Giving Citizens Agency

Our country is investing billions in skills, apprenticeships, postsecondary education, infrastructure, emerging technologies and workforce development. But I keep coming back to a more fundamental question: What good are opportunities if people cannot see them, imagine themselves in them, or navigate their way toward them?

After more than five decades in career development, I have come to believe that one of our most important challenges is not simply a skills gap. It is an agency gap. Career agency is the capacity to navigate learning, work and life's transitions with intention, even when the future is uncertain.

For my forthcoming book, The Missing Bridge, I have distilled career agency into seven interacting capacities: Imagine. Understand. Recognize. Evaluate. Choose. Navigate. Connect. None develops simply by giving people more information. Agency grows through experience and encounters: meeting people doing unfamiliar work; visiting workplaces; trying things; discovering strengths; talking with mentors; connecting classroom learning with life; making small decisions; sometimes getting them wrong; reflecting; and trying again.

There is an important distinction here. Giving people agency does not mean telling them what their country needs them to become. Quite the opposite. It means expanding the possibilities they can see so that their freedom of choice becomes more real.

Imagine if we made a simple promise to every citizen: Before you make consequential choices about education and work, we will help you understand yourself, encounter possibilities you didn't know existed, experiment safely, learn from experience, and develop the confidence to navigate what comes next. We won't choose your future for you. We will help you develop the agency to choose, and keep choosing, it for yourself.

Our greatest untapped resource may not be a shortage of talent. It may be talent that has never had enough opportunity to discover where it belongs and how it can contribute.

Giving citizens agency is how we begin to change that.

AI Acknowledgement: I conceived and wrote this post, with creative and editorial assistance from my partner, ChatGPT.