Building a Skills-First Future: NGA Skills in the States Convening

From May 19-21, 2026, the National Governors Association (NGA) Center for Best Practices convened the Skills in the States Annual Convening at the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C. Governors' workforce and education policy advisors, state agency leaders, human resources (HR) officials, national employers and federal partners gathered to advance one of the most consequential shifts underway in state workforce systems: moving from credential-based to skills-based talent practices. Over three days, participants examined what it takes to move from policy commitment to operational reality: as employers, as system stewards and as market shapers. The consistent message was that the infrastructure states are building today is not a single-program effort. It is the foundation for how states will compete for talent, support workers and respond to artificial intelligence (AI)-driven labor market disruption for years to come.

Opening Fireside Chat: The New Talent Economy

The convening opened with a fireside chat between U.S. Rep. Burgess Owens of Utah and Nick Moore, Deputy Assistant Secretary in the Office of Career, Technical, and Adult Education at the U.S. Department of Education. Rep. Owens framed the stakes directly: the country faces a projected five to ten million job shortage by 2030, a retiring Baby Boomer workforce and a generation moving through education systems not designed to connect students to careers. Learning Employment Records, or LERs, are central to the solution. LERs are portable, individually owned digital records that capture credentials, skills, courses, and work experience, verified and shareable across state lines. He described them using an analogy that recurred throughout the meeting: like the Visa network, LERs do not own the data, they are the trusted rail that allows verified skills to move between individuals, employers, education systems and states. Moore grounded the conversation in structural challenges, historically low labor force participation, a leaky talent pipeline and the information asymmetry that the "train and pray" model produces, emphasizing that states moving now to adopt talent marketplaces will set the interoperability standards others must follow.

Skills in the States: Aligning State as Employer, System Steward and Market Shaper

State leaders from Arkansas and Arizona joined national experts from C-BEN to examine how states pursue skills-first strategies across three distinct roles simultaneously. The conversation surfaced a tension familiar to states: the A-team and B-team dynamic inside government. Appointed officials carry urgency for change; career staff sometimes carry an expectation that they can outlast any given administration's priorities. Panelists were direct that in the next six to twelve months, governors and senior appointees need to remove that inertia, particularly around data quality, unemployment insurance wage record enhancement and cross-agency administrative alignment. The session also explored what it means for a state to treat itself as a model employer. States that remove degree requirements from their own job descriptions, build in-house apprenticeship programs and implement competency-based hiring internally are not just practicing what they preach to private sector employers, they are building the institutional knowledge to be credible consultants when those employers come asking how to do it themselves.

Business Engagement Best Practices

Leaders from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation, the Indiana Chamber and SHRM Foundation challenged assumptions about employer engagement that are deeply held but only partially true. On the myth that building a platform means employers will come: designing without employers at the table produces tools nobody uses. Engagement must be sustained, asking the same stakeholders the same questions without demonstrating that previous input changed anything destroys trust faster than not asking at all. On small and mid-sized employers being harder to engage than large ones: decision speed in small businesses is a feature, not a barrier, and because small and mid-sized businesses represent the majority of jobs in every state, tools that cannot flex to their capacity will not reach most of the labor market. On the education-employer language gap: the problem is not an absence of translation capacity, it is an absence of shared accountability for building it. Panelists also introduced the term "skill phishing," as AI lowers the cost of misrepresenting skills on applications, the verified portable credential becomes an increasingly critical trust signal for employers.

Leveraging the National Guard as a Skilled Talent Pipeline

Gen. Chad Bridges of the Arkansas National Guard, Lauren Runco of SOLID and Robin Baker of Amazon joined NGA's Sytease Geib to reframe the National Guard as a high-performance workforce asset distributed across every county in every state, and largely invisible to civilian employers. Gen. Bridges made the structural case plainly: 80% of Arkansas's 9,000 Guard members serve part-time while building civilian careers, with training federally funded and skills continuously developed. His recommendation to state leaders was equally plain: learn the name of your adjutant general, who works directly for your governor and has access to talent already embedded in your communities. Baker was candid that even at Amazon's scale, sustainable Guard pipelines are hard to build because they are personality-dependent, when key people rotate, partnerships dissolve. Her ask was systemic infrastructure that outlasts individual relationships. Runco argued that traditional military occupation-to-civilian job crosswalks leave most value on the table, because durable skills like problem-solving, leadership, adaptability transfer across far more pathways than a title-to-title match ever surfaces.

Lessons from the Private Sector on Skills-First Implementation

Private sector leaders from Cisco, Accenture and the Massachusetts Business Roundtable pushed back on the assumption that the private sector has skills-first figured out while the public sector falls behind. Accenture's Natalie Sisto noted that every organization started from the same place on skills architecture and data quality problems inside large enterprises are just as endemic as inside state HR systems. Cisco's Miranda Lutz shared findings from the AI Workforce Consortium, a collaboration of eleven major technology companies: seven of the 10 fastest-growing ICT jobs are AI-related, and the single fastest-growing job category is AI governance and ethics, with demand up more than 200%. The human skills layer is as in-demand as the technical one. The session's most actionable theme was leadership's role in sustaining momentum: reward curiosity by spotlighting employees who build new skills; connect the organizational strategy to each department's day-to-day work so it does not feel abstract and protect dedicated time for learning, because a culture of continuous development does not emerge without it.

Advancing Skills-First Across States: From Commitment to Action

Year Up United's Grads of Life program led the convening's most operationally focused session, centering on a distinction that runs through nearly every failed implementation: commitment is not the same as implementation and implementation is not the same as sustained adoption. Most skills-first efforts do not fail because leaders stop believing in the strategy. They fail because the change was never defined precisely enough for people to know what to do differently on Monday morning. The session introduced a Head, Heart and Hand framework for driving behavior change. Head is the business case: the specific challenge and the metric that signals success. Heart is why the change matters to each stakeholder personally. Hand is capability, whether people have the actual tools and revised workflows to act differently. All three must be present. A hiring manager who intellectually accepts skills-first will still default to degree requirements if no one has provided a new interview rubric and permission to use it. The practical recommendation: start with one role family, one data system, one named challenge. Build the proof point, then tell the story.

Public Sector Best Practices for Skills-First Model Implementation

State HR and workforce leaders from Indiana, Massachusetts, Virginia and Washington provided a ground-level view of what operationalizing skills-first requires inside government. Washington's Travis Aberle noted that removing degree requirements from postings was straightforward; removing years-of-experience requirements is where the real cultural work lies. Indiana's Cam Rowley described five years of centralizing job architecture across 850 state classifications as the unglamorous prerequisite for everything else: without shared definitions, there is no foundation for competency-based hiring or workforce planning. Massachusetts Sec. Lauren Jones described the Mass Skills Coalition as a model for leading by example internally while pulling the private sector along. Virginia Works Commissioner Nicole Overley argued that the workforce system's most underused role is as a skills translator-between military and civilian careers, between education and employer language and between what workers have done and what employers actually need-and that starting employer engagement with a consultative conversation about business strategy, rather than a menu of programs, is what changes the relationship.

Mapping End-to-End Skills in Arkansas

Credential Engine and state experts from Arkansas then presented the most integrated state-level skills infrastructure in the country. LAUNCH, the state's talent ecosystem platform, connects job seekers, employers, high school students and supportive services in a single open-source system. It is built on the Credential Transparency Description Language and job posting data from the National Labor Exchange, with more than 10,000 competencies published and a living skills taxonomy that uses AI and human review to detect emerging skills in near-real time. The platform will be required for all 250,000 Arkansas public high school students by August. Every component is open source so any state that wants to build on what Arkansas has built can.

Building Opportunity Together: Employers, States and the Skills-Based Economy

At the Skills in the States Symposium, Julie Gehrki, Walmart SVP and President of the Walmart Foundation, joined NGA CEO Brandon Tatum for a fireside chat on how Walmart has built skills-based hiring and workforce development into its core business strategy - investing $300 million over the past decade in moving the broader workforce ecosystem away from degree requirements and toward skills recognition. With 75% of Walmart's management having started as frontline hourly associates, the company has leaned into internal mobility, including programs that pay associates to earn their commercial driving license and transition to driving roles earning around $135,000 a year, as well as new pathways into skilled trades like HVAC and refrigeration. Looking ahead, Gehrki highlighted how Walmart is upskilling its entire workforce in AI - including partnerships with Google and OpenAI to offer free certifications tailored for frontline workers - while calling on state and private sector leaders to accelerate the skills-based movement with urgency, reminding the room that the decisions made today will shape how the economy works for workers in the years to come.

Over the course of the event, attendees also participated in breakout sessions on making durable skills work for states, a practical framework for turning skills-first strategy into action, building evidence based skills data for today and tomorrow, how to leverage storytelling as a skills-first strategy, using AI for hiring reform, using small and mid-sized business successes as a model and a peer problem-solving workshop for skills-first leaders.

Looking Ahead

The workforce infrastructure being built for skills-first hiring is the same infrastructure states will need when AI-driven displacement accelerates. Waiting for labor market data to confirm the disruption before acting means the intervention window will have narrowed. These are not two separate priorities. They are one. NGA remains committed to supporting governors through peer connections, technical assistance and federal relationships as this work advances.