Reframing the Future of Career Guidance in the Age of AI

Love it or loathe it, artificial intelligence (AI) overshadows nearly every current conversation about education policy and practice. In the field of career pathways, AI is unignorable, and rightfully so. Beyond influencing what and how students learn in the classroom, AI is rapidly transforming the workplaces students must be prepared to enter. So, what can we do in a moment of profound disruption and uncertainty?

Rather than attempting to answer these questions in isolation, we turned to the collective wisdom of the field itself. Across the nation, we see a growing emphasis and investment in career advising and career navigation systems. The standard concept of advising typically evokes scenes of one-on-one conversations between a learner and advisor. Since very few states or districts have the resources to ensure one-to-one advising for every middle or high school student, career advising is ripe for innovation that combines the best aspects of human expertise and AI technology. Fortunately, we see states in the Launch network adopting new strategies to strengthen career navigation, offering a window into how paradigms will shift in response to the changing context of learning and work.

In the examples below, we note how traditional approaches to pathways are being modified in ways that don’t replace the need for trustworthy, skilled adult educators and advisors, but instead require adults to reimagine their roles in supporting career journeys.

• Ohio recently announced a strategic shift in its infrastructure to support high-quality career and technical education by changing regional tech prep centers to broader career pathway support networks in seven regions. Driven by cross-sector regional steering committees, these “refreshed” centers have three main goals: ensure students in grades 7-10 access career tech prep, ensure all students get high-quality career advising, and better align education with regional workforce needs. Each center is led by an education service center or community college charged with scaling best practices across districts, providing professional development and creating a network for educators and advisors, and establishing a mentoring framework in partnership with business and industry.
• Community colleges from three states—Virginia, Massachusetts, and Ohio—are piloting new ways to provide cohesive supports and work experience to students in humanities and liberal arts (HLA) programs. The angle is twofold: through HLA coursework, students are building and practicing durable and professional skills that are increasingly in-demand in AI-impacted workplaces. At the same time, cross-sector partners come together in new ways to help HLA students connect learning to career pathways. To increase the value of HLA degrees, these community colleges are embedding employer-validated micro-credentials into their programs and adding internships so students can apply their skills to real-world projects and work. To implement this model, faculty participate in structured professional development and employers advise on the design of the program elements.
• Maryland is reimagining career advising through a new career coaching initiative launched under the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future. The effort requires formal collaboration among K–⁠12 education, workforce development boards, and community colleges to ensure every middle and high school student receives individualized, high-quality guidance. To support consistent, effective advising, whether delivered by advisors from a workforce board or by school counselors, the state has created a comprehensive career counseling framework and professional learning strategy. Developed in collaboration with Maryland Workforce Association (MWA), state partners, and career counseling practitioners, the new professional development model builds a career coaching community, strengthens practitioners’ career coaching skills and knowledge, expands access to tools and resources, and deepens collaboration across Maryland’s career coaching ecosystem.

What do each of these examples have in common? Each recognizes that AI’s disruption requires us to double down on the human elements of career pathways, not by resisting technology but by ensuring advisors and educators are equipped, empowered, and coordinated across systems. Progress necessitates that cross-sector partners share ownership and define new ways of collaborating to deliver consistent support for students and adapt pathways as the labor market shifts and AI reshapes work.

AI is transforming the workplace in ways that affect all of us, not just young learners on their way to the job market. The fact that AI will affect our very own jobs is a powerful motivation to act quickly and embrace new perspectives and ways of collaborating. Whatever your feelings about AI right now, we hope you will capitalize on this moment to lead—which just happens to be another uniquely human skill.