Building The Workforce Of The Future: Strategies for a Globally Competitive Talent Pipeline Along America’s Innovation Highway 

Session Overview

Innovation thrives on people. To fuel an innovation ecosystem, we need a skilled and creative workforce capable of tackling complex challenges and coming up with groundbreaking solutions. While the Mountain West has attracted talent from other parts of the country and world, enhancing its talent pipeline is critical for long-term, sustainable growth and innovation. Leaders in the Mountain West’s workforce development landscape showed how they are working to create the skilled labor force of the future.

Key Session Insights

Introducing his panel of workforce leaders, Burning Glass Institute Executive Director for Programs Dr. Stuart Andreason asked what they were seeing as emerging regional innovation hubs competed to build up their talent pools.

Gallup Principal of Global Analytics Mr. Dan Foy started by noting four of the trends that his firm had identified nationwide:

1. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the past four years have seen a massive disruption in the workforce brought on by the emergence of remote work. And despite some employer steps to curtail remote work, he predicted that it would persist.
2. The emergence of AI is having an unsettling effect; while the number of people using AI on the job is still growing, many more people are anxious about the impact it will have on the future job market.
3. A lack of upskilling in the workforce on technologies around AI have led to concerns around affordability.
4. K-12 education is struggling to keep students engaged and interested in STEM careers, bottlenecking the number of people ready to fill technical positions.

Elevate Quantum Chief Operations and Financial Officer Ms. Jessi Olsen noted workforce development has become one of its the tech hub’s primary hurdles. To meet the challenge, many quantum institutions have turned to internal workforce development to supplement the currently insufficient public pipeline. National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) Founder and Executive in Residence Ms. Lucy Sanders, in response, relayed how she had worked earlier in her career, when at Bell Labs, with the National Science Foundation to broaden the use of computing. To build a computer-savvy workforce, they recognized that they needed to broaden access to computing technologies. This same problem is reflected today in the struggle to build a quantum workforce. “Intentionality” she argued, is central to any effort to build a successful quantum workforce; workforce development cannot just be “allowed to happen,” or else we will end up with siloed systems constantly reinventing the wheel. And it starts with broadening the number of people, from K-12 to senior-level computer scientists who are exposed to and trained in quantum.

Ms. Sanders highlighted the Elevate Quantum Workforce Collaborative, a group of ecosystem partners focused on strengthening the regional quantum workforce. Founded on the principle that local quantum entities benefit more from collaboration than from competition, this group convenes periodically to create new workforce development pathways. The partners contribute their time pro bono, driven by a shared belief in a unified regional approach to workforce development. Ms. Olsen added leaders must be willing to invest resources to advance workforce development and address existing gaps, too. She argued for a broader focus beyond PhDs and STEM degrees in quantum, as an example, highlighting the necessity of building an entire ecosystem comprising researchers, technicians, HR personnel, etc.

Microsoft Principal Technical Program Manager Matt Adamczyk outlined how his company is taking an intentional approach to workforce development through its “TechSpark program.” The program is built on two ideas: Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not; and when Microsoft builds disruptive technology, it has a responsibility to see it deployed for the good of the whole community. Working in all 50 states, TechSpark provides technical training for local communities, connecting them with new technologies to allow them to take full advantage of innovation. By doing so, the positive economic impacts of technologies like AI and quantum can be felt nationwide, not just the negative ones.

Mr. Foy has seen signs that AI would create a surge of talented workers looking to fill those new opportunities. His research shows most workers believe AI will reduce the number of jobs overall, with 21 percent believing that they will eventually lose their job because of it.

Mr. Adamczyk offered Microsoft’s experience at training people on AI as a potential model for how to approach a workforce adapting to quantum. Microsoft puts AI skilling programs into three buckets:

1. User – people using products like copilot on their computers for day-to-day tasks,
2. Scientists – researchers using AI to build better products or enhance research, and,
3. Business leaders – people preparing organizations for AI disruption.

While quantum is in earlier days than AI, a similar setup might be viable once it further matures. He stressed people do not need to understand quantum physics to use AI successfully, any more than they need to understand machine learning to use AI; the application is the essential component.

Dr. Andreason, referring to the anxiety among workers caused by coming disruptions, reminded participants that the workforce is often not as tuned into the innovation sphere as they are. He asked, how do you close the gap between workforce training and innovation when it is not well understood by most workers? Ms. Olsen suggested bringing educators into the conversation, but also guidance counselors and career planners. Students need to be intentionally connected to opportunities – it is not “if you build it, they will come.”

Mr. Adamczyk made it clear that the days of getting a degree and working for forty years are gone. Lifelong learning is going to be the new normal, but modern tools, like AI tutors, should make that an exciting opportunity rather than a hurdle, building worker confidence. Mr. Foy had the data to corroborate that idea; those using AI at work were significantly more confident in their future prospects than their peers, especially if they had received on-the-job training in its implementation.

To end, the panelists focused their attention back on where workforce training has traditionally had its beginning: high schools and colleges. Ms. Sanders called high school the “entry point” to the workforce and advocated for more programs to connect high school students to frontier technologies, like one in Colorado sponsored by Gov. Polis, which brings cyber into classrooms. And while the use of AI by students has been controversial, the panelists agreed it was ultimately a positive step. When pocket calculators were introduced, people believed that they would become a crutch in math education. The opposite was true; they radically expanded student capabilities, Mr. Adamczyk said. Students do not necessarily need to be computer scientists, but a working knowledge of AI implementation will be crucial for future success.