The Stranded Talent Dilemma: A Challenge to Higher Ed, Employers, and Government

Millions of Americans are employed. But their work doesn’t advance them. They’re not outside the economy. They’re stranded inside of it. We’ve built a workforce system designed to get people jobs. But we haven’t built one to help them move forward. 

A person can be employed and educated yet stuck. A worker may have a paycheck but no significant raise. A worker may have know-how, but no credentials that employers recognize.  

This is a problem—and an opportunity. Our public debate often revolves around misguided binaries of employed or unemployed, in the labor force or not, college graduate or non-graduate. Those categories matter, but they miss Americans whose problem isn’t absence from work but a lack of progress within it. 

A report last month from the Burning Glass Institute and NYU School of Professional Studies, Sidetracked: The Hidden Crisis in Mid-Career Mobility, puts numbers on this problem. Using over 1.3 million career histories at their ten-year career mark, it finds that roughly one in four (24.2 percent) mid-career professionals are stalled, defined as having five or more years with no meaningful promotion and negligible wage growth. So while they haven’t left the labor market, their progress has been stymied. A healthy economy should create momentum, build skills, and raise wages. When work flatlines, employment alone is a thin measure of success. 

The stranded-talent problem reaches beyond the report’s mid-career professionals to include workers in low-wage jobs with high turnover and little upward mobility. It includes adults who started college but never finished, and workers, usually women, whose careers slowed after caregiving or other employment gaps. It includes those whose skills are real but invisible to employers because they were learned on the job rather than in school or through certification. 

The common thread is not idleness but underuse. Talent exists, but the systems that should identify, develop, and move it toward opportunity are weak. 

For years, America’s answer to stalled opportunity has been to promote more education. That’s not wrong. But it’s incomplete. Education can be transformative, but telling adults to go back to school often misses the problems they face.  

Which program? For what job? At what cost? What evidence shows which credential matters? How will they manage work, family, transportation, child care, and debt?  

The harder point is that the old opportunity bargain no longer works well enough for adults whose careers have stalled. Telling them to get more education assumes they can afford the time, money, and risk of starting over. Many cannot. What they need is a more practical opportunity system, one that treats college as one route, but also builds serious alternatives, such as apprenticeships, employer-based advancement pathways, community college programs tied to good jobs, industry-recognized certifications, career coaching, and talent marketplaces that workers see and use to take the next step.  

The infrastructure connecting workers to those routes is fragmented and hard to navigate. The policy question is how to align learning and work to move people forward. 

Sidetracked points to a useful opening. Some stalled workers regain momentum not by starting over but by moving into adjacent roles that leverage their existing skills. For example, the report shows how a stalled computer programmer who moves into data science can sharply reduce the risk of remaining stuck, as the new role builds on existing technical skills while offering a stronger career trajectory.  

That should shift the policy test from activity to movement. It’s not simply about whether a worker enrolls in training, completes a course, or earns a credential. It’s about whether that step changed the worker’s economic trajectory.  

Many workers aren’t stuck because no better job exists nearby. They’re stuck because the next move is hard to see. They don’t know which skills transfer, which credentials employers value, which occupations offer better mobility, or which institutions get them there. The routes may exist, but the map is weak. That’s why the idea of a talent marketplace, or what Achieve Partners Managing Director Ryan Craig calls a career GPS, deserves attention.  

A good talent marketplace would help workers understand what they can do, identify better jobs that build on that, connect them to relevant learning or work-based experience, and help employers recognize talent they might otherwise overlook. In a fragmented education and workforce system, navigation isn’t a luxury. It’s infrastructure. 

Imagine a retail supervisor who has managed schedules, handled customers, trained new workers, and solved daily operational problems, yet sees no clear path beyond the store. A good career-navigation system could show that those skills overlap with higher-paying roles in logistics, health care administration, or customer-success management. It could identify the missing skills, point to a short community college or industry program that fills the gap, and show whether local employers actually hire from that pathway. That is much more useful than simply telling the worker to reskill by getting more education. 

The rise of artificial intelligence makes this important. Much of the AI debate has focused on job loss. But the stranded-talent lens points to a second risk. AI may leave many workers stuck. It’s already eroding entry-level work through which people once learned, proved themselves, and began to climb the opportunity ladder. When the first rung of the career ladder disappears, the damage can be invisible in the short run because there are neither layoffs nor headlines. But the long-run effect on mobility is severe.  

The risk isn’t only at the bottom. AI could flatten career ladders at every level if employers use technology mainly to cut costs rather than redesign jobs for learning and advancement. In that world, the damage wouldn’t show up in unemployment numbers but in slower wage growth, fewer promotions, and more workers stranded in jobs while the economy changes around them.  

That’s why an AI workforce shouldn’t focus only on rescue after displacement. It should focus on prevention that keeps workers moving forward before they stall. That requires more than urging employers to do the right thing. Public workforce funds, state economic development incentives, and large public contracts should ask firms adopting AI to show how they retrain incumbent workers, redesign jobs, and move people into AI-augmented roles rather than simply eliminating tasks.  

States and local jurisdictions should identify occupations where AI is likely to change tasks and then work with schools, community colleges, universities, workforce boards, employers, unions, industry associations, other training providers, and state agencies to build short, practical programs that lead to new jobs. That means designing these programs around a real job transition. For example, it means helping an administrative worker become a project coordinator, a customer service worker move into health care operations, or a technician learn the AI tools now used in advanced manufacturing.  

Community colleges are especially important because they sit close to students, working adults, employers, and regional economies. But they can’t do the job alone.  

Employers must make advancement more visible inside firms. States must use labor market data to show where mobility occurs and where it’s blocked. Workforce boards must focus less on short-term placements and more on career progression. Philanthropy can begin building data systems and local partnerships that make opportunity easier to navigate, pushing public systems to follow suit at scale.  

A stranded-talent agenda would start with six practical moves. 

1. Measure mobility, not just employment. States and regions should track whether workers are moving into better jobs over time, not simply whether they are working. Employment is necessary, but career momentum is a better measure of opportunity. 
2. Build career-navigation systems for adults. Workers need clear, local information about better jobs, transferable skills, wage gains, training options, and likely returns. It should be understandable to workers, not buried in labor-market dashboards for specialists. 
3. Make credentials prove their worth. Short-term credentials can help workers regain momentum, but only when linked to real employer demand and clear opportunities for advancement. Public funding should favor programs with evidence that workers move into better jobs. 
4. Rebuild employer mobility ladders. Employers benefit when talent isn’t stranded. They should make internal advancement routes more transparent, invest in worker training, and use AI to identify hidden talent rather than automate work. 
5. Connect support services to mobility. Many workers can’t take the next step if training is offered at the wrong time, in the wrong place, or without help managing child care, transportation, job coaching, or lost wages. Public workforce programs shouldn’t try to build every support on their own but should partner with employers, philanthropy, unions, and community organizations to bundle practical help around programs that lead to better jobs.  
6. Measure what matters. A public report card that tracks and grades progress on employer-provided investments, such as wage growth, promotion rates, and other important measures, would shine a light on firms that are helping workers move forward and those that aren’t.  

The next opportunity agenda begins with a simple premise. A job isn’t enough if it leads nowhere. Education and training, workforce policy, employer practice, and public investment should help people move forward. The opportunity-pluralist promise isn’t one path for everyone, but a real path for everyone.