A new Work Shift brief by Matthew Muench, who founded Lucerra Impact Advisory after serving as head of jobs and skills for JPMorganChase Global Philanthropy, argues for a four-wave framework to understand the past 40 years of workforce development progress. He uses this framework to chart out what it will take for the next generation of workforce thinkers to finally achieve scale in the AI age.

Anne Trumbore is Chief Digital Learning Officer at the Sands Institute for Lifelong Learning at The Darden School, University of Virginia, where she is responsible for creating a strategy to expand access to world-class education and advance Darden’s mission of providing transformational learning experiences to learners globally. Drawing on experience establishing and leading Wharton Online and early-stage roles at Coursera, NovoEd, and Stanford’s Online High School, Anne has helped pioneer new forms of student-centered online education. She is the author of The Teacher in the Machine: A Human History of Education Technology (Princeton University Press, 2025) and was a 2025 Stanford Futures Fellow.