As the great Yankees Hall of Fame catcher Yogi Berra said, “It’s difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.”
Nonetheless, ’tis the season for predictions in the new year. I’ve got a few for 2025 that cross the K–12, higher education, and workforce silos. So, without further adieu, here are six predictions for you.
1. Might 2025 finally be the year of apprenticeships in America? After all, there is bipartisan support for them. But for America to go back to the future and party like it’s the 18th century, more legislation that offers funding for each apprentice hired will likely have to move—Pell grants for apprenticeships, anyone?—so that intermediaries can meaningfully enter the market and derisk things for companies wary of hiring unproven employees. Either way, though, expect apprenticeships to gain steam in the new Trump administration. GenZ’s suspicions of high-cost colleges and their search for other pathways into good jobs—especially career and technical education—aren’t going away. Nor are pushes in states like Indiana to make apprenticeships more mainstream in industries like healthcare and life sciences, advanced manufacturing, and banking and financial services.
2. Along those lines, expect states to continue making career exploration and work-based learning a bigger and bigger priority in 2025 for middle and high school students. It might not be CTE for All yet. Still, the landscape is considerably different, as more folks believe the College for All narrative hasn’t served sizeable portions well and that students would benefit by, in the words of TGR Foundation CEO Cyndi Court, “learning about work, through work, and at work.”
3. The bigger narrative in all this is that education and work are becoming less linear—a trend that will continue in 2025. Despite setbacks at the polls, more states will join the list of those with education savings accounts (ESAs) that support students in moving between educational experiences—including microschools, homeschooling, district public schools, charter public schools, private schools, and hybrids of all. Although college might not be the next step for as many high school graduates, it doesn’t mean they’ll never earn a degree, particularly if apprenticeship degrees gain steam. As Rachel Romer, founder of Guild, has said: “The 4-and-40 is dead. Now it’s about the every 4”—meaning that individuals must constantly be reskilling and upskilling. Although many companies continue to act like schools—as though individuals are motivated primarily to climb the ladder in their schooling and careers—our research in Job Moves shows that at least 75% of individuals change jobs to make progress in ways that depart from the career ladders. The more individuals can make progress as they define it rather than what organizations think, the better. However, this will prove difficult for policymakers and wonks who are intent on measuring outcomes.
4. The end of this current school year represents peak high school graduates before we enter the demographic decline. But don’t tell that to the many colleges that will close or merge in 2025 as they struggle with declining enrollment and revenues in the face of high costs.
5. As we wrote in Job Moves, if you peruse enough job postings, you sometimes get the feeling that employers are seeking unicorns. It’s no wonder that prospective employees feel they need to puff up their résumés to make themselves look like superheroes. And yet people on both sides of the process—employers and candidates—know that these posts don’t reflect reality. They’re playing a game of unicorns and superheroes, which does nothing to ensure a good match. Now, job applicants are increasingly using AI to apply for hundreds of jobs. Employers have long used AI to help filter the hundreds of incoming resumes from job applicants. AI is essentially and increasingly talking to AI, in other words. This will further break the job market as recruiters and hiring managers become more suspicious that what’s represented on someone’s resume accurately reflects who they are; even before the emergence of large language models, upwards of 70% of jobs were filled through people’s networks. Thanks to AI, expect that number to go up as people default to who they know to fill roles. In other words, social capital is going to become even more important in a world of AI.
6. What’s more, although people in my network love to fawn over the notion of “skills-based hiring,” when people write down that they have a certain skill or when an employer asks for a certain skill on a job description (unless it’s a technical one that’s demonstrated by earning a certification), most aren’t speaking the same language. The words mean different things to different people. As efforts to move beyond degree requirements in hiring gain steam (a good thing), rather than skills-based hiring, I suspect companies will look not just to people’s networks but also to evidence of people actually having done the core elements of the job—or showing the ability to learn what they need to do. This is what I call experience-based hiring—with a hat tip to USC Professor Morgan W. McCall Jr. And what’s the best way for young people to gain real experiences? Why, in work-based learning opportunities such as apprenticeships…which brings us full circle for predictions in 2025.
