A group of fifteen workforce leaders convened to elevate employer leadership within public workforce systems.
The Industry-Led Talent Initiative works to strengthen the role employers play in the public systems that shape talent — so that education, training, and workforce systems produce the skills employers actually need, and learners reach the good jobs those systems were built to deliver. Its premise is that employers should not merely be consulted on those systems, but help lead them.
Fifteen workforce leaders — from sector intermediaries, employer-led coalitions, industry associations, state workforce systems, policy organizations, philanthropy, and academic research — met monthly across the first half of 2026 to answer three practical questions: how employers can lead, which decisions they should hold, and what states would need to change to make it real.
The body of work on this site is the result of that collaboration. It draws on the collective field experience of the members, the specific case studies they brought to the group, and the structural analysis that emerged from the group's discussions. The ideas and resources here are grounded in their work; the writing was synthesized and drafted by the co-leaders on the initiative's behalf.
This is a working resource rather than a finished public website — a substantive, shareable version of the group’s thinking, meant to be read closely by people who work on these systems.
It hasn’t been publicly launched, and it isn’t a campaign. We’re in an exploratory phase: sharing the work with people whose judgment we trust, testing where the ideas land, and looking for the places they can be put to use. Feedback at this stage still changes what’s here.
The field has no shortage of frameworks and toolkits. What it has very little of is a clear argument that employers should hold a meaningful role in public talent systems. We’re looking to publish this body of work with partners whose reach goes further than ours, so the argument reaches the people who set direction for state systems.
By workforce innovators we mean the state agencies, sector intermediaries, employer coalitions, and policy organizations positioned to change how a state’s talent system actually works. We’re working with a small number of them to apply the framework and recommendations to a specific state, sector, or set of decisions — the place where these ideas stop being a framework and start changing how a system works.
Employer-led sector intermediaries are the connective tissue between employers and public systems, and they are chronically under-resourced relative to the role they’re asked to play — or have the potential to play. We’re encouraging funders to treat them as core workforce infrastructure — and to structure investment so the capacity lasts beyond a grant cycle.
If any of these connect to work you’re doing, we’d like to hear from you →
Fifteen practitioners across sector intermediaries, employer-led coalitions, policy organizations, philanthropy, academic research, and state systems.
With thanks to the Livelihood Impact Fund for the seed funding that made this work possible.
Their support enabled the convening of the collaborative, the synthesis of the body of work presented here, and the continued development of the resources that will follow.
Questions or feedback? Interested in applying this work, publishing it together, or shaping an investment strategy around it — or something we haven’t thought of? We’d love to hear from you.
ashley@pathfinderstrategies.coThe thinking behind this work continues on Substack.