One of Learning Society’s core tenets is adaptability. Why is that? 

Human life expectancy has doubled in the span of a single century, yet we’ve changed relatively little about how we structure the arc of our lives. The linear model of school, then work, then retirement has outlived its utility. The model itself isn’t broken; it’s simply too flat and too rigid to accommodate the increasing complexities and uncertainties of modern life.

We envision a society in which learning is available and rewarded across the entire lifespan, and where people are encouraged to take episodic career journeys rather than climbing a single, linear ladder. 

Critical to making this shift is understanding how and why millions of people are currently shut out of learning opportunities — and making coordinated efforts to include them in designs for learning. Community colleges and frontline workers offer two instructive examples. 

Schools that serve the most under-resourced students have the least resources themselves. 

In 2025, community colleges educated 37% of all undergraduates and 31% of all post-secondary students. About 70% of those students are working learners, and an increasing share of high school graduates are now choosing community colleges for their relative affordability and flexibility. On the whole, community college students reflect a far more accurate picture of America’s demographic and financial diversity than enrollments at selective four-year institutions do. These schools give first-generation college students, working parents, and other underrepresented groups access to training and education that can help them achieve new levels of economic success. 

Community colleges themselves are also vital, if often underappreciated drivers of economic activity. Partnerships between community colleges and local employers create direct pathways to relevant training and employment. The federally funded Good Jobs Challenge illustrates this well: Illinois Central College, for example, launched an IT Workforce Accelerator that has helped hundreds of local residents earn IT certifications for free and land jobs paying $40,000 or more annually. 

Yet, at a time when community colleges could be held up as vital pillars of the domestic labor market, their funding is often precarious. Community colleges across the country are facing millions of dollars in cuts to services like campus-based childcare, student advising, and academic support. While these cuts reflect a broader trend within higher education, community colleges often lack the cushion to absorb these financial blows. 

Most workers are left out of the career development conversation. 

Frontline workers face similar challenges. They make up 82% of the workforce and are often a customer’s only point of contact with any given organization — yet they are routinely deprioritized in conversations about learning and career advancement. Often, career development opportunities are shrouded in corporate, academic, and legal jargon that obfuscates more than it clarifies. As Jodi Anderson, Founder of Rézme, spoke of at Century Summit VI, “You can order a sandwich 50 different ways, but there isn’t an app where you can click a few buttons and find out what opportunities are available to you.” 

What makes this especially troubling is that many employers don’t realize the disconnect between leadership and their frontline employees. Only 17% of frontline workers report having regular career discussions with their managers, while 40% of employers believe those conversations are occurring.

Building a learning society is a shared responsibility. 

The lack of support for community college students and frontline workers presents serious economic and labor consequences. Employers have long assumed that higher education would pick up the slack on training: that even if internal development programs are thin, universities and community colleges are preparing their future entry-level employees for success. But the pace of technological change is making that assumption untenable. The more people are priced out of accessible learning opportunities, the wider that talent gaps will grow. Employers will be forced to confront the gap between what they expect from workers and what their own internal learning and development programs can deliver.

If we are serious about incentivizing learning across the entire life course, we must reckon with the access issues that prevent many workers and learners from even imagining such a possibility. Learning can’t be a value reserved for tenured academics or chief learning officers. It must be accessible for everyone and lower structural barriers that have impeded continuous learning for so many Americans. This means that organizations for which learning has long been an afterthought — employers chief among them — must recognize both the social responsibility and the business imperative of treating themselves as learning providers instead of simply consumers of credentialed talent. In a learning society, we don’t wait for schools to prepare workers; instead, every institution that benefits from human capability plays a role in helping develop it. Our recent report, The Future Is Now: America’s HR & Talent Leads on AI and Learning at Work, reveals how C-suite HR and talent leaders are thinking about this shift and investing in their own learning infrastructures — but this is just the start of the conversation. 

Building more adaptive systems.

Blurring the lines between work and learning offers an essential opportunity to build more adaptive systems for developing talent — systems built for the 21st century. Once we build the presumption of career dynamism and technological change into our society’s learning architecture, what now feels painfully disruptive and costly will become a normal, manageable, and even enjoyable part of 21st century life.  

To make this vision a reality, we believe that architecture for learning forward can be built around the following tenets. Learning societies…

• …recognize and reward learning wherever it happens;

• …distribute investment in learning among all who benefit; 

• …support transitions across the life course;

• …enable people to work, learn, and care all at once.

These principles are far from idealistic. They are viable and practical considerations for the next 10 years of human capital development. Our schools, workplaces, and households are under tremendous strain in the wake of societal change, and millions will suffer if we don’t re-align our learning incentives toward an ethos of accessibility and adaptability. It makes human sense. It makes business sense. And it will take true joint ventures across the domains of higher education, business, philanthropy, and government  to make it a reality.