Stop Building Projects. Start Building an Ecosystem.
By David Goodman, Vice President of Learning and Impact
Contents:
What We’re Getting Wrong
What an Ecosystem Actually Looks Like
This isn’t Just About Coordination. It’s About Vision
What it Takes to Get There
The Opportunity
There's a pattern that plays out across the country in workforce development, and almost everyone working in this space has lived it.
An employer signals that they can't find enough qualified workers in a high-demand field. A community college, a workforce board, or a regional economic development organization steps up. Stakeholders come together, a project gets funded, a training program gets launched, some data gets collected, and outcomes get reported. Then the grant ends or the pressure to solve a problem subsides. The organizations or teams go back to their siloed work and the partnership quietly dissolves. The data sits in a spreadsheet on someone's desktop.
Two years later, a different employer or community college or government agency signals the same problem.
Everyone starts over, attempting to revive internal buy-in, struggling to reconnect with individuals who have moved on, and to quickly amend the previous data sharing agreement to get the same or new data.
This isn't a failure of effort. The people doing this work care deeply. It's a failure of design. We keep building projects when what we actually need is to build an ecosystem.
What We're Getting Wrong
The dominant model in education-to-workforce work — and broader collaborations more generally -- is what you might call the use-case approach: identify a single problem, assemble the stakeholders most directly affected by it, solve for that problem, and go back to your day jobs. It's a logical way to get something done quickly and it’s the funding mechanism used by federal, state, and local governments and countless philanthropic organizations looking to “make an impact.” Bless them all, because this does get money in the hands of the experts and it gets things done. However, it creates unnecessary burden and it doesn’t always address the things we actually need.
The use-case approach produces one-off data engagements fueled by data sharing agreements that expire when the project ends. It produces training programs, skills profiles, or career pathways designed for yesterday's labor market. It either produces insights that never travel beyond the organization that paid for them, or by the time it gets to decision makers, the insights are obsolete. And it places an exhausting and ongoing burden on employers and education providers alike, who are asked to participate in the same conversations, share the same data, and answer the same questions over and over again, for every new project that comes their way.
The cumulative result is a landscape full of siloed, redundant, and ultimately fragile work. Relationships get built and then abandoned. Resources get spent on deliverables that are never used again. Good ideas die in final reports that nobody reads,or worse, that they never knew existed in the first place.
The problem isn't a lack of good intentions or good people. It's that we haven't built the infrastructure needed to make the good intentions and hard work of people trying to improve these systems add up to something valuable, iterative, and sustainable.
What an Ecosystem Actually Looks Like
A true education-to-workforce ecosystem is built around a fundamentally different premise: the goal is to build the shared capacity to understand, respond to, and shape the labor market continuously, rather than to solve one problem for one set of stakeholders at a specific moment in time. That means several things in practice.
It's demand-informed, not demand-driven. Employers are essential partners, but a healthy ecosystem doesn't simply react to the loudest or most well-resourced employer. It develops mechanisms to understand labor market demand in aggregate — across industries, firm sizes, geographies, and time horizons — so that supply-side investments in education and training are grounded in a fuller picture of where the economy is going, not just where it is right now.
It is honest about the supply side. Education and training providers are not a monolith. Community colleges, four-year universities, registered apprenticeship programs, short-term credentials, bootcamps — each has different strengths, constraints, and incentive structures. These strengths and constraints are not just because of their programs, but also the context in which they are provided (context matters, folks!). A real ecosystem understands the supply side with the same rigor it applies to understanding employer demand, and it creates pathways for education and training providers to collaborate rather than compete.
It's built on shared infrastructure, not parallel silos. One of the most underappreciated costs of the use-case model is that every project reinvents the wheel on data, relationships, and governance. An ecosystem invests in shared infrastructure — common data standards, durable data sharing agreements, trusted intermediaries, and coordinating bodies — so that each new initiative can build on what came before rather than starting from scratch.
It's collaboratively governed, not imposed or just convened. Showing up in the same room is not a partnership. Neither is one entity imposing its will upon others. A real ecosystem has clear governance: defined roles, shared accountability, transparent and collective decision-making, and mechanisms for resolving conflict when stakeholder interests diverge. Without collaborative governance, even the best-designed ecosystem drifts back toward whoever has the most resources and the loudest voice.
It accumulates and leverages knowledge over time. Every project, every data sharing agreement, every training cohort generates information that has value beyond the immediate purpose it was collected for. An ecosystem is designed to capture that value to build institutional memory, surface patterns across initiatives, and make prior work visible and usable to future partners.
This Isn't Just About Coordination. It's About Vision.
Here's the harder truth: you can have all the right infrastructure and still not have an ecosystem. An ecosystem isn’t held together by a data platform or a governance structure; an ecosystem is created and maintained by a shared vision for what the region or sector is actually trying to become.
That vision has to be specific enough to guide collective decisions, honest enough to survive disagreement, and valuable enough to individual stakeholders to keep them invested. It needs to answer questions like, what does workforce success look like here in ten years? Who currently benefits and who doesn't? What tradeoffs are we willing to make? Which industries are we investing in and which are we letting go? What goals or challenges can it help solve for my organization through my participation?
Most workforce initiatives avoid these questions because they're politically uncomfortable, but avoiding them means that every stakeholder is quietly operating with a different picture of success. We already know that doesn’t work – the result is the fragmentation and redundancy we keep experiencing.
The work of building an ecosystem starts with building a shared vision in which organizations can see themselves and the value of ongoing participation. Everything else — the data, the governance, the partnerships — flows from that.
What it Takes to Get There
Building an ecosystem doesn't happen by convening a bigger meeting or writing a more ambitious strategic plan. It requires a few things that are genuinely difficult:
Sustained investment in the intermediary function. Someone has to hold the ecosystem together to maintain relationships, broker agreements, translate between employer and education/training provider language, and keep the work aligned with the shared vision. This is not overhead; this is the work.
Willingness to slow down and do the architecture right. The pressure to show near-term outcomes is real, especially for funders. But ecosystems that are stitched together from a series of rushed projects end up with the same fragmentation problem they were trying to solve. The upfront investment in shared infrastructure pays off.
Short-term commitments help achieve long-term sustainability. The stakeholders who control resources — philanthropies, federal and state agencies, economic development organizations — can provide initial multi-year, flexible commitments that allow the ecosystem to be designed and implemented properly. Long-term sustainability, however, should focus on the development of revenue streams to sustain itself over time, from data, services, and the use of the infrastructure. The ecosystem can and should sustain itself over time, without endless philanthropic or government support
The Opportunity
The education-to-workforce challenge isn't new, and neither is the frustration with how we've been trying to solve it. What is new is a growing recognition among employers, educators, funders, and policymakers that the one-off project model has run its course.
The opportunity in front of us is to do something harder and more lasting: to build ecosystems that actually learn, adapt, and improve over time. Ecosystems that treat every stakeholder's participation as an investment in shared infrastructure, rather than a transaction. The opportunity is a commitment, rather than a project. It makes the labor market more legible for everyone and not just for the organization that paid for the latest study