Super insightful piece on early careers. Kantor argues that craft protects you from being treated as disposable. If you master something real, you command new technologies instead of becoming a supplicant to them. She also names something we often either forget, or choose not to mention: the panicked conventional wisdom about what field to enter and how to prepare has been largely wrong in every generation. She and her classmates were told to learn Japanese and the Japanese stock market proceeded to slump for the next 30 years. Today the panic sounds like "pivot to AI." The wiser move is to identify a genuine need and build the craft to meet it. This also indirectly backs up From Here's views on the rising importance of the gig workforce and the idea that individuals will need to continue to creatively find niche areas where their skills and passions meet. For anyone advising young workers: forward this piece. It says what most career counseling doesn't.

Interesting pivot from the NYT piece above. That one emphasizes how difficult it is out there, this one suggests the tide is turning, and both seem to be true. The most important line comes from IBM's CHRO: "The jobs that we had two years ago, AI can do almost all of it." IBM is tripling entry-level hiring anyway. McKinsey is up too. But the roles have been rebuilt: more customer work, more problem-solving, fewer rote tasks. Meanwhile, a Fordham career coach put it plainly: "Companies have a perfect-candidate mentality. They don't want to train anybody." And graduates who worked during school landed jobs at twice the rate of those who didn't. That kind of experiential learning, while also developing the human skills to succeed in a professional work setting, is something to consider as we look to improve the hire rates for new grads.

That last number is the one to sit with. Once someone has AI training, they can't imagine working without it. A structural divide is forming in real time between workers inside the AI economy and workers locked out. The people expressing the highest willingness to pay for training are the ones least likely to have it: younger workers, non-white workers, people without degrees. The demand is there, the question is who builds the on-ramp.

This isn't an open call. The round is closed. But it's worth reading as a signal of where one of the country's largest foundations is placing bets right now. Kauffman's three lanes (college, workforce, entrepreneurship) map closely to the same intersections we cover in Throughline every week. The emphasis on funding both research and practice together is notable. Too many funders pick one or the other. And for anyone building a case for workforce innovation funding, this is a useful reference point for how a major foundation frames the connection between mobility, systems change, and evidence.