People at the Center – How We Think About Designing Systems Change for Impact

Chelsea Miller

Associate Director

Over the first half of 2026, I lived out of a suitcase, traveling from coast to coast to connect with people shaping the future of workforce development. I sat with HR leaders in Chicago for a conversation on early career readiness with the SHRM Foundation, talked tech and scale at ASU+GSV in San Diego, and looked at localized, hands-on learning opportunities during a C-BEN Nursing Apprenticeship site visit in Mobile. From a tight-knit dinner discussing foundational skills in New York City to a design session with Axim Collaborative in Boston, the settings could not have been more different.

Yet, no matter where I was, the core conversations kept returning to the same friction points. Everyone in our ecosystem seems to agree that technology will fundamentally reshape how we work. AI is the topic of the moment and whether you’re bullish or hesitant, everyone agrees things need to change. But beneath that consensus lies a deeper, unsolved challenge: change management. We are building incredibly sophisticated tools and solutions, but we haven’t figured out how to ensure the people expected to use them actually feel brought along.

Right now, both employers and job seekers are struggling to find each other in an incredibly noisy hiring marketplace. Employers are drowning in applications, yet they still report a talent shortage. Job seekers are checking every box, yet their resumes disappear into algorithmic black holes.

A big piece of this disconnect is information asymmetry. Employers don’t trust the signals they are getting, and candidates don’t know how to prove what they can do. One promising solution I heard echoed across these events is the rise of co-endorsed credentials. When an industry body, a higher education institution, and a major employer collectively validate a credential, it creates a trusted, shared language.

But for that language to work, our skills data has to change. We need data that is validated, easily consumable by HR systems, and, crucially, owned by the learner. These conversations echoed the research UpSkill America completed this fall on validated skills. True progress won’t come from forcing employers or workers onto entirely new platforms. It will happen when verified skills data integrates seamlessly into the tools, platforms, and applicant tracking systems that both sides are already leveraging.

Of course, none of these technical fixes matter without accountability. Right now, accountability remains a major driver of systemic change, but it is deeply unclear in practice. Who is ultimately responsible when a training program fails to yield mobility? Is it the educator, the employer, or the supporting organizations? Without clear metrics for accountability, well-intentioned initiatives will continue to stall.

This brings us to the most vital takeaway from my travels. There is a profound difference between designing a system centered on employment outcomes versus one centered on people.

For a long time, the workforce ecosystem has treated job placement as the ultimate victory. If a person gets hired, the spreadsheet turns green, the grant is satisfied, and the system declares success. But centering design on the person requires looking past day one on the job. It means asking whether the system supports long-term economic mobility, continuous upskilling, human dignity, and meeting people where they’re at.

Putting people at the center of the systems we are building means accepting that career paths are rarely linear. It requires us to build infrastructure that accommodates life transitions, recognizes informal learning, and values a worker’s agency over their own data. As we continue to build solutions together, our challenge is to stop building for the transaction of hiring, and start building for the reality of the person engaged in the hiring, work, and education systems.