RAISE US just in time for JFF and I’m watching them closely.
And when the future is unclear, the path is unknown, and insight on hiring decisions is relational and based on real demonstrations, we need to work together to create the moments that matter in cultivating talent and helping them demonstrate it in ways that meet individual, organizational, and regional needs.
This insight makes me even more excited about work that’s crossing my desk lately and starting up soon.
The question I'd ask a president or provost: when an employer asks what your graduate can actually do, whose definition answers?
Where the Field is Growing 🌱
One role each week. Not as a job board, but as a way to notice where learning, work, design, and higher education are moving.
This week: Director, Skills Intelligence & Learning Experiences at Degreed.
I spent two days listening to people say that credentials aren't carrying the signal anymore. Then I found a posting where someone is being paid $185,000 to $197,000 to solve that problem from outside higher education.
Read what the role actually owns:
The data model behind what a skill is: how skills get defined, organized, and kept accurate as the system grows
The rating scale that measures proficiency, including the criteria that separate one level from the next
Compatibility with external frameworks like O*NET and ESCO, and with enterprise HR systems
The full learner journey: how someone finds a skill gap, engages with content, and demonstrates they have closed it
The process by which every AI interaction across the product improves the underlying skill data over time
And this line, which I'd underline twice: they want someone who understands the difference between content a learner clicks through and a program that changes what someone can do.
That is the argument of several takeaways from Horizon written as a hiring requirement.
Two things worth pointing out here.
First, look at what the taxonomy is built on. O*NET and ESCO are task-level frameworks. They break work down into what people actually do. The infrastructure being built to make AI useful in the labor market is being built at the task level, which is exactly where I said the impact lands. This role is the machine that makes human capability legible enough for a model to act on, and someone is being hired to draw that map.
Second, notice who is drawing it. Institutions issue credentials. An enterprise learning platform is defining what those credentials should have meant, for an audience of employers, on a scale it designs. Degreed's customer is the employer, not the campus.
I don't think there's anything sinister in that. Somebody has to do this work and higher education largely hasn't. But it's worth naming. The definition of what your graduates can do is being standardized right now, in a product roadmap, by people who are very good at this and who are not talking to you.
Role: Director, Skills Intelligence & Learning Experiences Organization: Degreed Location: US, Remote Salary Range: $185,000 – $197,000 Learn more
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In learning,
Brian LeDuc is the founder of Learning, Designed, where he serves as a design strategist partnering with learning organizations to improve the learner experience and drive change co-designed with students, educators, communities, and employers.
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