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The workforce world (myself included!) love to reference the “career ladder” - the idea that one experience leads to another. Carlos Vazquez, founder of GoSprout, pushed me to reconsider: careers are a jungle gym. They zigzag. You take steps toward and then away from a specific goal. You make tradeoffs between interests, compensation, responsibility, flexibility, and location. You learn what you want by learning what you don't. You find your footing not through a plan but thr

There's a lot of emphasis in career pathway work on planning. If only we can pair students with the right sequence of courses, design the right pathway, map out the right trajectory, they'll be able to successfully launch into a linear career — right? Students have to do things to know things about themselves. The most we can really offer them is the structure and support to try out the next step and the skills to make meaning from it when they do. That means helping them dis

Giving students the skills and confidence to open their own doors "Students don't understand that they have the most powerful weapon in the world to open doors for themselves: they're kids and they can ask for help." - Dr. Troy Podell One of the most important lessons I learned as a high school leader was the power of pairing high expectations with high support. Everything started with students being surrounded by adults who believed they could do really hard things — and who

Today's students are caught between two narratives about their future: work hard and stay the traditional course, or brace for a world so uncertain that planning is futile. The systems meant to support them aren't much clearer. Schools and workforce programs are either placing students on predefined pathways and hoping for the best, or scrambling to identify the careers that AI won't touch (as if anyone actually knows). What will hold, I think, is this: the students who thriv