Workers in Waiting

We’ve been focused on the wrong problem.

Remember how, in our last post, we committed to asking uncomfortable questions about whether we’re solving problems young people actually have or those that reflect our own interests? We tried that out. And we concluded that how we’ve framed the problem pathways are solving has led us to talk about young people as though they’re commodities that we seek to customize to meet employers’ specifications. This isn’t a metaphor. It’s the actual operating logic of economic and education systems designed around “employer demand.” Here’s our concern: starting with the needs of employers reveals a flawed—and, if left unchecked, potentially harmful—assumption: that the primary purpose of education is to produce labor. When we ask what industry needs and design backward from there, we are, in economic terms, treating young people as inputs on the supply side of the supply and demand equation.

Advocates for pathways (including your humble correspondents) often frame pathways as a “win-win.” The argument goes something like this: education-to-career pathways benefit employers by building the talent pipeline they need while simultaneously benefiting young people by creating routes to jobs that provide them with economic stability. In order to achieve these outcomes, the pathway design process often begins with the question, “What does industry need?” In other words, we start by trying to solve the employer-facing problem we’ve identified. Yet our ongoing struggle to engage employers suggests that this employer-first approach hasn’t delivered for them. (But that’s a topic for another blog.) We say that we’re designing pathways that benefit young people, but our approach doesn’t meaningfully engage with young people’s aspirations for their own futures. When the strategy doesn’t work for either party in the supposed “win-win,” it’s most likely a zero-sum game and time to question the premise.

The result of our framing is an education and career ecosystem that looks efficient on paper, but feels irrelevant—and potentially deterministic or dehumanizing—to the very young people it claims to serve. We’ve built entire systems around the idea that young people are future workers waiting to be efficiently sorted, credentialed, and deployed to serve the needs of the economy. But young people aren’t waking up imagining themselves as labor in a supply and demand equation. Of course labor market realities matter, but those realities include how young people actually think about work and their futures, not just what employers say they need.

Young people imagine lives defined by thriving: health, stability, agency, meaningful relationships, purpose, and the ability to shape their own futures. Work, including work that is meaningful and dignifying, is a piece of that puzzle, not the puzzle itself. Jobs matter to young people, but as tools for reaching those broader goals. The research could not be clearer: economic security matters and youth want agency, belonging, purpose, and the power to define success on their own terms. Our systems rarely deliver that, and if they do, it happens despite—not because of—the system. If we design systems that don’t respond to young people’s needs or support their aspirations, we shouldn’t be surprised if young people aren’t vibing with it.

We’ve built entire systems around the idea that young people are future workers waiting to be efficiently sorted, credentialed, and deployed to serve the needs of the economy. But young people aren’t waking up imagining themselves as labor in a supply and demand equation.

Listening to young people

What would pathways look like if they were designed backward from the needs and aspirations of young people? Michaela Leslie-Rule, a researcher, cultural strategist, and storyteller, is working to answer that question by amplifying the voices of young people and illuminating how they think about education, careers, and their lives. Her Striving to Thriving research, conducted in collaboration with Goodwin Simon Strategic Research, is based on survey data, in-depth interviews, and focus groups with nearly 4,000 Black and Latine young people, and white youth experiencing poverty, between the ages of 15 and 21. Michaela’s new book, How We See Us, builds on that research by challenging deficit narratives and positioning young people as the authorities on their own lives and hopes for their futures.

Her work has played a pivotal role in shaping our thinking about next-generation pathways strategies. We were tempted to turn this post into a book report on How We See Us, but: 1) you should really just read the book; and 2) we realized we had a lot to learn from talking directly with Michaela, so we did that instead. Our interview with her, which has been edited and organized for clarity, is below.

How youth think about their futures matters 

We asked Michaela what she learned when she asked young people how they think about their futures. Their responses—and the striving-to-thriving framework that Michaela and her colleagues developed based on those responses—challenged our assumptions about how young people conceptualize work. 

Work is a journey, not a destination

Michaela Leslie-Rule: The research was supposed to be about occupational identity formation, and of course, to no one’s surprise, kids never mentioned any of those words. Instead, they talked about the words “job,” “work,” and “career,” and the meanings they assigned to each. These are words that those of us in the pathways field sometimes use interchangeably, but that young people understand and experience in different and nuanced ways.

We also heard—through our analysis of young people’s language, sentiment, and word usage—that many young people understand work to be a noun and also a verb. The metaphor for work was that it is a journey, where work is what you do to make progress, and it is also a destination, where you end up if you are successful.

Surviving, striving, and thriving 

MLR: The framework for surviving, striving, and thriving came out of this analysis of what young people said. It describes the experiences and emotions young people anticipate experiencing as they move through their work journeys.

The way that they thought about surviving and survival in relationship to work was often consistent with their own first work experiences: working a part-time job, feeling replaceable, being a cog in the wheel. Young people talked about not having control of their time or their labor. It was the 9 to 5; it was the grind.

Thriving was the opposite in some respects. They felt this would be a time when they had control and time, and, in some cases, were giving back to their communities. Older adults talk a lot about finances and economic mobility, and some young people use that language, but many more talk about having “enough.” When they are thriving, there’s enough food, enough money, enough power. In the book, there’s a young man who talks about this idea of enough. He makes the comparison to a buffet. At the end of his life, he wanted to feel like he’d eaten everything on the buffet. He really talked about it as food, which I thought was interesting.

And then there is striving, when they are working toward thriving. It’s this longer period of time where you’re working hard and working towards something, kind of that verb piece. So many young people we talked with could articulate the feeling of striving, but it was harder to say what the behaviors or activities of striving might look like. So they’d say, “I’m learning new things,” or “I’m building relationships,” but would struggle to answer what actions they might take that would help them to build those relationships or what that learning would look like. Sometimes being college-bound madestriving easier to envision or imagine, but not always. College was sometimes part of striving and sometimes the experience that preceded striving. Striving is what happened in working over time. So once they were situated in some type of work, striving was what they would do to keep building. They would say, “I’m going to keep manifesting, stack money.”

How they want to live, not what they want to be

MLR: The surviving, striving, and thriving framework helps to describe the quality of life young people want to experience and the emotions they hope to have while having those experiences. We spend a lot of time asking young people, “What do you want to be?” But that may be missing the point. Maybe we should be asking them, “How do you want to live?” Or “what do you want to feel?” Maybe that’s a better starting point.

As I talk more about this work, I’m starting to think more about the framework as iterative, one that better acknowledges the reality that many of us [adults] go through stages of striving and thriving several times in our working lives. We hope that young people don’t come back to a survival stage after moving into striving. We don’t want them to feel they don’t matter or don’t have enough, but at the same time, we have to equip them with the mental toughness, belief in themselves, and ability to pivot, so that they can better navigate the emotions around surviving and work if that becomes necessary. 

I see a throughline—maybe it comes out in the book, maybe it doesn’t—around adaptability, building relationships, and self-reflection. Those are durable skill sets, the things you have to keep coming back to. Anybody looking for a job right now on LinkedIn is trying to build relationships and do self-reflection to figure out what to do next. It’s not easy. It’s hard. It’s hard, and it’s emotionally tough. How do we prepare young people for the emotional challenges of being an adult?

What’s wrong with linearity

Linear pathways encourage young people to choose a direction and move efficiently toward it. But Michaela’s research reveals that young people have a fundamentally different orientation that’s rooted in exploration, keeping options open, and the developmental need to learn about oneself through experience. 

We need to open doors, not close them 

MLR: We built out this framework [for stages of occupational identity formation] rooted in the iterative way young people wanted to experience learning about and engaging with work: Exposure, Exploration, and Selection. Keep in mind that the core research population was 15- to 21-year-olds, only some of whom had already made decisions about what to pursue or study. We also had a handful of 26- to 29-year-olds who we asked to look back and reflect on what those decisions had looked and felt like at the end of high school and how they wanted them to look or feel.

Kids whose school or home environment provided multiple exposure opportunities to different opportunities, different ideas, different interest areas, etc. sometimes had a feeling of overwhelm. A feeling there was too much to choose from and building pressure to choose “right.” Kids who had not yet found something that sparked their interest were worried that they were just pulling something out of a hat and wanted to be able to have a do-over when they had more information down the road.

We heard a lot about how they wanted the journey out of high school and into early adulthood to be more forgiving and feel less high stakes and high pressure. They worried the decision they made today or tomorrow or in a year was going to prevent them from making another decision in the future.

Linear pathways misrepresent the reality of careers 

MLR: Maybe we should come back to where we started. The metaphor of work and how it is not a fixed destination for many young people, and how many young people are thinking about how they want to feel as adults and less about what they should “do” or “be.”

In the book, I describe some of the ways young people perceive the path to their future dreams and goals as nonlinear. One example is the concept of a side hustle. There were also a lot of kids who had a very specific idea of what they wanted to do. One thing I thought was really interesting is that we, as adults, typically talk about a side hustle as plan B. It’s the thing that you’re doing to make ends meet. But we heard from a lot of young people that a side hustle is something that they wanted to have because they had many different things they were interested in. So it wasn’t something done out of financial need necessarily; it was something they might do in their spare time because they wanted to.

Our society spends a lot of time telling young people—telling all of us, really—that work is everything. It is the only place in which you should find purpose. You’re supposed to discover something that interests you when you are young and then make that interest into a career. If that happens, you will be totally fulfilled and love it; it’s going to be your life’s passion. And yes, that is one way that some people experience work. But, arguably, the majority of people don’t experience work that way. For them, work is actually a means to an end. It is a mechanism by which you get money, and money allows you to pay the rent or the mortgage, travel, take care of the people you love, donate to organizations you care about. The work enables you to have a certain life that you want for yourself, your family, and your community.

It’s highly problematic and incredibly dishonest to tell young people this neoliberal fallacy that work is supposed to be the source of their everything—including their joy—when we know that this is not always the case and perhaps is also not the goal. Young people want to know how working will feel as an adult. They are anchored on the feelings and the quality of life that working will enable.

Everyone pivots (but we don’t talk about it) 

MLR: The Exposure, Exploration, and Selection framework is visualized as something akin to the spiral shape of a conch shell, where we acknowledge and assume young people learn more about themselves through working and therefore the expectation should be that we are enabling them to return to an exploration and selection stage many times over their working lives.

The shape of the conch is connected to young people wanting feedback, wanting to be able to go out and learn more about themselves and then make some new decisions. We don’t talk enough about what that looks like, even though I would say probably, without even asking you, we have all done that. We receive a little more information or feedback, reflect or learn to reflect on what we know, and then make some new, more informed decisions based on this new thing that we now understand about ourselves. And working is one way of doing that. You go and you work, and you experience other things, other dimensions or ways of working, and then you know more about yourself in that context, and you make another choice. One could imagine that we are all toggling between selecting the work we want to do, then reflecting on what we’ve learned and whether that work still meets our needs, throughout our working lives. We don’t talk about the skills you need to do that. Our schools and our employers should be aligned in that reality, and, as adults, we should talk to young people about how they can make choices and choose practices that allow for this toggling to occur. But we don’t talk about that.

Why we need a different starting point

Our assumptions about young people shape our pathways strategies, from program design to outcome metrics. Michaela’s work argues that we are steeped in deficit-focused crisis narratives about young people—especially Black and Latine youth and those experiencing poverty. We asked her how those narratives show up in pathways efforts and whose interests they serve. 

Who gets to be the helper? 

MLR: One deficit narrative about Black and Brown young people in particular is that they are always in crisis and in need of being saved. And there’s a comfort when you think about the dynamic that we’ve established around who the helpers are and who needs to be helped. I don’t think that’s necessarily specific to the pathways community. Crisis narratives are apparent in all of our “helping” institutions: philanthropy, education, health care, etc. From a systems standpoint, we need these kids to need something and we need to be the ones that provide it. 

Young people aren’t widgets 

MLR: I think about the supply-demand piece. The notion that young people’s main contribution to the future is their labor and that in order to meet their potential as workers they need to be shaped into the thing that employers and our economy need. This negates and all but erases the inherent value that young people have as architects of our future. This framing of youth minimizes what they have to offer us: their excitement, optimism, courage, interest, and ability to dream and imagine things that we, as older adults, can’t.

We all know we’re supposed to be preparing young people for the future of work. We also know we don’t know what that future will look like. That’s a tension, but also an opportunity. What would it look like to acknowledge we don’t know what is coming and to work more collaboratively with the young people whose interests and minds and actions are likely to be instrumental in building the future?

Where we should begin 

If the pathways movement’s current orientation is misaligned with how young people actually think about their futures, what would a different approach look like? Michaela offers concrete ideas about changes we can make to both practice and policy. 

Ask young people how they want to live 

MLR: We need to ask young people how they want to live. They’re much more connected to how they want to live. They know what it’s like to live in a household that has enough, or to live in a household where it doesn’t feel like they have enough, and both are motivating. I think a lot of kids are thinking about their own wants and desires for their lives in comparison or in relationship to how they grew up. If we talk about occupational identity, we need to understand how that context and the meaning that they assign to those experiences are influencing how they think about their lives and their pasts and their futures.

Support young people in telling their own stories 

MLR: We have a habit of assigning meaning to kids’ experiences that is different from the meaning that they assign to those experiences. So, for example, we talk in our work about this idea of potholes, not craters. We have determined that certain experiences or events in a young person’s life are traumatic or catastrophic because we anchor on the outcomes at a population level. But this minimizes and devalues the meaning young people assign to those same experiences. Take teen pregnancy, for example. We have created a monster in our own minds: “This will derail them. This is the worst thing that can happen. This is a trauma.” But when we spoke with young people who had become parents as teens, they often described parenting as an important and joyful event that happened at a young age. It was something that happened. Maybe hard or difficult, but certainly not traumatic. It was one experience among many in their young lives, not the monster we made it out to be.

So we would do well to listen attentively and withhold our judgement. What do they want to experience? What have they already experienced, and how do they make meaning of the events in their own lives?

Value youth as resources 

MLR: We have a habit of segregating young people into groups based on their interests, who we think is most prepared, who has it figured out, and who does not. I would love to see kids with all different orientations around education, work, and career talking to one another about their future lives. Many of the young people leaving focus group rooms exchanged Instagram handles and phone numbers and offered to be in touch with one another after the group—to hold one another accountable. They said the conversation in the group was unlike anything they’d ever experienced before. What we know is that when young people are together in rooms that are not moderated or mediated by adult voices, they actually can be resources to each other in ways that we can’t. We should design for that—for them to share their fears, aspirations, and hopes with other young people—as a first step to supporting them to take steps into the life they want for themselves.

Rewriting the equation

We’ve been asking young people what they want to be, but they’re thinking about how they want to feel and what they want their lives to look like. They know they need more opportunities to learn and explore before they commit to a single path. Our systems prioritize connecting young people with jobs, but they see work as a process that will take them through three distinct emotional states—surviving, striving, and thriving—not as a fixed destination. Young people see work as the way to make sure they have enough: enough money, enough time, enough control. Having enough enables them to pursue their larger visions for their lives.

What young people aren’t thinking about is a vision of themselves as workers in waiting or as inputs in a supply and demand equation. That’s the vision that results when we start by asking what employers need instead of what young people need. We’ve designed backward from labor market efficiency rather than from developmental reality.

The reality is that young people are whole humans in a formative stage of life, seeking connection, purpose, and the conditions needed to thrive. So what happens if we consider youth on the demand side of the equation and design systems backward from what they really need to thrive? In our next post, we’ll dig into what it would actually look like to design for this developmental stage and what has to shift in policy and practice to make that possible.

This post is the third in All4Ed’s Normal Gets Us Nowhere series, which seeks to ask hard questions, spotlight fresh data and thinking, challenge longstanding assumptions, and offer new approaches that go beyond tinkering in order to contribute to the development of the next generation of pathways strategies. We don’t have all the answers about the right approach, and we are committed to working with both long-time pathways leaders and those new to the conversation to identify and test new ideas and strategies. If you’re working to build better pathways systems, we’d love to learn more and think about how we can work together, so please get in touch!

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