So you want a vocational education system?

The one thing states need to get right as they embrace career education

It’s become quite clear, to me at least, that vocational education is becoming the priority. For decades, American education has focused on preparing every student for college. That consensus has collapsed, and a new one is coalescing: prepare every student for a career.

Are you not convinced? Well, you probably spend less time than me following legislation on high school graduation requirements. Let me tell you about a new trend. Previously, states were moving to match up high school graduation requirements with college entrance requirements. Now, states are establishing multiple diploma tracks. There’s still the high school diploma aligned to college entrance, but there are also now diplomas for students preparing for enlistment in the military or employment after high school.

Think-tanks are also in on the game. The National Skills Coalition will release a workforce policy agenda in 2027, aimed at establishing our workforce system as a ‘first-choice’ investment rather than an afterthought meant to serve people who our academic education system has failed. The Bipartisan Policy Center’s Commission on the American Workforce has been hard at work creating a ‘coherent, comprehensive, national strategy.’ And the Commission on Purposeful Pathways just released its report that calls for all students to be on pathways that include career-connected learning.

Now, I love the energy. I want these efforts to succeed. But there’s a teeny, tiny, problem. We don’t know what we are preparing kids for.

whoops…

Under an academic model of education, we know the end goal - have kids graduate high school and earn a bachelors. These may be hard to do, but they are clear end goals, defined by policymakers and colleges. But over time, policymakers and colleges have watered down those requirements, making both of those markers less valuable to students. And likely leading to the enthusiasm we’re seeing today for more vocational education.

But, there’s a very important first step to creating a vocational education system that I see many people missing.

Industry-defined skilled occupations

That’s it. That’s the secret. Industry-defined skilled occupations are the necessary first step. Any good vocational education system has to reliably lead students to the skilled occupations that actually exist in the economy today and will exist in the future. But that’s easier said than done, especially in America. Because we don’t have any mechanism (yet!) for American employers to collectively define their shared, skilled occupations at a state level.

This is the first and most important thing that states need to do. But to do this, we have to let a new player into our education systems - employers.

When it comes to defining skilled jobs, industry must have a leadership role in defining them. Why? Because they know what they need! And, more importantly, in the age of AI, they know when what they need changes.

Employers also need to agree on what their shared occupations are. When Nike says project manager, they should mean roughly the same thing as Reebok. Occupations are social constructs that need industry consensus to be useful.

Defining skilled jobs in this way has a lot of follow-on benefits. One of the biggest ones is increased legibility for young people on how to get one of those skilled jobs. I’d wager that right now most skilled jobs in the U.S. don’t have a clear path to get them. You have the trades and licensed professions, which are fairly clear. There might not be enough openings in the electrician apprenticeship or the RN program, but it’s a clear path for those who get on it.

But then you have a huge jumble of skilled jobs with no clear definition or route to entry. Roles like project manager, enterprise sales lead, and HR business partner employ millions of people and require genuine skill, but the path to getting there is opaque to outsiders. They usually require bachelor’s degrees, but there are no majors that line up neatly to them. Getting one of these jobs typically requires a mix of initiative, networking, and luck. Not to mention, years of schooling where you aren’t actually learning the skills you need for these roles.

So for states that are taking seriously the goal of preparing young people for careers, they need to take seriously this necessary step of getting industry to define their skilled careers.

How states might do this

So how would we do that? How can states build the infrastructure for Industry-Defined Skilled Occupations?

This may seem super hard to do in the American system. How would it even work? Well, there’s actually an example that almost gets this right. Let me introduce you to Georgia’s High Demand Career List.

The High Demand Career List, established under Governor Kemp by HB 982, is Georgia’s first unified occupation priority list. The list reflects current and projected high-demand jobs that offer livable wages and require a postsecondary or industry-recognized credential and/or significant on-the job training.

The list is built annually from Lightcast labor market data, starting with the full universe of SOC codes and filtering down through set criteria. To make the list, an occupation must show positive projected growth, offer wages at or above 75% of the state median, and require credentials or training beyond a high school diploma.

What is wonderful about this list is the state’s effort to align its various career education and workforce programs towards the in-demand skilled jobs that exist in Georgia. Where they miss the mark, is the lack of industry-provided definitions and projections.

The state is starting with SOC codes. Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) codes are a federal system to categorize workers based on job duties. They were developed in 1980 and are updated every 10 years. Every ten years! It can take years for a new occupation or a meaningfully changed skill set to show up in BLS data. With the rapid shifts in skill sets and occupations brought about by AI, that timeline is unworkable for a modern vocational education system.

Here is what I would change. We’ve got to get industry definition in there from the start.

Instead of starting with SOC codes and filtering down, start with the employers themselves, or more precisely, their intermediaries.

States should issue an open call to industry associations, sector partnerships, and TPM collaboratives to submit the high-skill, high-wage occupations in demand among their members. Give them a standardized template: the occupation name, the number of member employers who hire for it, one- and five-year projected demand, the knowledge, skills, and abilities required, any postsecondary credentials or training needed, and starting and median wages. Then let the state do quality control on the back end — aligning submissions to SOC codes where they exist, reconciling overlapping submissions, and validating wage data against existing benchmarks.

In this model the data comes from employers first, not from backwards-looking labor-market analytics. An industry-submission model captures what SOC codes structurally cannot. Employers know when their occupations are changing. We should be asking them.

Successful programs already do this

There are examples of this happening well at the local and regional level, with employers in an industry even coming together on their own to tackle shared talent challenges. One example comes from Phoenix.

A Hospital Workforce Collaborative was organized by the Greater Phoenix Chamber Foundation to address ongoing critical skill shortages. Nine hospitals in the Phoenix area used the Talent Pipeline Management (TPM) model to identify their greatest talent pain points and develop a plan to address them. The employers themselves provided demand projections for their priority roles. This employer-provided data revealed that specialty nursing areas were most urgent. With this level of clarity, the Collaborative was able to work with the Maricopa Community College District to expand the upskilling programs needed for the in-demand nursing specialties.

There are plenty of successes, like the Phoenix Hospital Collaborative, at the program-level of industry-defined occupations resulting in effective education and training programs. But these programs have to work twice as hard as they need to because they are operating in a system that doesn’t support them. The key is to shift from episodic, program-based activity to making this type of process the norm for how our system operates.

A high-demand career list, where industries define and supply their skilled careers, is one idea for how states can shift policy towards industry-defined skilled occupations. I’m interested in learning about others! Because it’s a critical problem to solve. It seems cruel to have students spend years of their lives preparing for jobs that aren’t actually in demand. As states rush to embrace career education, they have a responsibility to ensure that they know what the real careers are. This is information only employers, supported by their trusted intermediaries, can provide.

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Thanks to Ashley Carter for her review and contributions to this article. Her piece on employer leadership inspired this post.