Aspen is a place for leaders to lift their sights above the possessions which possess them. To confront their own nature as human beings, to regain control over their own humanity by becoming more self-aware, more self-correcting, and hence more self-fulfilling.
One of the largest food and beverage companies in the world, PepsiCo generated more than $86 billion in net revenue in 2022, and its products are enjoyed by consumers a billion times a day in more than 200 countries and territories around the world.
With more than 300,000 employees globally and 100,000 US-based employees — many of whom are in front-line roles responsible for manufacturing, packing, or distributing products — PepsiCo is committed to creating meaningful jobs and growth opportunities. The company has developed a suite of upskilling initiatives that provide end-to-end opportunities. Employees have access to everything from high school diplomas to basic digital training to bachelor’s degrees, all at no cost to them.
“Everyone has a different ‘why’ that motivates them to learn,” said PepsiCo’s chief learning officer Molly Nagler. “We offer a portfolio that meets both employee and business needs. There is something for everyone.”
PepsiCo leverages these upskilling investments to create lasting value for the company and career mobility for workers. “This is not just about graduations, it’s about mobility post-completion,” said Dewey Torres, senior director of PepsiCo’s Global Learning Center of Excellence, which is responsible for driving the company’s upskilling and reskilling strategy. “We’re building an internal talent pipeline.”
UpSkill America, an initiative of the Economic Opportunities Program, supports employers and workforce organizations to expand and improve high-quality educational and career advancement opportunities for America’s front-line workers.
About the Economic Opportunities Program
The Aspen Institute Economic Opportunities Program advances strategies, policies, and ideas to help low- and moderate-income people thrive in a changing economy.
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States invest in work-connected learning through dozens of distinct funding streams, grant programs, and agency initiatives, often developed independently over time by different administrations and agencies pursuing different goals.
To create a future-ready workforce system, we must move beyond outdated credentials and analog processes to one that is skills-first, transparent, data-driven, and aligned with the evolving needs of workers, educators, and employers.
This publication examines how fragmented skills, credentialing, and workforce data systems limit the potential of skills-based hiring and advancement, and outlines a shared vision for building the interoperable infrastructure needed to create a connected skills ecosystem that benefits workers, employers, educators, and governments.
In this interview, Chelsea Miller of Upskill America speaks with Nick Greif of InStride about how employers can design education benefits that are more accessible, strategic, and aligned with workforce goals.
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.
This is the final event in our Job Quality in Practice series. In this conversation, hosted by the Aspen Institute Economic Opportunities Program on May 7, 2026, we hear from the Institute’s Job Quality Fellows who are embedding job quality into their work across a range of contexts and strategies — from employee ownership models that give workers a direct financial stake in their company’s success, to apprenticeship programs that create structured pathways to higher-wage careers, to worker advisory committees that bring employee voice into business decision-making.
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.
Back to where we started, AI is not creating one future. It is opening up several. Which one gets created may depend on whether the people closest to the work bring their voice, and name what no one else is naming.
