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For generations, we built careers around a simple assumption: learn first, work second.

Earn a degree. Land an entry-level job. Build experience. Move up. Eventually, step into an executive role. We’ve also come to think of professional success as a ladder, each rung representing another step in our education, experience, and earning potential. But what happens when the rungs no longer sit where we expect them to? It’s not that the proverbial ladder of yesteryear is disappearing, but its rungs are certainly moving—and in some cases, they are getting farther apart. 

As new technologies change how work gets done, the skills workers need to succeed are changing with them. In 2025, the World Economic Forum estimated that would change by 2030. Its underscores how immediate that shift feels: 28% of entry-level workers believe half or fewer of their current skills will still be relevant in three years. Today's in-demand skill can quickly become tomorrow's baseline competency and, eventually, yesterday's relic.

For workers, continuous learning and skill-building create opportunities to take the next step in their current role, move into a new area of the business, keep pace with technology, or pivot as the nature of their work changes. It also shifts the role higher education plays. Our responsibility as educators doesn't necessarily end when a student earns a degree, because their need for education doesn't end there, either. We need to be ready when learners come back, whether for another degree, a certificate, a credential, or focused learning to build a particular competency. 

When the First Step Becomes a Leap

Lifelong learning isn't the only way the traditional career ladder is changing.  AI is also changing what happens at the very beginning. The very first step seems higher off the ground than it used to be. 

Entry-level work has traditionally been where people learn how work gets done. New employees complete routine assignments, shadow experienced colleagues, make low-stakes mistakes, and gradually develop the proficiency and judgment to take on harder problems. As AI takes on more entry-level tasks, however, employers are expecting new graduates to arrive ready for more complex work.

Roughly early-career professionals is employed in industries with medium-to-high exposure to AI-driven task change. That creates a new challenge: If the first rung is no longer a step but a jump, where do workers learn the judgment, experience, and power skills they once developed through entry-level work? We shouldn’t assume learning ends when someone earns a degree. We also can’t assume graduates will have years on the job to develop the skills employers demand. Higher education must help close both gaps: preparing people for more complex work before they enter the workforce and giving them ways to keep learning after they do.

Building a New Ladder Together

This should change how we as educators think about our role in developing talent. Our responsibility is no longer simply to prepare someone for their first job. It is to help them build the capacity to navigate an entire career. That means building an educational model that more closely connects learning to the full arc of one’s working life. We must do our best to ensure the ladder can bend so it is not knocked out from beneath us.

Fortunately, schools such as the Â鶹ԭ´´ School of Business have an opportunity to lead that shift because we sit at the intersection of education and real-world work experience. Our conversations and significant relationships with employers provide us with a firsthand account of how organizations’ needs are evolving and what learners need to build successful careers. Â鶹ԭ´´â€™s established model—creating the pathway from education to employers—will become increasingly meaningful as the traditional expectations and inevitably boundaries between learning and working realign.

For students preparing to enter the workforce, that means creating more opportunities to build practical experience before graduation. Learners need opportunities to practice power skills by solving real problems, applying judgment in authentic settings, navigating ambiguity, and making decisions without an answer key. Just as important, we need to make those experiences accessible to more students. The new career ladder cannot become another system in which opportunity depends on who can afford to take an unpaid internship, make the right connection, or get a foot in the door.

For people already in the workforce, the challenge is different. Lifelong learning must fit into a life already in progress. A working parent supporting a family or someone considering a career change may not be able to put work and life on hold every time they need to develop a new skill. Higher education needs to adapt to those realities, offering greater flexibility and multiple ways for people to develop and demonstrate what they know. 

Learning Can’t be a Luxury

If lifelong learning is becoming part of the new career model, then we need to build systems that make it realistically possible. Learning cannot be a luxury reserved for people with the time, money, or flexibility to step away from their lives.

For generations, education has been the great equalizer. It has long served as one of the most powerful ways people create new opportunities for themselves and their families while taking agency over their life’s trajectory. As the career ladder changes, we must protect—and expand—that promise.

Adapting higher education models to prepare students for the new career ladder should create more pathways to opportunity, not new barriers to reaching them. That means we must think about access as deliberately as we think about innovation. These two points are not mutually exclusive, but rather intrinsically complementary. A new model may better reflect how careers are changing, but it only works if learners can realistically participate in it. If lifelong learning becomes an economic necessity, access to lifelong learning becomes an issue of economic mobility.

At Â鶹ԭ´´, we've seen how designing education differently can expand who has access to it. Keeping tuition affordable is a deliberate part of our model, alongside an approach that allows learners to move through their education in ways that reflect what they already know and what they still need to learn. As the relationship between education and work changes, those principles become even more important. Access and affordability can't be afterthoughts in a system that may ask people to return to learning again and again throughout their careers.

The career ladder is being rebuilt. Education will not simply be what prepares people to step onto it; it will be part of how they move through it. As the speed of business continues to accelerate, our responsibility as educators is to evolve alongside it while ensuring people have the skills, opportunities, and access they need, not just to climb the ladder, but to keep moving when the ladder itself changes.