Nearly half of all American workers today are college-educated adults, with many holding jobs for which their degrees are no longer enough to help them to remain effective or sometimes even employable. Now, artificial intelligence is accelerating the issues, technological shifts and investor pressures that white-collar work has faced for decades.Today’s educated workers need the ability to switch directions, acquire skills and make radical changes as old career paths disappear and new ones emerge. The problem is that our education and training systems haven’t kept pace with the abrupt and often unanticipated shifts in job requirements. Layoffs forcing career pivots are common across numerous industries, and a study of a million career trajectories by New York University and the Burning Glass Institute, a labor market analytics firm, found that nearly 25% of mid-career professionals were now in a “stall,” defined as five or more years without wage growth or promotion.What is a college grad aged 25, 40 or 55 to do in the face of these radical job market shifts? Where can people and companies go to get the “just-in-time” knowledge and skills needed to adapt and stay competitive? These are central questions facing millions of students, parents, workers and employers today.Here’s what almost nobody knows: A solution is already hiding in plain sight. The University of California system educates more than 320,000 college graduates each year in new and emerging technologies, including healthcare, teaching, manufacturing, drug development, material science and media, largely through its extension and professional development programs.Through studies conducted across eight metropolitan regions, including New York, Atlanta, Chicago and San Diego, we discovered that research universities throughout the U.S. are helping college-educated workers retool and pivot their careers thanks to what we describe as America’s “shadow training system.” These programs quietly meet employers’ needs for up-to-date skills and graduates’ needs to stay current, even those who hold advanced degrees from prestigious institutions.California helped invent this model. UC San Diego, for example, has spent more than 50 years meeting the real-time talent needs of once incubating local companies such as Qualcomm, the telecom giant, and Illumina, a leader in DNA sequencing technologies. Meanwhile, Georgia Tech has trained tens of thousands of working adults in digital technologies, originally with AT&T‘s backing. And the University of Washington has enjoyed years of career training partnerships, first with Boeing and more recently with Microsoft.The universities doing this training understand that “career launching” of undergraduates with bachelor’s degrees is not enough, and that “career sustaining” education of college graduates is not a luxury or a private good but a necessity for regional economic competitiveness. They remain strong in foundational degree education — focusing on the liberal arts and sciences that form and launch lifelong thinkers, communicators and problem servers. And they operate at dual speeds: Alongside the deliberate rhythms of degree programs and research institutions, they run nimble units that read labor market signals in real time, design short-term programs with employer input, schedule these programs for working adults and retire them when demand fades.Community colleges and technical programs rightly get credit for workforce development, but the college-educated workers facing disruption are largely absent from that conversation, even as employers search for people who can quickly adapt to new technologies in the office, the laboratory, the clinic and the sales floor. Hiring managers, notably, already trust universities here. A National Assn. of Colleges and Employers survey suggests that employers place unusual trust in university certificates: More than 75% ranked them above certificates from community colleges and for-profit institutions.If we want to address this issue head on, the UC system’s leadership — its president, its chancellors, its regents — should declare career-sustaining education a formal and co-equal mission of the universities alongside launching careers and conducting research — and it should invest in this mission and measure it accordingly. That means every UC graduate would come with a guarantee that no diploma currently promises: that the university that launched their career will have their back if and whenever reeducation becomes necessary. It also means that California will be able to maintain a workforce nimble enough to keep the state’s regions competitive in a global economy now being rewritten by AI.The mechanisms exist. The track record is more than 50 years long. What is missing is the declaration that this work is central to what a public research university is built for. Many of the technologies disrupting careers today are pouring out of university laboratories. The obligation to help Californians adapt to them should live there as well.John D. Skrentny is a professor of sociology at UC San Diego. Mary L. Walshok is recently retired associate vice chancellor for public programs and dean of university extension at UC San Diego. Insights L.A. Times Insights delivers AI-generated analysis on Voices content to offer all points of view. Insights does not appear on any news articles. Viewpoint This article generally aligns with a Center point of view. Learn more about this AI-generated analysis Perspectives The following AI-generated content is powered by Perplexity. The Los Angeles Times editorial staff does not create or edit the content. Ideas expressed in the pieceThe article argues that in a labor market reshaped by rapid technological change and artificial intelligence, the skills acquired in a bachelor’s degree now have a short shelf life, echoing analyses that suggest core professional skills may remain current for only a few years and must be regularly refreshed.[1]It contends that the University of California system already operates a largely invisible “shadow training system” through its extension and professional education programs, which provide just‑in‑time, employer‑aligned upskilling in areas such as healthcare, manufacturing and digital technologies for hundreds of thousands of college‑educated adults each year.The piece highlights long‑standing partnerships as proof of concept, noting that UC San Diego has spent decades meeting real‑time talent needs for companies like Qualcomm and Illumina, while institutions such as Georgia Tech and the University of Washington have similarly built short, targeted programs with major corporate partners, effectively running at “dual speeds” — traditional degree education alongside nimble, market‑responsive nondegree offerings.It maintains that, although community colleges and technical programs rightly receive credit for workforce development, they do not fully serve the large group of college‑educated workers whose jobs are being disrupted, and it asserts that research universities are uniquely positioned to help this population stay current because employers tend to value university‑issued credentials and structured continuing‑education options.[6][10]Building on this diagnosis, the article urges UC leadership to formally declare “career‑sustaining” education for graduates a co‑equal mission alongside launching careers and conducting research, and to invest in and measure this mission so that every UC diploma effectively comes with a guarantee that the university will be available for reeducation if changing job requirements make it necessary.The piece further suggests that, because many of the technologies now disrupting careers emerge from university laboratories, public research universities have an obligation not only to innovate but also to help Californians adapt to those innovations, framing ongoing education for alumni as essential to maintaining regional economic competitiveness in a global economy increasingly shaped by AI.Different views on the topicMany career‑development guides and employer‑focused resources emphasize that staying relevant is primarily an individual responsibility, urging workers to conduct regular skills‑gap analyses, monitor job postings for emerging requirements and build personal learning plans that rely on online courses, certifications and self‑directed practice rather than on formal retraining guarantees from their alma mater.[8][9]In contrast to the article’s call for research universities to take the lead, other commentary on lifelong learning highlights community colleges, adult‑education centers and online platforms as the most accessible providers of upskilling, pointing to free or low‑cost classes, short professional certificates and flexible micro‑credentials as practical routes for workers at different education levels, not just graduates of large research systems.[3][4][10]Advice aimed at recent graduates often frames continuous learning as an informal, multifaceted process — involving mentors, workplace committees, volunteer work, book clubs, podcasts and local clubs — suggesting that broad engagement with community and workplace resources can be as important as university‑based certificates for keeping skills fresh and adaptable over time.[2][4][7]Employer‑oriented research that finds many traditional degrees do not adequately prepare students to “hit the ground running” tends to call for redesigning undergraduate curricula, stronger internships and more applied projects, rather than for expansive post‑graduation training guarantees, implying that universities should focus first on improving the effectiveness of their core degree programs before expanding extension‑style missions.[11][13]Analyses of hiring trends that stress the importance of soft skills — such as communication, teamwork, problem‑solving and adaptability — note that employers often value these human capabilities as much as or more than technical credentials, and that such skills can be cultivated through everyday work, coaching and mentoring, thereby challenging the idea that university‑issued certificates are central to long‑term career resilience.[7][12]Finally, institutional guidance on keeping skills current frequently encourages workers to seek support from managers, professional associations and industry events, underscoring the role of employers and sector organizations in organizing training, seminars and conferences and suggesting that responsibility for career‑sustaining education should be shared across an ecosystem of actors rather than concentrated primarily within public research universities.[5][8]
