Industries Take The Lead on Talent

A growing chorus of voices is calling for industry-led workforce systems

In November, sixty Vermont healthcare employers gathered in a room to design education pathways. A few weeks earlier, the head of the workforce arm of America’s largest manufacturing industry association told senators that the only way to fix America’s apprenticeship system was to put employers in charge. And a leader in apprenticeship and career-connected learning released an impressive essay calling for sector-led workforce systems. At various levels, employer associations are doing the work of talent development themselves and are calling for greater responsibility and leadership in our public education and training systems.

Let’s dive into three November developments that reveal this convergence in action.

Manufacturing Takes the Mic

“Through our experience, we know that creating global-best manufacturing talent is done most successfully through an employer-led apprenticeship model.” -Gardner Carrick

Gardner Carrick runs The Manufacturing Institute (MI), the workforce arm of the National Association of Manufacturers. When he testified before the Senate in November 2025, I was interested in what he would have to say, because MI is a pretty close proxy to the Swiss employer associations that start and run apprenticeship programs.

Indeed, his written testimony is a compelling case for apprenticeship as the best model to prepare the future manufacturing workforce. But he’s very clear about the style of apprenticeship that’s needed. He wants an employer-led, multi-employer model, facilitated by an employer-facing intermediary. Yes, I did write employer three times in that sentence on purpose.

This is exactly the style of apprenticeship that MI runs, called Federation for Advanced Manufacturing Education (FAME). FAME is employer-led because the skills taught are those deemed necessary for success by manufacturing employers. It’s a multiemployer apprenticeship model where companies with shared skill needs form a local FAME chapter and partner with a local community or technical college to deliver the related instruction. And it’s facilitated by an employer-facing intermediary. MI took over the FAME network from Toyota in 2019 and has scaled it to 500 companies across 16 states, employing over 1100 apprentices.

However, Carrick testifies that of these programs, only 15% are part of the official registered apprenticeship system, and that number is dropping. The federal system is too rigid, regulatorily burdensome, and offers too few benefits for most FAME programs to bother participating.

This is a shame. In reading Carrick’s testimony, I’m struck by the similarities between what MI and Swiss employer associations do to support apprenticeship, but the incredibly different policy environments they operate in.

In Switzerland, the employer-led apprenticeship programs are the official apprenticeship programs! An employer association identifies a shared need for talent amongst its member employers, and this kicks off the process for setting up a ‘dual vocational education and training program’ like the type the MI runs. Like in MI’s program, students will spend part of their week on the job, and part in school. But MI chapters have to go out and find willing education partners to deliver related technical instruction. This can be a big challenge for manufacturing programs, where equipment costs can exceed $1 million. But in Switzerland, this isn’t a problem. State-led and government-funded vocational schools are responsible for delivering the classroom-based training portion of apprenticeships.

While FAME’s outcomes are impressive in the American context, 1100 apprentices is a drop in the bucket compared to the 400,000 plus current manufacturing job openings. For apprenticeship to reach those kinds of numbers, we need public policy to support scale. Carrick called for federal policy to fund employer-facing intermediaries, modernize apprenticeship rules, and treat industry consortia as legitimate governing partners.

I call for a similar employer-led governance structure for Career and Technical Education in my post April 17, 2033.

April 17, 2033

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Vermont Healthcare Employers Design Their Own Pipeline

Next is an example from a group of healthcare employers who are self-organizing to solve their talent problems. This one is interesting because it’s the grassroots, bottom-up discovery that apprenticeship is an effective model. Over the past eight years, a network of healthcare employers has quietly built a homegrown solution to their talent shortages using Talent Pipeline Management, or TPM.

Developed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation, TPM gives employers a structured way to act collectively around shared talent challenges. Instead of competing for scarce workers, companies share data about their talent needs, align on job definitions, and coordinate training investments. The model treats workforce development as a joint logistics problem, not a charity project. In Vermont, the Vermont Business Roundtable adopted this approach back in 2017, hiring Mary Anne Sheahan to lead a new initiative called Vermont Talent Pipeline Management (VTPM). Her task was to help employers stop talking about labor shortages and start building systems to solve them.

The early years focused on three industries: construction, advanced manufacturing, and healthcare. Each sector formed what TPM calls an employer collaborative—a group of businesses that meet regularly to identify the most critical roles they struggle to fill and map the skills those jobs require. In healthcare, that meant hospitals, long-term care centers, and home health agencies agreeing on which jobs were hardest to hire (nursing assistants, licensed practical nurses, and registered nurses) and then working backward to design training pipelines that actually led to employment.

By 2021, those efforts began to bear fruit. VTPM released a statewide nursing demand report projecting thousands of vacancies over the next five years. The data made it impossible to ignore the need for systemic solutions. Employers responded by creating “earn-while-you-learn” apprenticeships, where hospital employees—say, a nursing assistant or technician—could keep earning a paycheck while training to become a nurse. Employers paid tuition and guaranteed job placement.

By 2023, more than 40 healthcare employers were participating in Vermont’s Healthcare Collaborative, working together to expand the nursing apprenticeship model. The Chamber Foundation spotlighted the project nationally, describing how Vermont hospitals were investing directly in upskilling their existing workforce through apprenticeships.

That spirit culminated in November 2025, when more than sixty healthcare leaders met at Rutland Regional Medical Center to co-design new education pathways for Vermonters to enter high-demand healthcare roles. Local media reported on the event, telling the story of employers coming together to create an employer-led healthcare training system and apprenticeship-style pathways. But, like with FAME, now that these groups of employers have designed their training programs, they need to go out and identify education partners to help them actually implement them.

The Case for Investing in Sector-Led Workforce Systems

The third piece I read in November is a tour de force guide to sector-led workforce systems and why they are the missing link to scaling excellent programs. The guide is written by Ashley Carter, based on her direct experience supporting sector intermediaries through Career Connect Washington (CCW). CCW is a public-private partnership built to expand career-connected learning in Washington state.

A central thesis of the guide is that sector intermediaries are the linchpin of effective sector-led workforce systems. These organizations are trusted, employer-connected organization that translate between industry and education.

Vermont’s TPM collaboratives and MI’s FAME chapters both behave like sector intermediaries. They organize groups of employers around shared skill needs, convene educators, and design pipelines to meet hiring demand. But they do it informally—bootstrapping their own data collection, curriculum alignment, and coordination.

Washington tried to make that informal coordination connected to the state’s formal Career and Technical Education (CTE) and workforce systems. Under Career Connect Washington, the state formally designated ten sector intermediaries—each responsible for growing career-connected learning in its industry. They were given funding, a shared framework, and access to a statewide network of agency and regional partners. For once, employer voice wasn’t an afterthought. It was the organizing principle.

Carter describes how these intermediaries worked in practice: they acted as translators, brokers, and connectors. They gathered employers’ real-world pain points (“we can’t find enough qualified lab techs,” “students don’t know what jobs exist in banking”), translated them into workforce strategies, and helped education partners act on them. In her words, intermediaries gave businesses a “single front door” into the workforce system—one trusted point of contact that simplified engagement and made it easier to say yes.

One of my favorite examples is the Washington Bankers Association (WBA). The association had deep credibility—over a century old, representing banks statewide—and used that trust to lead the state’s financial-services workforce strategy. Its members were worried that too few young people knew banking could be a good career and that entry-level candidates often lacked soft skills. WBA didn’t try to fix that with another pilot program. It scaled what already worked.

They started with BankWork$, a nonprofit training program that prepares young adults for entry-level banking roles. With CCW’s funding and coordination, WBA persuaded banks across the state to recognize BankWork$ graduates as competitive candidates, removing unnecessary credential barriers. Then, they went further: WBA helped translate the BankWork$ curriculum into a high-school-ready CTE course, embedding financial services directly into Washington’s education system. What began as a niche workforce program became a statewide pipeline because an intermediary with credibility and resources was there to connect the dots.

That’s the power of the middle layer. Without WBA as a funded intermediary, BankWork$ would have stayed a standalone nonprofit, and students might never have seen banking as a viable career. Without CCW’s infrastructure—funding, technical assistance, and policy alignment—WBA would have lacked the platform to scale. But within a functioning system, great programs can scale.

Still, Carter is honest about the limits. The structure worked—until an $8 billion budget shortfall hit in 2025. Funding was cut, and momentum slowed. A cautionary tale for when public policy doesn’t prioritize building that necessary connective tissue: the intermediaries and shared employer governance that let what already works scale.

Inevitability or fragility?

Reading about all these individuals and groups calling for employer leadership, I sometimes feel like success is inevitable. It just makes so much sense that industry needs to collaborate around talent and have a greater say in curriculum, assessments, and apprenticeship training. More and more people are equipped with both the desire and skills to support employer collaboration around talent.

But other days the work feels fragile. It feels like a ship is on the verge of being completed, and if we can just finish it and get it into the water, it will help propel us into the future. But if we fail, we’ll have lost something beautiful that was within our reach. However, the growing chorus of voices converging on the same solution independently gives me hope. Different industries and states are discovering the same truth: when employers collaborate to lead talent development, everyone wins.