**How Governments Can Harness the Digital Employability Infrastructure Already Serving Millions, ****The Future of Learning Series **
Artificial intelligence is transforming labour markets at remarkable speed. Governments everywhere are responding with new skills strategies, workforce initiatives and employability programmes designed to help citizens adapt.
The Future of Learning and trends to watch #
This urgency is well founded. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 concludes that technological change, led by AI, is expected to reshape jobs across virtually every sector, with employers anticipating that around 39% of workers’ core skills will change by 2030. The report argues that continuous reskilling and lifelong learning will become central features of successful labour markets. Yet amidst this understandable activity, an important question is rarely asked:
Before building new employability infrastructure, should governments first ask what infrastructure already exists?
For decades, public policy has assumed that governments are the primary providers of workforce development. Ministries fund universities, vocational colleges, apprenticeships, employment services and retraining programmes. These institutions remain essential and will continue to play a central role in developing national skills. But something fundamental has changed:
Alongside traditional education systems, a new generation of digital employability platforms has emerged. Millions of people are now acquiring workplace skills independently through AI assistants, professional learning platforms, industry certification programmes, instructional video channels and free online learning providers. Increasingly, employability is being built not only inside public institutions, but across a much broader digital ecosystem.The policy question is no longer whether these platforms matter but whether governments are making the best possible use of them.
A New Layer of National Infrastructure
Governments have traditionally invested in physical infrastructure because it enables economic activity. Roads connect workers to jobs. Broadband connects businesses to markets. Energy infrastructure powers industry.
In the knowledge economy, employability infrastructure deserves similar attention.Every completed course, every verified workplace skill and every professional certificate contributes incrementally to a country’s human capital. Unlike roads or railways, however, much of this infrastructure has been built privately, often without public funding and increasingly at global scale. The result is something policymakers have never previously encountered: an international layer of employability infrastructure already serving millions of citizens before governments become involved. Unlike traditional education systems, these platforms can measure completed learning, verified skills and learner progression, making employability infrastructure increasingly visible and measurable for the first time.
Different Countries, Different Opportunities
The opportunity looks different depending on where one stands. In rapidly growing economies such as Nigeria, Kenya, Pakistan and Ghana, governments face enormous demand for workforce development alongside constrained public resources. Building sufficient physical training capacity for rapidly expanding young populations is both difficult and expensive. Free digital employability platforms therefore represent an opportunity to extend access to workplace skills at very little additional public cost.In advanced economies, the challenge is different.
Countries such as the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom already invest heavily in education and workforce development. Their challenge is less about access than efficiency, coordination and lifelong reskilling.
In the United States alone, federal and state governments collectively spend many billions of dollars annually on workforce development through a complex network of programmes, agencies and local workforce boards. For more than three decades, the U.S Government Accountability Office has repeatedly highlighted fragmentation and duplication across parts of this system, arguing that better coordination could improve outcomes and reduce unnecessary costs.The lesson extends well beyond the United States.
Governments should not stop investing in employability. Rather, they should increasingly focus public resources on those areas where the government adds unique value: career guidance, employment services, support for disadvantaged learners, wage subsidies, apprenticeships and human-centred interventions that digital platforms cannot replace. Where high-quality learning infrastructure already exists, the question becomes whether it should be complemented rather than duplicated.
From Building Everything to Partnering Wisely
Historically, governments have had three options when responding to public needs; building services themselves, purchase from others, or subsidise provision. Digital employability platforms introduce a fourth possibility: partnership.
Rather than recreating existing learning ecosystems, governments can recognise, integrate and build upon resources that citizens are already using voluntarily. It is a simple principle that is widely accepted in other forms of infrastructure planning. Few governments would build a second bridge simply because the first had been financed privately, provided it was safe, accessible and met the public need.
The same principle increasingly applies to employability infrastructure. Before creating new digital learning platforms, policymakers might first ask whether suitable capacity already exists or – indeed – with some small changes and additional investment could reach the standard required by all.
Learning at Global Scale
This emerging infrastructure is no longer theoretical. Technology companies including Google, Microsoft and Cisco have built extensive professional learning ecosystems around their technologies. YouTube has become one of the world’s largest sources of informal workplace learning, while AI assistants increasingly provide immediate explanations and guidance that support day-to-day professional development. Alongside these sit dedicated employability platforms designed specifically to deliver structured learning, assessment and recognised credentials.
One example of this new generation of employability platforms is the Irish-founded Alison Operating in nearly every country worldwide, Loughrea, Co Galway based Alison has over 15 million graduates of its free online courses focused on workplace education and training. It has very significant numbers in key countries including the USA where it has over 10 million registered users, more than seven million in India and almost three million each in Nigeria and South Africa.
Closer to home, Ireland provides an interesting illustration of the policy question. Alison reports more than 500,000 registered learners in Ireland despite receiving no direct public funding, while publicly funded programmes such as Skillnet engage tens of thousands of learners annually. The comparison is not intended to suggest one should replace the other. Rather, it raises a broader policy question: how should governments evaluate and integrate digital learning platforms that citizens are already choosing to use?
These figures illustrate something important: Citizens are not waiting for governments to tell them to learn.They are already investing in their own employability at a remarkable scale. Public policy should recognise this reality.
A New Role for Government
** **The emergence of large-scale digital learning platforms should encourage governments to rethink how they approach workforce development. Good public policy is fundamentally about making the most effective use of existing resources. When millions of citizens are already engaging voluntarily in high-quality workplace learning, governments should consider how that activity can complement national skills strategies rather than assuming every solution must be designed, built and funded from scratch. Public investment delivers the greatest value when it fills genuine gaps, improves quality, broadens access and strengthens outcomes, rather than duplicating capabilities that already exist and are demonstrably effective. This represents an important shift in policy thinking.
Rather than viewing digital employability platforms as competitors to public education, policymakers should increasingly recognise them as complementary partners within a broader lifelong learning ecosystem. Public institutions remain essential for delivering formal qualifications, ensuring quality assurance, supporting disadvantaged learners and addressing strategic national priorities. At the same time, large-scale digital learning platforms can extend the reach of those systems by providing flexible, accessible and continuously updated skills training to millions of learners at very low marginal cost.
The challenge for governments is therefore no longer simply to build more educational infrastructure, but to develop policies that harness and integrate proven digital learning resources into national workforce and employability strategies. The most successful education systems of the future are likely to be those that combine the strengths of public institutions with the scale, innovation and efficiency of the world’s leading online learning platforms.
Building Smarter Skills Systems
The AI economy will require continuous reskilling throughout adult life. No university degree, apprenticeship or professional qualification can prepare someone for every technological change they will encounter over a forty-year career. Learning will become increasingly continuous, personalised and self-directed.
Learning will become increasingly continuous, personalised and self-directed. This is consistent with the OECD’s analysis in its Skills Outlook 2023, which argues that successful skills systems must support lifelong learning across the whole of adult life and make effective use of diverse learning pathways rather than relying solely on traditional educational institutions. As technological change accelerates, governments will increasingly need to think less about providing every element of learning themselves and more about enabling citizens to access, recognise and build upon high-quality learning wherever it occurs.
While appropriate workplace education and training has to be of vital strategic importance to the health of any economy, and hence of importance to the government, the level of involvement is likely to evolve. Success may depend less on delivering every element of learning directly and more on orchestrating an ecosystem in which public institutions, employers and digital platforms work together.
The countries that adapt most successfully may not simply be those that spend the most on workforce development. They may be those that recognise where learning is already happening, remove barriers to participation and concentrate public investment where it creates the greatest additional value. The digital employability infrastructure already exists.
Digital employability infrastructure already exists. Millions of citizens are using it every day to improve their skills, often without governments even noticing. The challenge for policymakers is no longer whether these platforms have a role to play, but how national skills strategies can make the best possible use of them. In the AI economy, the countries that learn fastest may ultimately be those that recognise learning wherever it happens.
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