Episode 4:
M0bility
through lifelong learning
People are working—but economic pressure persists
Hawaiʻi Appleseed’s Economic Justice data shows many households struggling to meet basic needs
Many of these households are already employed
Prior episodes surfaced:
job availability gaps (Episode 1)
uneven returns to education and training (Episode 2)
This data shows where people are today—but not how they got there, or where they are going.
If many working households are still struggling, what pathways exist for them to move into better outcomes over time?
Lifelong learning is intended to enable upward movement
Across Hawaiʻi’s workforce system, lifelong learning and upskilling have become the primary strategy for improving economic outcomes.
Public investments, education programs, and workforce initiatives are increasingly focused on helping individuals gain new skills, earn credentials, and transition into higher-wage roles. From short-term training programs to sector-based pathways, the underlying idea is consistent: that targeted learning experiences can create new opportunities over time.
At its core, the system is designed around a simple promise:
Gain skills → access better jobs → increase earnings.
Lifelong learning, in this sense, is meant to function as the mechanism that allows individuals to move through the labor market over time—adapting to changing opportunities and improving their economic position.
At the same time, there are strong reasons to question whether this dominant narrative fully reflects people’s lived experience. [LINK TO “A Good Job in Hawaiʻi” Report]
In conversations with communities across Hawaiʻi, the Islander Institute found that many residents define a “good job” not simply by wages or advancement, but by whether it allows them to:
remain rooted in Hawaiʻi
support their families
contribute to their communities
maintain their health and well-being
For many, the goal is not maximizing income—but making a life in place.
This suggests that the relationship between learning, work, and economic mobility may be more complex than the dominant narrative implies.
It also raises a related challenge:
Much of what people value most about work—and what defines meaningful progress—is not consistently captured in the data we use to measure success.
Today, we can observe important indicators like wages and employment. But we have far less visibility into how opportunity and mobility vary across communities, or how those experiences change over time.
Efforts like the Hawaiʻi Appleseed Center for Law & Economic Justice Economic Justice Dashboard help illuminate differences in economic pressure across geographies and populations. But similar visibility into access to opportunity and pathways to mobility remains limited.
To design a system that works, we need to be able to measure not just outcomes at a point in time—but how access to opportunity and mobility varies across people and places, and how it evolves over time.
If lifelong learning and upskilling are intended to enable better outcomes,
how consistently are they doing so—and for whom?
Opportunity exists—but pathways are not clearly translating into movement
Across Hawaiʻi’s labor market, there are clear examples of jobs that offer real potential for upward mobility.
Nationally, organizations like Opportunity@Work have helped bring visibility to workers who are Skilled Through Alternative Routes, or STARs framework—individuals who have developed skills through work, training, or life experience rather than a four-year degree.
Through a partnership with Lightcast, this work has made it possible to see—within real-time labor market data—where skills-based hiring is already happening in practice. Prior to this, there were limited ways to identify where workers without degrees were actually accessing jobs that lead to economic mobility.
Importantly, this is not just about jobs that don’t require a degree. It reflects roles where workers without bachelor’s degrees are already participating—and where skills-based hiring is functioning in the labor market today.
Hawaiʻi reflects this same potential.
Across industries in the state, a significant share of job postings are open to these roles—suggesting that many jobs are accessible to workers without a four-year degree.
Accessible Jobs in Hawaiʻi Don’t Always Lead to Living Wages
At first glance, this is encouraging.
In sectors like transportation, administrative support, and construction, a large portion of jobs are accessible to workers without traditional credentials. These are real entry points into the labor market—places where people can get started, gain experience, and build skills over time.
But a closer look reveals a more complicated picture.
Many of the industries with the highest levels of access do not consistently offer wages that meet the cost of living in Hawaiʻi. At the same time, some of the sectors that do offer higher wages remain less accessible to workers without degrees.
In other words, opportunity is not absent—it is unevenly distributed.
This pattern is not unique to Hawaiʻi. Across the country, there is growing recognition that access to jobs, wage levels, and labor market demand do not always align neatly within the same roles or industries.
But Hawaiʻi’s context makes this challenge more complex.
Geography, cost of living, and industry concentration all shape how opportunity is experienced across the state. What appears to be a single labor market at the statewide level often functions very differently depending on where you are.
This is where statewide data begins to reach its limits.
To dive deeper, we spoke to UHERO to better understand what we know and don’t know; did a county by county breakdown to understand what’s actually going on across the state; and analyzed what it would take to gain traction and increase mobility for Hawai’i’s workers.