Across the country, a substantial shift is underway in how communities think about preparing people for careers. For decades, the dominant model of workforce development has been driven by what education and training providers are able to offer: schools design programs, employers are invited as an afterthought, and too many graduates end up with credentials that don’t lead anywhere meaningful. The intentions are good, but the outcomes fall short.
At the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation, we believe there is a better way.
In March 2026, we launched Pathways with Purpose Through Career-Connected Learning, a competitive grant initiative awarding $295,000 to employer-led consortia committed to strengthening alignment between K–12 education and the real demands of the labor market. The response was extraordinary. In just five weeks, we received 181 applications from 45 states representing chambers of commerce, industry associations, employer coalitions, and economic development organizations eager to lead this work.
That level of interest is a signal in itself: employer-led organizations are not waiting to be invited to the table. They are ready to lead.
We ultimately selected five grantees – each representing different sectors, geographies, and strategies – to receive funding, along with technical assistance from our team and external coaches throughout the grant period. Together, they will develop and implement scalable, employer-driven career pathway strategies. While we will formally announce the cohort in the coming days, the themes that emerged from the selection process are worth sharing now because they speak to something larger than any single grant.
What We Were Looking for and Why It Matters
Pathways with Purpose was designed around a simple premise: employers should not just participate in workforce development—they should help drive it. When employers are true co-design partners, programs are built around real hiring needs rather than assumptions. Curriculum reflects the competencies employers use. Work-based learning experiences are designed with employers, not simply hosted by them. And credentials carry value in the labor market because the employers who helped shape them are the same ones hiring graduates.
Systems Change Starts with Behavior Change
Building better career pathways is not just a programmatic challenge. It is a cultural one.
Educators and employers have historically operated in parallel universes, each with its own language, timelines, incentives, and definitions of success. A high school counselor and a manufacturing plant manager may both want students to succeed, but they rarely sit in the same room to define what success looks like. When they do, the results can be transformative. Multiply that dynamic across an entire employer network, and the potential becomes even greater.
That is what we looked for in the Pathways with Purpose applications. In our view, systems change starts with behavior change—with employers and educators building new habits of collaboration, new structures for shared accountability, and new ways of measuring whether students are truly prepared for the careers they hope to pursue.
That can take many forms. It might look like a statewide employer network moving beyond advisory roles to co-design competency standards that shape K–12 curriculum and credential pathways—with employers helping set the direction, not just reacting to it. It might look like industry professionals with both sector expertise and teaching experience stepping into schools to facilitate work-based learning, giving students meaningful mentorship without placing the full burden on classroom teachers. It might look like a regional employer collaborative working backward from the hybrid technical and digital skills its industries need—before students ever set foot in a postsecondary institution—to ensure the pathways being built today reflect the labor market of tomorrow. Or it might look like employers helping design the goal-setting infrastructure itself, so that what gets built, credentialed, and scaled is grounded in validated employer demand from the start.
In every case, the underlying shift is the same: education and industry are no longer operating in silos. They are accountable to one another and to students.
This kind of change does not happen overnight, and it does not happen in a single grant cycle. But it must start somewhere. The pilots and projects we selected stood out in part because they demonstrated real momentum: existing relationships, engaged employer champions, and a genuine commitment to measurable impact that can be documented, replicated, and scaled.
Pilots with Real Traction
Some of the most compelling proposals were grounded in work already underway, employers that had been building trust with education partners for years, or sector partnerships that had already piloted elements of the approach they were now proposing to expand. Others were newer but demonstrated the kind of employer leadership and institutional buy-in that give a new initiative a real chance of success.
The strongest applications shared a clear theory of change: here is the problem, here is how we know employers are committed to solving it, here is what we will do differently, and here is how we will know whether it worked. That emphasis on measurability is non-negotiable. Promising practices are only useful to the field if they can be documented and shared.
The five communities we selected span a range of sectors, geographies, and strategies—from electrical trades and construction to advanced manufacturing, healthcare, IT, and cross-sector approaches. Together, they form a diverse laboratory for what employer-led career pathway development can look like at its best, and we look forward to sharing their stories as the work unfolds.
Building for Scale: What the Field Can Learn
One of the explicit goals of Pathways with Purpose is not simply to fund strong work, but to generate knowledge the broader field can use.
This commitment to dissemination reflects a broader belief at the U.S. Chamber Foundation: communities doing this work well should not be the only ones who benefit from it. The employer-led model should be replicable. The structural innovations that emerge from this cohort should be available to any community willing to do the hard work of bringing employers and educators into genuine partnership.
The Demand Is There. The Question Is Whether We’ll Meet It
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation is proud to support five communities in doing exactly that. We are equally committed to ensuring that what they learn reaches not only the other communities that applied, but also the many more asking the same questions.
When employers help shape pathways from the beginning, students are better served, educators are better aligned, and communities are better positioned to grow. That is the promise of Pathways with Purpose—and the work ahead.
About the author
Jaimie Francis
Jaimie is vice president of policy and programs at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation.
