Learning-to-Earning has become a central concept in debates on jobs, skills, and the future of work. As labour markets evolve and artificial intelligence reshapes roles and tasks, there is growing agreement that education must connect more directly with employment and economic opportunity.
This shift is necessary.
But it is not sufficient.
Across global policy and business discussions—such as those convened by the World Economic Forum—Learning-to-Earning is often framed as a question of speed, scale, and alignment. Education, in this view, is expected to adapt quickly and deliver the skills the market demands.
What this framing tends to overlook is that Learning-to-Earning is not only a delivery challenge. It is a design challenge.
From alignment to co-design
Many Learning-to-Earning initiatives involve education late in the process, once skills frameworks, credentials, and timelines are already defined. While consultation may take place, real ownership rarely does.
Co-design implies something different. It means education actors working alongside employers, learners, and policymakers from the outset to shape learning pathways together. It allows learning outcomes to evolve, acknowledges context, and recognises that meaningful learning cannot be fully standardised in advance.
Without co-design, Learning-to-Earning risks narrowing into short-term training—efficient, but poorly equipped to support long-term adaptability.
Skills alignment reshapes education itself
Discussions on skills transformation rightly highlight technological change, talent shortages, and the growing importance of human capabilities such as creativity and adaptability. Less attention is paid to what this implies for education systems.
Connecting learning and work requires more than updating curricula. It demands new teaching roles, continuous educator development, flexible assessment approaches, and institutions capable of learning and redesigning themselves over time. If education is expected to prepare people for uncertain futures, it must itself be supported as a learning system.
Why ecosystems matter
Learning-to-Earning cannot be implemented through isolated reforms or universal models. Skills develop within specific economic, institutional, and social contexts, shaped by relationships as much as by frameworks.
For this reason, sustainable progress depends on learning ecosystems. Communities of practice and cross-sector partnerships help translate shared ambition into practice, align expectations, and build trust between education, industry, and policy actors.
These ecosystems do not replace formal systems; they strengthen them by enabling collaboration where formal structures alone fall short.
Learning-to-Earning as shared responsibility
The question is no longer whether education must connect more closely with work, but how this connection is governed—and by whom.
If Learning-to-Earning is to deliver inclusive and resilient outcomes, education cannot remain a downstream provider responding to predefined needs. It must be recognised as a strategic partner in shaping skills pathways and learning futures.
This perspective underpins initiatives such as ComeThinkAgain, which focus on creating shared spaces for educators, innovators, entrepreneurs, and policymakers to collaborate. Rather than prescribing solutions, such approaches enable co-creation, experimentation, and collective sense-making.
Learning-to-Earning works best not as a formula to be applied, but as a process to be built together.