While Arizona communities and organizations continue investing in the state’s education-to-workforce pipeline, a lack of shared direction and coordination is limiting impact, keeping local efforts from turning into statewide progress, according to the first paper in a new Education-to-Workforce Whitepaper Series by Education Forward Arizona.
“Isolated efforts, even effective ones, do not have the same overall impact as multiple aligned and coordinated efforts,” the paper states. “Arizona’s economy is dynamic, and the state’s ability to prepare, attract and retain skilled talent is increasingly central to its competitiveness.”
Education Forward Arizona defined education-to-workforce alignment as something broader than job training: the work of helping people move through school, build skills, earn credentials, access needed supports and connect those experiences to opportunities in Arizona’s economy.
It emphasizes that alignment goes far beyond standard job training. Instead, it requires a connected pipeline where K-12 schools build foundational academic skills, career and technical programs offer direct industry exposure, and colleges and universities offer targeted degrees and certificates.
This ecosystem also relies heavily on outside partners, including employers signaling skill demands, economic groups tracking job growth and community organizations helping people overcome barriers to finishing school or entering the workforce.
According to the paper, early ecosystem mapping found more than 100 organizations across Arizona involved in alignment, career pathways, workforce development, economic development or broader opportunity-focused efforts.
So, with so many players investing in the education-to-workforce ecosystem, how can progress be limited? “Arizona has significant civic energy around workforce issues,” the paper states, “but that energy is spread across many actors with different roles, audiences, funding sources and definitions of success.”
That spread shows up in how people inside the system describe it.
“Stakeholders throughout the education-to-workforce ecosystem describe it as crowded, decentralized and difficult to navigate,” the paper states. “There is a prevailing sense that many organizations are doing important work. Still, there is a limited shared understanding of who is doing what, for whom, with what resources and toward which outcomes.
“That fragmentation slows progress. It can make it harder for students to see the path ahead, for employers to know where to engage, for policymakers to assess what should scale, and for local success stories to become statewide progress. It can also leave Arizona relying too heavily on individual relationships and local initiative rather than a coherent statewide approach.”
Education Forward Arizona said the issue isn’t that stakeholders are falling short individually; it’s that they’re not working from a shared picture.
Part of the difficulty in coordination, according to the paper, is that different facets of the ecosystem often share the same broad goal — connecting people to meaningful work — but ask different questions about how it’s done.
The paper breaks this multifaceted ecosystem down into three overlapping perspectives — education-centric, employer-centric and opportunity-centric. Each one plays an essential role on its own, the paper notes, but each has its limits when it operates too far removed from the others.
An education-centric view focuses on how people move through training, asking if students are finishing programs, if credentials hold real value, and if learning tracks connect smoothly. An employer-centric view targets labor-market demand, asking what businesses need, where industries are growing, and whether programs prepare enough people for the job market. And an opportunity-centric perspective focuses on access, asking who gets left behind, what people need to continue, and if pathways reach those facing historic barriers.
Together, the paper argues, these three perspectives all contribute to getting more students on paths to valuable credentials and employment — but without a shared framework guiding them, that work tends to happen in parallel rather than in coordination.
“The goal is to create enough shared direction that each part of the ecosystem can maintain its distinct mission while contributing to a larger statewide effort,” the paper states. “Done well, that kind of coordination can help organizations reinforce one another’s work rather than compete for attention, resources or influence.”
Although Arizona has formal structures like workforce governance bodies, tracking data, and targeted talent initiatives, the paper notes these pieces still operate largely on their own. The state’s main hurdle is bringing these separate regional strategies, employer demands, education systems and support services together into one shared framework centered on common outcomes.
“This challenge is becoming more urgent because education, economic growth, and opportunity are increasingly interdependent,” the paper states.
The paper continues to explain that as Arizona vies for new corporate expansions and long-term economic growth, its success hinges on building a robust local workforce. While bringing in out-of-state talent remains essential, the paper underscores the urgent need to strengthen homegrown pipelines so local students and working adults can secure these emerging high-skill positions.
Better alignment doesn’t require overhauling the ecosystem, the paper emphasized, just an enhancement.
“It would mean making existing work easier to see, connect with and strengthen,” the paper states. “A clearer statewide framework could help Arizona understand roles and responsibilities, turn data into decisions, reduce duplication, support regional strategies and make pathways easier for students and families to navigate.”
A unified framework could also help employers streamline engagement, the paper argues, replacing scattered requests for input or partnership with organized channels tied to regional and statewide priorities. That would give businesses a more direct way to communicate hiring needs, get involved in career-connected learning and see how their efforts connect to the bigger picture.
The paper adds that stronger alignment can highlight local innovation without stifling it. Instead, stronger coordination makes successful regional programs more visible, allowing other parts of the state to easily replicate and adapt what works.
Ultimately, the paper argues that the state needs a more coherent way to connect learning, credentials, skills, supports and work. To work toward that, Education Forward Arizona has a few ideas on what the state needs to do next.
The first recommendation is to build a shared, public-facing map of the education-to-workforce ecosystem, showing who’s doing what and where, for whom, with what resources and toward which outcomes.
This kind of map, the paper argues, would give stakeholders — including employers, educators, funders, community leaders, students and families — a practical tool for seeing gaps, duplication, bright spots, and opportunities for coordination, and a better understanding of how programs, pathways, supports, and institutions connect.
The paper adds that this mapping should also recognize the different roles organizations play — some focused on education and credentials, others on employer demand or access and support. Making those roles visible, the paper argues, could turn that same crowded, hard-to-navigate landscape stakeholders described earlier into something far easier to understand and move through.
The second recommendation is that the state establish a common framework for goals and outcomes.
“Arizona’s education and workforce actors do not need to use identical measures for every purpose, and they should not have to abandon their distinct missions,” the paper adds. “Still, the state needs a shared vocabulary for the outcomes that matter most.”
That includes defining what terms like student success, credential value, workforce readiness, employer demand, economic mobility and access to opportunity actually mean, the paper explains.
Without a common language, it explains, different systems can look coordinated while working toward different definitions of success.
A shared framework would make it easier to connect the dots between existing efforts — showing how attainment goals relate to workforce readiness, how credentials translate into employment outcomes, how employer demand should shape program design, and how support services affect whether students persist and complete their education.
“The purpose would not be to flatten the work into a single set of measures, but rather to enable improved coordination,” the paper explains.
The third and final recommendation from Education Forward is to use coordination to strengthen, not replace, local and regional efforts.
“Arizona should build on what is already working,” the paper states. “Many of the state’s strongest education-to-workforce efforts have grown from local leadership, regional partnerships, and relationships among schools, colleges, employers, public agencies and community organizations.”
Better alignment, the paper stresses, shouldn’t mean centralizing every decision, since economies, industries and institutional strengths differ across regions. Instead, a framework should offer enough shared direction to help identify effective local models and support, adapt or scale them where it makes sense.
“This distinction matters; local initiative is one of Arizona’s strengths, but it should not be relied on to create statewide alignment instead of more intentional alignment,” the paper notes.
Better coordination, the paper explains, can help ensure that promising work doesn’t stay in a silo, that regions won’t have to solve statewide problems alone, and that students’ access to opportunity is not overly dependent on their location.
“Arizona has the pieces to build a more coherent education-to-workforce approach,” the paper states. “The work ahead is to connect those pieces in ways that clarify roles, strengthen pathways, support regional innovation, and expand opportunity for more Arizonans.”
The paper makes a broader point about what aligning the education-to-workforce ecosystem actually requires.
“The system is not fragmented because people are disengaged. It is fragmented because different entities operate from distinct roles, incentives, definitions and accountability structures. Arizona’s challenge is to create enough shared direction that these distinct parts of the ecosystem can work together without asking every organization to become the same kind of organization.”
Education Forward Arizona explains that greater alignment, when done well, should help students and families see what paths exist, communities ensure individuals facing historic barriers share in the state’s economic future, employers connect with education and training systems more effectively, policymakers and funders see where investments are producing results, and the state as a whole more clearly connects learning to opportunity.
This story is made possible through grant funding from the Arizona Local News Foundation’s Arizona Community Collaborative Fund.
