Three encouraging workforce things I learned in 2025.
Things to build on in 2026. Hopefully.
2025 has been a rough year for… pretty much everything around jobs and jobs policy.
There also are plenty of reasons to be pessimistic about 2026. politics either are disinvested in actual results or living on another planet, the money isn’t really where it should be given the massive numbers of workers at risk for unemployment due to a questionable premise, and there could be much less of the federal money soon.
Happy as I am to make you good and depressed, I saw and heard some things that gave me hope as I traveled the country this year and talked frankly with all sorts of stakeholders about what could be better.
The ideas below are more broadstrokes than not to put what I saw in a neat and digestible package (and spare folks unnecessary regulatory angst in a time where all sorts of entities are overcorrecting out of fear of Trump Administration investigations). I’m not going to glaze over any problems or limitations, but I think it’s worth highlighting some signs of progress on workforce so we can build upon them in 2026.
There are more qualified workers out there than you might think for jobs that are reportedly hard to fill.
A little background: remember back in the spring when the head of the manufacturers’ workforce arm said it can take four years to prepare a worker to service machines in a plant? I have spent much of the year digging into that premise because of how manufacturing is driving parts of the federal funding conversation.
Something I learned is the number of skills in common between jobs repairing machines in plants and jobs in automotive maintenance. One analysis by my Robot Research Assistant found 70 percent overlap in a breakdown of generic skills associated with the occupations. In a bit of serendipity, I recently talked with an auto maintenance trainer who had been a little puzzled about his students getting hired not into car dealerships but manufacturing plants. It made more sense to him when he learned about the overlap.
Separately, one of my favorite conversations this year was with Jim Higdon of Cornbread Hemp in Kentucky for my newsletter on the jobs impacts of the funky legal status of cannabis.1 He told me about how Cornbread had zoomed in on former restaurant workers for their production of their gummies. Higdon said that restaurant workers can be exceptionally good at communicating with their eyes in high-pressure environments. Both skills are key when making products in cleanrooms where workers must wear masks.
More employers are being more proactive about finding and keeping talent than you might think.
There are two frequent strawmen I encounter when talking about employers in the abstract. One is that employers can’t find an adequate supply of damns to give about talent development or workers—and asking them to be proactive and treat workers fairly is a losing cause. The other is that employers just can’t find talent and they just can’t figure it out. It evokes the image of a hiring manager standing in the rain while clinging to a well-loved position description, staring down an empty street with a confused look in their eyes, and shivering with hope that one day a qualified candidate will find them.
Well, good news: neither of those strawmen are every employer. Yes, you can read big corporate CEOs talking about how AI is going to take your job, steal your car, and make you drive a rusty Ford Tempo previously owned by someone whose hobbies were chain smoking and fender benders. And yet, I have spoken to hiring managers this year who are thinking ahead so they don’t lose good talent due to technological and economic shifts. That includes preserving salaries and pay as people get retrained and helping them find new jobs as transitions go into effect.
Is it widespread? Not as much as I wish it was. Broadly, I think smaller and midsize employers are doing the best work here because they can’t afford to be caught offguard by the talent challenges on the horizon. The important part is there are employers trying, and I wouldn’t assume that every employer is unwilling to have a conversation about how they can find talent more creatively and treat workers better.
There are programs succeeding because they aren’t trying to be The Big Solve.
Because public money for workforce is so scarce, there tends to be a lot of pressure on the things that get funded to serve everything and everyone in all the ways.
The problem with that?
Meaning that how someone gets hired—or even goes into a field—is the result of a million hyperspecific decisions and needs-in-the-moment of employers and workers. One-solution thinking tends not to age well—or work at all—in those conditions.
Accordingly, I think the programs best positioned to travel the uncertain road ahead aren’t trying to be The Big Solve. They typically involve a proactive training provider working with an open-minded employer to curate training around open positions and offer workers as clear a pathway as possible to getting hired into a good job. It doesn’t work all the time because it isn’t meant to work all time. Employers change priorities, or they open new lines of business, and the hiring goes that direction. But the relationships are strong enough for both partners to make the changes needed to keep hiring pipelines open.
It’s hard work, for sure. But amid this much uncertainty, I wouldn’t focus on The Big Solve so much as the metric that matters: getting people who need jobs hired into jobs that employers need filling—and helping both workers and employers get ahead.
Card subject to change.
In an utterly stuffed version of THE MONEY on Friday, I didn’t have space to link Anne Kim’s piece at The Washington Monthly capturing the overwhelming amounts of everything and nothing happening in the Trump Administration’s approach to apprenticeship. I really enjoyed talking to her for this story.
As a reminder, this week’s edition of THE MONEY will show up in your inboxes on Thursday. I’ll have details on this week’s congressional hearings on workforce and answer a reader question about one of the more confusing pots of workforce training dollars in the United States.
Next week, an interview I have been looking forward to about the future of skills-first hiring.
Which has gotten even funkier to a degree that it could lead to some significant job loss in the near future.