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.

Why it matters: Generative AI is poised to accelerate job churn faster than any previous technological shift — and the U.S. workforce development system still operates at a fraction of the scale that’s needed.

• Only 250,000 Americans are trained annually through the country’s principal public funding stream, and even fewer are placed into quality jobs.
• Muench argues the field can no longer afford another decade of promising pilots. The goal should be to effectively connect 2–3 million people to good jobs each year.

The four waves: Each successive generation of workforce organizations has grown more commercially sophisticated, better designed for scale, and faster to reach it.

• Wave 1: Community Problem-solvers. Nonprofits that emerged in the 1980s and early 1990s (sometimes earlier) to solve domestic employment challenges resulting from deindustrialization, urban poverty, and neoliberal economic policy.
• Wave 2: Social Entrepreneurs. Millenium-era leaders alongside the broader phenomenon of social entrepreneurs taking a more business-like approach to operating, fundraising, and measuring and articulating return on investment in the era after welfare reforms.
• Wave 3: Founders. Leaders after the financial crisis aped the aesthetic, approaches, and tools of the venture-backed startup culture and sought rapid growth right out of the gate.
• Wave 4: AI-first Pioneers. Emergent post-ChatGPT providers are attempting to leverage the capability of generative AI tools to resolve the scale vs. personalization conundrum that has foiled education and social-services entrepreneurs.

The time to act is now: “The workforce field must avoid another decade of admiring promising pilots and modest growth. If AI disrupts labor markets faster than previous shocks, rapid scale with quality is essential.”

Six recommendations: Workforce organizations that want to break through should:

• Explicitly prioritize growth.
• Design for scale
• Use AI to reduce costs and enhance services.
• Treat employers as customers on whom your survival depends.
• Be aggressive.
• Adapt as markets change.

The takeaway: The U.S. economy’s job-creation engine historically compensated for a broken workforce system. AI disruption removes that backstop.

• Muench argues the insights from 40 years of progress are clear, but only if funders, policymakers, and operators are willing to abandon habits built for lesser ambition.
• “It will be enormously difficult. But it is achievable, and it is necessary.”

Read the full brief on Work Shift.