Career pathways approaches combine support services with articulated education and training steps between occupations to enable individuals to enter and exit training within a pathway at various levels and to advance over time to higher skills, recognized credentials, and better jobs with higher pay. Recent years have witnessed a rapid growth of both career pathways program development and the body of research examining the effectiveness of the approach. This creates an urgent need to incorporate this new evidence into policy and practice and to focus future research on unanswered questions identified through these studies.

This forum brought together researchers, government, practitioners, and the policy community to examine the state of knowledge, priorities for future research, and implications for policy and practice. Speakers discussed what have we learned about career pathways strategies for improving economic outcomes for low-income Americans, what makes career pathways programs more or less effective, and what the implications are for public policy and practice.