Faye Sahai is a global healthcare and technology advisor, investor, founder, and executive with over 30 years of experience, including leadership roles at Kaiser Permanente, Schwab, AIG, Blue Shield, and Deloitte Consulting. A self-described lifelong learner, she is a Stanford Distinguished Career Fellow and has been recognized on Silicon Valley Business Journal’s Power 100 and Computerworld’s Premier 100 IT Leaders.

Avanish Sahai is a retired technology executive who held leadership positions at Google, ServiceNow, Salesforce, and McKinsey. His career at the intersection of technology and enterprise gave him a distinct lens on systemic change — one he now applies to philanthropy, focusing on grants that strengthen the infrastructure of organizations working on education, poverty alleviation, and healthcare access.

Together, Faye and Avanish are co-founders of the Sahai Family Foundation, where they lead a grantmaking practice rooted in rigor, empathy, and long-term impact. Their focus on systems thinking reflects the Learning Society’s broader mission of

building new systems for human capital development. We asked them for their thoughts on how this might come to fruition.

The following Q&A has been lightly edited for clarity:

What does organizing the life course around lifelong learning rather than schooling mean to you and your organization?

Faye: I’ve always thought of myself as a lifelong learner. By learning, I mean education that goes beyond traditional K-12 and higher education schooling to include professional development, on-the-job learning, and post-career learning endeavors.

Avanish: The speed of information creation and exchange is changing so dramatically that many aspects of traditional schooling aren’t keeping up with the demands of the labor market and society. While “schooling” is timebound and structured in the early parts of life, “learning” needs to happen continuously throughout life — and can involve a range of technical and human skills.

People are living and working into their 70s and 80s — and changing careers far more often than previous generations. How should this reshape how we think about education and training?

Faye: Education and training simply needs to be more agile and flexible to adjust to longer lives, evolving career journeys and broader societal shifts. We have to move beyond a narrow scope of learning that focuses on the first 20-something years of life and consider learning throughout our lives — and how we contribute not only to our companies but also our communities. Employers figured out just-in-time supply chains decades ago; now we need just-in-time learning, along with serious investment in reskilling and intergenerational workforces.

Avanish: Until recent generations, people had a single career journey post high school or college graduation, and often worked and retired from the same organization, usually in their late 50s and early 60s. The confluence of longer lives and greater economic uncertainty is enabling (or even requiring) people to work longer, but the single-threaded career journey no longer exists. As a result, workers in later career stages need to adapt and learn new or different skills. The role of education and training needs to adapt in turn, providing relevant, up-to-date, and necessary capabilities to these workers. This has implications for how content is created, how and where it’s delivered, and who pays for it.

What’s one way that schools, employers and policymakers could better collaborate to develop human talent?

Faye: One way is to co-create and pass joint legislation and budgets that offer resources, data, and incentives for lifelong learning and human talent development that apply to schools, communities, employers, and individuals.

Avanish: This requires systemic change and alignment across all these organizations, along with workforce development boards, unions, and other representative groups, to: a) identify the key needs, gaps, and changes in workforce skills; b) develop and provide the appropriate training around them; and c) create an incentive structure that rewards those who provide and take part in such talent development initiatives.

The current models are generally misaligned, with poorly designed incentives. For example, an employee may pay for their own training but fail to actually break into their desired new career. Conversely, an employer that could pay for training may worry about losing that investment if the employee leaves. And government funding is too narrowly scoped in its geography and categories to close these gaps at scale.

Beyond graduation rates and test scores that informed policy analysis in the schooled society, what sorts of data and indicators should we develop to measure progress in the learning society?

Faye:

1. Promotion and advancement
2. Unemployment/underemployment
3. Satisfaction/happiness index
4. Community service and civility

Avanish:

1. Placement rates post training
2. Adoption rates of offered coursework/skills development
3. Income levels and changes across the life course (to ensure that folks aren’t underemployed in later stages just to “make ends meet”)

If you could change one thing about how we invest in people’s talent and potential, what would it be and why?

Faye: We must treat learning and investing in potential as a public good — something that is accessible, equitable, and available across your entire life, not just when you’re young. The goal is a society where people remain engaged and productive at every stage of the life course.

Avanish: Talent development should be an issue of national competitiveness and geopolitical focus. Policymakers must treat it as a national priority; the changes in longevity, the impact of AI, and the emphasis that other countries are placing on this issue can put the U.S. and Western societies at a much higher risk of extreme unemployment, poor productivity, and social unrest.