Leaders from education, industry, labor, and philanthropy have joined together to issue a call to action for public- and private-sector leaders to “open real paths from schools into careers for young people,” the organizations announced this month.
The American Federation of Teachers, national nonprofits CareerWise and Jobs for the Future, and others launched the Compact for America’s Youth, which asks organizations to make commitments to mobilize industry, advance policies, and deploy innovative tools and resources to better connect young people to careers.
It comes at a time of uncertainty in the labor market and a rapidly changing economy as the growing use of generative and agentic artificial intelligence is both destroying current jobs and creating new ones.
“We are missing early-career infrastructure at a time when there’s a lot of uncertainty around what the impact of AI will be on early careers across a range of sectors,” said Brent Parton, the chief executive officer and president of CareerWise, a nonprofit focused on expanding youth-apprenticeship models.
Schools can’t do the work alone of preparing kids for careers, Parton said in an interview. The goal of the compact is to bring organizations together to work on solutions to scale up career-connected learning, he said.
“Our North Star for the compact is infrastructure,” Parton said. “We have to start looking at what we’re doing with high schools and in workforce development. We need infrastructure to support the scale and the impact of high-quality programs that are out there.”
About a dozen organizations announced their first commitments during the launch of the compact, ranging from new funding and programs to curricula, digital tools, and pledges to open more pathways for young people.
Here is a look at the initial commitments:
- The AFT is directing $150,000 in new Career Pathways Partnership Grants to local affiliates to launch and strengthen career-connected learning in their communities, in support of work-based-learning programs, employer and higher education partnerships, and classroom career and technical education clubs.
- Jobs for the Future and LinkedIn are partnering on a $400,000, one-year initiative to examine how AI is reshaping early-career jobs and pathways, what skills young people need to navigate that shift, and how practitioners can support them.
- North America’s Building Trades Unions and Microsoft announced the Jobs Machine, an AI-powered tool that helps students, parents, and job seekers understand and enroll in registered construction-apprenticeship programs.
- The AFL-CIO and AFT are piloting a manufacturing core curriculum with high school students in up to three locations in 2027.
- General Motors is committing $500,000 to a new AFT program that will connect middle school students in the Detroit area to advanced manufacturing careers.
- The Siemens Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, and the Annie E. Casey Foundation are investing to expand CareerWise’s apprenticeship models. (The Walton Family Foundation supports Education Week’s enterprise coverage of teaching, curriculum and instruction, and other key K-12 issues, and the Annie E. Casey Foundation supports Education Week’s coverage of preparing students for life and the workforce. Education Week retains sole editorial control over the content of this coverage.)
The group joins a growing list of organizations that have invested in career and technical education and career-connected learning in the past year.
This increase in investments in career pathways could be attributed to a few factors, said Kate Kreamer, the executive director of Advance CTE, a national nonprofit that represents state CTE leaders:
- The rapidly changing labor market has pushed educators to grapple with what it means for students to be prepared for the future of work;
- There’s uncertainty around the return on investment of a four-year college education; and
- Many students are asking for more career exposure and more opportunities to apply their learning.
“It turns out our workforce is dependent on engaged students who are excited about the future, who are engaged with their coursework and getting prerequisite credentials, and who are ready and connected to a workforce that needs them,” Parton said.
How to make sure these investments turn into meaningful results
To ensure these investments turn into meaningful results, they need to link to and build on existing infrastructure “rather than starting from scratch or in silos,” Kreamer said. Advance CTE unveiled a new vision this year that focuses on better aligning education and workforce partners.
Knowing if a program or model is successful also “requires identifying and using consistent measurements of what defines success—values, quality, return on investment—that are agreed upon across partners,” Kreamer said.
As more organizations invest in CTE, it’s important to consider “how we can move from individual investments to sustainable systems,” said Alisha Hyslop, the chief policy, research, and content officer for the Association for Career and Technical Education, which represents CTE professionals at all levels of education. “That requires more systemic investments from policymakers at all levels.”
For instance, funding for the federal Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education Act, which provides foundational support for CTE programs in every state, is actually hundreds of millions of dollars below the inflation-adjusted level from over 20 years ago, Hyslop said.
“We hope that the work of AFT, CareerWise and Jobs for the Future will shine a light on the need for the entire country to invest in youth and develop the policies and underlying infrastructure that support their long-term success,” Hyslop said.
Bipartisan interest in CTE has grown in recent years. U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon has repeatedly emphasized the importance of pathway alternatives to traditional higher education.
Even so, the Trump administration last summer abruptly canceled more than $48 million in ongoing grant awards for CTE programs, including in Republican-led states. Funds from those grants will instead go toward the prize challenge for states.
One of the goals of the compact is to bring industry leaders together and work toward “a common policy vision around early-career infrastructure in the U.S.” that, Parton said, he hopes will help policymakers as they consider related bills.
“We’re here to try to build this kind of infrastructure collectively and build that coalition,” he added.
