Current pathway models are challenged by today’s rapidly shifting realities. The future is now. Paramount to that future is creating pathways and credentials—of value to industry and lifelong learning—that ensure learners can thrive in an ever-evolving world.
We introduce Unbounded Pathways, an approach that synthesizes career readiness theories with contemporary approaches, future-forward pathways, and workforce ecosystem models. The word “unbounded” signals high-value career pathways that are flexible and adaptive to learner needs and the dynamic pace of an ever-changing world.
Education Must Enable Economic Mobility
The World Economic Forum predicts that AI will displace 92 million jobs and create 170 million new jobs. LinkedIn notes that 20% of professionals hired today in the U.S. have job titles that did not exist in 2000. 81% of millennials view their degree as a “poor investment” and approximately half (49%) of rural Gen Z believe they can find a good job in their community, forcing difficult choices of survival and dislocation.
Education’s broad mandate to provide a foundational level of knowledge is still true—as is the expectation that earning a degree enables a graduate to secure a livable wage job.
With the workforce disruptions we are now facing, a degree no longer guarantees family-sustaining income. Furthermore, historically less than 50% of learners have finished an undergraduate degree. The reality is that education must enable economic mobility for all learners.
Not only is the world of work transforming, life and learning itself is continually shifting. The picture below underscores the complex pathway for one person who is blending life and learning with securing a good job in nursing. The majority of learners find their way through their careers on non-linear paths.
Image Caption: One learner’s non-linear path from earning a GED to pursuing a nursing career is marked by marriage, motherhood, job changes, and a pandemic.
Learners—especially those who are navigating poverty, learning differences, rural access, financial issues, and other circumstances—need opportunities that are accessible, flexible, and adaptable.
Learners need pathways that:
- Create the conditions to support basic needs
- Embed skills training, including foundational and digital literacy and other durable skills
- Offer personalized human supports including peer-to-peer and mentorship
- Provide direct career navigation and placement services including career maps and professional support networks
Pathways must be fluid based on learner circumstance and labor market context.
Unbounded Pathways are the Future
Pathways to the future do not fit in a box. Learning is continuous and cumulative. Labor market needs are fluid and evolving. Skills and competencies need to be durable, technical, and expansive. Pathways to the future need to be unbounded.
Digital Promise defines Unbounded Pathways as connected systems of adaptive and flexible powerful learning experiences and conditions that enable learners to attain durable skills, competencies, and credentials of value, leading to agency, wellbeing, and economic mobility (AWE).
Unbounded Pathways enable education ecosystems—including K-12, postsecondary, industry, and community-based organizations—to co-construct pathways for the future that are:
- Accelerated: Designed to meet the rapid-cycle of labor market demand and ensure that learner skills and competencies are current
- Future-Forward: Reflects leading emerging technology, AI, and innovation-centric policies, strategies, and models
- Responsive: Adaptable, agile, and scalable to learner and workforce realities
- Co-Created: Grounded in Collaborative Innovation, a process that ensures shared goals and impact with learners and communities
- Credentialed: Results in credentials of value to industry and advance lifelong learning
Image Caption: The five dimensions of Unbounded Pathways—accelerated, future-forward, responsive, co-created, and credentialed—form a framework designed to meet learners and labor markets where they are.
Achieving the confluence of these dimensions results in shifting conditions that dissolve pathway dead-ends and create systems learners can thrive in and beyond.
Existing and Emerging Models of Unbounded Pathways
- K-12 school systems are creating “Build Your Own High School” models to create accelerated, responsive, and credentialed opportunities (Phoenix Union City High School).
- Postsecondary systems are collaborating to co-create, responsive, and credentialed pathways that dispel the credit-transfer and continuity dead ends (Long Beach College Promise).
- Rural regions are developing pathways infrastructure to co-create accelerated, credentialed pathways that meet state labor market demand (Alabama Cybersecurity Regional Pathway).
- Programs that support adult populations including healthcare, military veterans, and people in the justice system are creating responsive, credentialed pathways that enable learn-to-earn opportunities (Hiring Our Heroes, The Last Mile).
Unbound Pathways approaches meet current and future needs across the education ecosystem—not just for one sector. To achieve the win-win, everyone must be at the table in creative, uncommon alliances to ensure outcomes and impact are anchored in shared priorities.
The five dimensions of Unbounded Pathways provide a structure that invites and incentivizes K-12, postsecondary, industry, and communities to design, implement, and scale models that create shared benefits. When shared benefits are the goal, learner opportunities meet labor market demand—and communities experience economic well-being and vibrant quality of life.
Learn more about Unbounded Pathways from Digital Promise’s Center for Learner Pathway Innovations and subscribe to email updates for opportunities to collaborate
