Each year, as the Chamber Foundation hosts the Talent Forward national workforce conference, we focus on talent—educating and training, talent tech and data, recruiting, hiring, and upskilling. With no shortage of talent challenges, the opportunities for informative discussion are endless. While a day devoted to dissecting talent-related topics could focus solely on the problems, Talent Forward is all about the solutions.

The future of work is now and the problem we are solving is not adapting to new technologies, but adapting to the dynamism of the economy, which will only accelerate. Dynamic economies require dynamic labor markets, and agile businesses require agile workers and workforce partnerships. 

As President Donald Trump moves forward with his pledge to rebuild America’s infrastructure, we’re going to need more workers. And as the nation looks to rebuild the American middle class, we’re going to need more people who are workforce-ready to support it. But we find ourselves in a difficult holding pattern.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that by 2020, there will be 1 million more computing jobs than workers to fill them. Demand for jobs in data science alone has grown 300 percent over the last four years. Tech skills like cloud computing and user interface design top the list of the most in-demand skills.  It’s a challenge that stems, in part, from the well-documented divide between higher education and the world of work. And the challenge is only accelerating as the shelf life of skills shrinks.