Field GUide Chapter 5:
Next questions
What questions remain unanswered? What do we need to know to learn more?
Chapter 5
NEXT Questions
Chapter 1
The Workforce Challenge
What problem are we actually trying to solve?
The first four chapters of this Field Guide explored what we currently understand about Hawaiʻi’s workforce. We examined the workforce challenge. We explored how people experience opportunity. We developed a framework for recognizing where economic mobility is emerging, and we identified the building blocks communities can use to strengthen workforce pathways.
Together, these chapters represent our best understanding based on the evidence available today. But they also reveal something equally important. There is still much we don’t know.
Throughout Season One, every analysis answered one question while raising several others. New data revealed unexpected patterns. Conversations with employers challenged our assumptions. Community discussions highlighted questions that existing workforce information simply cannot answer. Rather than producing definitive answers, the Workforce Understory has helped clarify where Hawaiʻi’s greatest opportunities for learning now exist.
That is not a limitation. It is the purpose of workforce intelligence. Throughout this Field Guide, one idea has surfaced again and again: Better workforce decisions require both evidence and curiosity. Evidence helps us recognize patterns, challenge assumptions, and identify where opportunity may be emerging. Curiosity reminds us to ask better questions, engage the people who experience the workforce every day, and remain open to what we still have to learn.
Importantly, those ideas are not sequential. We do not need perfect information before we begin working together. We need enough evidence to move forward thoughtfully—and enough curiosity to continue learning as we go. This distinction matters because workforce intelligence is not defined by the amount of data we collect. It is defined by our ability to ask better questions, make better decisions, and learn together over time.
Sometimes better decisions require new datasets. Sometimes they require stronger partnerships. Sometimes they require listening more carefully to workers, employers, educators, and communities. And sometimes they simply require asking better questions of information we already have.
As Hawaiʻi begins implementing the Generational Workforce Commitment, the question is no longer simply: “What do we know?” It becomes: “What do we still need to learn in order to build stronger workforce pathways over the next twenty years?”
The purpose of this final chapter is not to describe everything we don’t know; to identify the questions that matter most. These questions represent the next stage of Hawaiʻi’s workforce intelligence journey. They point toward the information, partnerships, and learning routines that can help communities continue improving workforce pathways over time. Together, the evidence from Season One points toward four important questions that Hawaiʻi’s emerging workforce intelligence agenda will need to answer.
Chapter 2
Access to opportunity
How is opportunity experienced across Hawaiʻi’s workforce?
Chapter 3
Recognizing opportunity
Where should communities focus their efforts?
Chapter 4
Building Mobility Pathways
How do we turn opportunity into lasting mobility?
Question 1:
How do people actually move through workforce pathways?
We still understand programs better than journeys.
Throughout Season One, we examined internships, career-connected learning, underemployment, STARs, and incumbent worker advancement. Each provided an important piece of Hawaiʻi’s workforce story. Together, they helped us better understand how different investments can support economic mobility.
What we still cannot see is how those experiences connect over time.
Today, workforce information is largely organized around programs and institutions. We know when someone enrolls in training. We know when they complete a credential. We may even know whether they find employment. But the journey between those milestones is often invisible.
Did an internship lead to continued education?
Did a short-term credential create opportunities for advancement several years later?
Did a worker successfully transition from one industry into another?
Where do people become disconnected?
Which transitions consistently lead to long-term economic mobility?
These are some of the most important questions facing Hawaiʻi’s workforce system, yet they are among the hardest to answer with the information currently available.
Why This Matters
Throughout this Field Guide, we have argued that people experience pathways—not programs. If that is true, then our workforce intelligence should help us understand pathways as well. Today, we often evaluate individual programs in isolation. We ask whether participants completed training, earned a credential, or found employment. Those are important measures, but they tell us very little about whether people continue advancing over time.
Communities increasingly need to understand something different. How well is the pathway itself working? Can people move successfully from learning to work? From an entry-level job to a career? From one opportunity to the next as industries and technologies change?
Answering those questions would allow communities to identify where pathways are strong, where they break down, and where better coordination could create better outcomes for workers and employers alike.
Building the Capability
Answering this question will require Hawaiʻi to strengthen its ability to follow people—not just programs. That will likely require new forms of workforce intelligence, including:
Enhanced Wage Records that connect education and employment outcomes.
Longitudinal learner and worker data that follows career progression over time.
Cross-agency data sharing that reduces fragmentation across workforce systems.
Journey analytics that help communities understand how people move through education, training, and employment.
Better measures of career transitions, advancement, and long-term economic mobility.
Ultimately, the goal is not simply to know whether individual programs work. It is to understand whether Hawaiʻi’s workforce pathways are helping more people build meaningful careers over time.
Question 2:
Why do pathways succeed in some communities and not others?
Statewide patterns reveal possibilities.
Communities explain what makes them work.
Throughout Season One, county comparisons repeatedly demonstrated that workforce opportunity differs across Hawaiʻi. The industries creating opportunity are not the same. The occupations in demand are different. The number of people within reach of a living wage varies. Even industries that appear promising statewide often look very different once viewed through the lens of a local labor market. Those differences reveal where opportunity may be emerging. They do not explain why.
Why does one community succeed in building a stronger workforce pathway while another struggles to do the same?
What local conditions help people move from learning to work?
What partnerships help employers find the talent they need?
Why do similar industries produce different workforce outcomes in different places?
These questions cannot be answered through statewide averages alone. They require a deeper understanding of how local workforce ecosystems actually function.
Why This Matters
Throughout this Field Guide, we have argued that workforce strategies should be designed locally. If that is true, then workforce intelligence must become more place-based as well. Communities need more than statewide labor market projections. They need to understand the unique combination of employers, educational assets, workforce organizations, community partners, transportation systems, housing conditions, and local relationships that shape opportunity where they live.
Just as importantly, communities need opportunities to learn from one another.
Why has one county successfully expanded internships while another has struggled?
How did a regional employer partnership emerge?
What conditions allowed a healthcare pathway to succeed?
Which innovations can be adapted elsewhere, and which depend on local context?
Understanding these differences can help communities build on their own strengths while learning from the experiences of others.
Building the Capability
Answering this question will require Hawaiʻi to strengthen its ability to understand workforce pathways at the regional and community level. That will likely require new forms of workforce intelligence, including:
County-level workforce intelligence that goes beyond statewide averages.
Stronger employer engagement to understand local workforce needs and opportunities.
Community validation that brings together workers, learners, employers, educators, and workforce organizations.
Regional learning networks that allow communities to learn from one another’s successes and challenges.
Place-based workforce strategies informed by both quantitative evidence and local experience.
Ultimately, the goal is not simply to understand how Hawaiʻi’s workforce is changing. It is to understand why opportunity emerges in some places, how communities strengthen it, and what others can learn from their experience.
Question 3:
How do we know whether the workforce system itself is improving?
We measure organizations well. We rarely measure pathways.
Throughout Season One, we examined many of the ways workforce success is measured today. Graduation rates, credential attainment, program completion, and job placement all provide valuable information about the performance of individual organizations and programs.
Those measures matter. But they answer a different question than the one Hawaiʻi now needs to ask. They tell us whether a school, college, workforce program, or employer is succeeding within its own sphere of responsibility. They tell us very little about whether the workforce system as a whole is becoming more connected, more navigable, or more capable of helping people build meaningful careers. That raises a different set of questions.
Is it becoming easier for people to move from education into employment?
Are transitions between organizations becoming smoother?
Are employers finding the talent they need more effectively?
Are workforce partners working together in ways that create stronger pathways over time?
These questions shift our attention away from individual organizations and toward the connections between them.
Throughout this Field Guide, we have argued that economic mobility depends on pathways rather than isolated programs. If that is true, then workforce intelligence should help us understand the health of those pathways as well.
Why This Matters
Communities rarely experience the workforce system one organization at a time. People move across schools, colleges, employers, workforce organizations, and community services throughout their careers. Their experience depends not only on the quality of each organization, but also on how well those organizations work together.
Today, most performance measures stop at organizational boundaries. They tell us whether individual programs are effective, but they rarely tell us whether the overall system is becoming easier to navigate or better coordinated.
Communities increasingly need to understand something different. Is the workforce system itself becoming stronger?
That means looking beyond completion rates and job placements to understand how people move between opportunities, where pathways break down, and whether collaboration is improving over time. Answering those questions would allow communities to strengthen not only individual organizations, but the relationships that connect them into a functioning workforce system.
Building the Capability
Answering this question will require Hawaiʻi to develop new ways of measuring workforce systems—not just individual organizations. That will likely require new forms of workforce intelligence, including:
Measures of successful transitions between education, training, and employment.
Indicators that assess how well organizations are connected into coherent workforce pathways.
Shared outcomes that encourage collaboration across institutions rather than isolated program success.
Measures of pathway health that help communities identify where workforce journeys are strong and where they break down.
Cross-system performance indicators that reflect how effectively education, employers, workforce organizations, and public agencies are working together.
Measures of coordination, alignment, and continuous improvement across local workforce ecosystems.
Ultimately, the goal is not simply to understand whether individual organizations are succeeding. It is to understand whether Hawaiʻi’s workforce system is becoming more connected, more coordinated, and more capable of helping people learn, work, and thrive over time.
Question 4:
How do communities continue learning together over time?
The goal is not simply to improve today’s workforce system.
It is to build one that keeps improving.
Throughout this Field Guide, we have argued that workforce pathways should be designed intentionally. But no pathway is ever truly finished. Industries evolve. Employers adopt new technologies. Workers develop new aspirations. Communities experience new opportunities and new constraints.
The workforce system must evolve alongside them. That means workforce intelligence cannot consist only of better reports or larger datasets. Communities also need ways of learning together.
Throughout Season One, many of our most valuable insights did not emerge from data alone. They emerged through conversations with employers, educators, workforce practitioners, community leaders, and workers who interpreted the evidence together and asked better questions about what it meant.
The information mattered. So did the conversation. This suggests that workforce intelligence is not simply about producing better evidence. It is about creating better ways to learn from that evidence over time.
Why This Matters
No dataset can anticipate every change a community will face. New industries will emerge. Others will contract. Employer needs will shift. Workforce priorities will evolve. Communities that rely only on periodic reports will always be reacting to change. Communities that build habits of shared learning will be better prepared to adapt.
That means regularly bringing together employers, educators, workforce organizations, public agencies, labor, philanthropy, and community partners to interpret new information, challenge assumptions, share implementation lessons, and adjust strategies as conditions change.
In this way, workforce intelligence becomes more than an information resource. It becomes a shared practice of continuous learning and collective decision-making.
Building the Capability
Answering this question will require Hawaiʻi to invest not only in better workforce information, but also in the routines and relationships that allow communities to learn from it together. That will likely require new forms of workforce intelligence, including:
Shared interpretation of workforce evidence across sectors and communities.
Continuous learning routines that regularly revisit workforce priorities and emerging trends.
Employer, worker, and community feedback loops that complement quantitative data.
Collaborative decision-making processes that strengthen trust and shared ownership.
Adaptive stewardship practices that help workforce strategies evolve as communities and labor markets change.
Ultimately, the goal is not simply to produce better workforce information. It is to build a workforce system that becomes more capable of learning, adapting, and improving over time.
Looking ahead
The four questions in this final chapter point toward the next stage of the work. Answering them will require better information about how people move through careers, stronger place-based workforce intelligence, new ways of understanding whether pathways and systems are improving, and regular opportunities for communities to interpret evidence and adapt together.
Some of that work will require new data. Some will require stronger partnerships and more intentional data sharing. Some will depend on listening more carefully to workers, learners, employers, educators, and communities. And some will require asking better questions of the information Hawaiʻi already has.
The goal is not simply to collect more data. The goal is to make better decisions.
That distinction matters because Hawaiʻi does not need perfect information before beginning to work differently. Communities can use the best available evidence to identify promising opportunities, strengthen partnerships, test new approaches, and learn from implementation. Curiosity ensures that those early decisions remain open to revision as new evidence and experience emerge.
The Workforce Understory was never intended to provide the final word on Hawaiʻi’s workforce. Its purpose is to create a shared foundation for continued inquiry, collaboration, and action. The questions raised here can help shape the next phase of that work: a long-term workforce intelligence agenda that identifies the data, partnerships, governance, and learning practices Hawaiʻi will need to strengthen workforce pathways over time.
Better workforce systems will not emerge from a single report, dataset, or initiative. They will emerge as Hawaiʻi becomes better at connecting evidence with lived experience, aligning partners around shared questions, and learning together from what happens next. That is the work ahead.
What is the Workforce Understory Field Guide and how do I use it?
What problem are we actually trying to solve?
How is opportunity experienced across Hawaiʻi’s workforce?
How do communities recognize where economic mobility is already emerging?
How do communities turn opportunity into lasting economic mobility?
Chapter 5: Next Questions
You are here!
