Voices + Evidence: What’s Moving the Needle (Vol. 2, No. 1)

By Crissy Chung

The Shift | Vol. 2, No. 1 — The Unfinished Work: Pushing Forward to a Collective Future

In the past few months, I have found myself asking a different kind of question: if young adults designed educational and workforce opportunities, what would disappear? Which norms, timelines, or assumptions would be scrapped? What parts of today’s economy would feel absurd or outdated?

Once you begin to ask the experts, the young adults themselves, the answers come quickly.

The first thing to go would be the expectation that stability must be delayed. For generations, young adults have been asked to accept years of precarity in exchange for the promise of eventual security. Struggle now and thrive later. Take the unpaid internship now to gain experience for your future job. Accept low-paying work and trust that it will pay off. That logic may have worked in a different economy and a different time, but today it is disconnected from reality. When rent, food, and basic living costs demand immediate attention, pathways that require prolonged sacrifice without near-term payoff stop looking aspirational and start looking unrealistic.

Another norm that would likely disappear is the idea that there is a single pathway to opportunity. Linear, traditional progressions from school to job to advancement are still treated as the gold standard, even though fewer people experience their lives that way. Young adults today understand that careers and opportunities are iterative, adaptive, and shaped by interruptions and real-life constraints. What feels outdated is not movement across roles or sectors, but systems that penalize or fail to support it. Systems can no longer afford to mistake nonlinearity for a lack of commitment, but rather recognize it as a rational response to a rapidly changing and unpredictable economy.

Perhaps most striking is what would disappear quietly: the assumption that young people must continuously prove they are worthy of opportunity. Many systems are designed around screening, sorting, and filtering candidates to test readiness rather than cultivate it. Yet in our work with young adults, what they consistently demonstrate is that trust is one of the most powerful drivers of performance. When young adults are given real responsibility, voice, and the ability to shape solutions, outcomes improve because the system shifts from gatekeeping to enablement, not because young people change.

If these norms disappeared, what would take their place would not be the breakdown of systems, but greater coherence and alignment across them. Opportunity would be designed around relevance rather than endurance. Education would be measured by its connection to real agency, not just completion. Work would be evaluated not only by output, but by whether it enables people to sustain a meaningful and stable life. Power would shift away from institutions and funding alone and toward partnership, with young adults positioned as contributors to system design rather than recipients of its outcomes.

This reframing matters not just for young people, but for the future of our regional economy. The systems young adults are calling for, including flexible pathways, early access to good jobs, portable skills, and shared accountability, are the same systems that allow all workers to adapt in an economy defined by constant change. If young adults were designing our economy and systems, much of what we take for granted would disappear. That is the point. What falls away reveals which structures and processes we have preserved out of habit rather than value, and whether institutions are ready to examine and let go of those habits to become active participants in building a sustainable and future-ready economy.

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Crissy Chung is the Head of Insights, Research and Evaluation at LeadersUp, driving our research initiatives and insights collection strategies.