Structure Follows Strategy | The Rise Report | Issue 26

This week, I'm glad to hand the pen to Amber Garrison Duncan, Executive Vice President of the Competency-Based Education Network (C-BEN), who has spent more than a decade helping states — Colorado among them — build the systems that connect skills to opportunity. She's tracking a piece of federal legislation that could give Colorado's cross-agency work a real tailwind, and she explains why it belongs on your radar.

By: Amber Garrison Duncan

Colorado has spent the last several years doing something a lot of states haven't: getting its Workforce Development Council, Department of Higher Education, and Department of Labor and Employment to actually align around a single strategy built on credential transparency, skills-based hiring, and work-based learning. That's the kind of cross-agency coordination that's genuinely hard to pull off. So it's worth paying attention when Congress moves a bill designed to support exactly that work.

Last week, H.R. 8183 — the Modernizing Access to Talents, Credentials, and Hiring (MATCH) Act of 2026 — cleared the U.S. House Education and Workforce Committee with unanimous, bipartisan support. Co-sponsored by Rep. Burgess Owens (R-UT) and Rep. Blake Moore (R-UT), and backed by the committee's ranking Democrat, Rep. Bobby Scott (VA), the bill advanced out of full committee markup without a single dissenting vote — moving it one step closer to a vote on the House floor.

Here's the problem the bill is trying to solve. States collect enormous amounts of information about their workforce: who has what training, what skills employers need, where the gaps are. But that information usually lives in separate systems that don't talk to each other. A worker's credentials sit in one database, a job posting in another, and nobody can easily connect the dots between what people can do and what employers need.

The MATCH Act creates a five-year pilot program to help states fix that by giving them support to modernize their data systems and build "talent marketplaces": infrastructure that matches real skills to real jobs, no matter how someone learned them.

I've spent over a decade working alongside states, including Colorado, on this exact challenge through the Center for Skills by C-BEN. Colorado's early alignment across agencies is precisely the foundation a bill like this is built to strengthen. For states already doing the hard coordination work, it offers new federal support to go further, faster.

Why does this matter to everyday Coloradans? Because a four-year degree isn't the only path to a good job. Millions of people have valuable skills from military service, apprenticeships, certifications, or years on the job, with no easy way to show employers what they know. Better data systems make those skills visible.

What's next: clearing committee is an important milestone, but it's one step. The bill still needs a vote on the full House floor, and then Senate passage, before it can reach the President's desk. Unanimous, bipartisan support in committee is a strong signal — but there's a road ahead.

For a state like Colorado, already investing in this infrastructure, this is a bill worth watching closely.

Amber and the C-BEN team will continue this conversation at CBExchange 2026, C-BEN's annual convening of the competency-based and skills-first community, September 30–October 3 at Disney's Yacht Club Resort at Walt Disney World. Leaders across higher education, K-12, workforce, employers, and policy will gather and you can register here.

Scott Laband, CEO of Colorado Succeeds and a founder and senior advisor to FutureRise, wrote in the Denver Gazette that the Transition Advisory Committee created by HB26-1317 could be one of the most important reforms Colorado undertakes in a generation — or another bureaucratic reshuffling that changes reporting lines without changing results. 

Scott is right on both counts.

In the piece, Scott lays out five conditions for the TAC to get it right — headlined below. I agree with all five, and want to build on his call to action.

Start with outcomes, not structure. Colorado has been here before. The Student Success and Workforce Revitalization Task Force in 2021 produced a set of recommendations that were directionally sound and largely shelved. The risk is a repeat — a plan everyone applauds and no one has to deliver on. But that history is also an opening: few states have defined what a genuinely integrated talent system should deliver, so the TAC has a chance to set that bar and let the rest of the country follow.

Design the system around the user. I keep coming back to Governor Polis' language about a "one door" system for Coloradans and Colorado employers. That is the right instinct. But one door is not the same as one agency. The test is whether a Coloradan in Pueblo or Greeley or Grand Junction can see a clear path from where they are to a credential that leads to a job. This is where technology can do real work. A shared, statewide navigation layer — a single digital front door that uses AI to translate a person's existing skills and credentials into concrete next steps toward a job — could make the "one door" promise real without forcing every agency into one building. The state's job is to build the connective infrastructure; the user should never have to see the seams.

Treat employers as partners in design and improvement. Colorado Succeeds has credibility here, and I'd push it further. In most states the problem isn't that employers are absent — it's that the system treats them as validators rather than co-designers, asked to review what's already been built instead of helping build it. I'm hearing the same thing firsthand through interviews with the Opportunity Now employers: they don't want to bless a finished product, they want a hand in shaping it. Bring them in as co-designers, and the pathways actually match the jobs they're hiring for.

Make data transparent and useful. And this is Colorado's clearest chance to lead. The state already holds the wage, completion, and enrollment data — what's missing is the governance to connect it. A merged agency could make Colorado one of the first states where a learner's full picture actually travels with them. If the TAC treats data architecture as a design priority rather than an implementation detail, Colorado can set the national standard.

Build something that lasts. This is the condition that keeps me up at night. Colorado is approaching a gubernatorial transition. The merger has been Governor Polis' priority in the final stretch of his administration. The TAC's recommendations need to be grounded in results that transcend the political moment. That means anchoring the work to outcomes any governor would want to claim — credential completion, employment, wage gains — rather than to a reorganization that belongs to one administration.

Next week at the SHEEO Higher Education Policy Conference in Chicago, I am moderating a session on one of the most consequential structural questions facing state higher education agencies: whether and how to integrate higher education and workforce development under a single roof.

The panel brings together three state leaders at different stages of the work. Dr. Ben Boggs, Missouri's Commissioner of Higher Education, is seven years into one of the country's first higher ed–workforce mergers and can speak to what integration looks like beyond the press release. Dr. Shannon Gilkey, Rhode Island's Commissioner of Postsecondary Education, has built deep cross-agency coordination without a formal merger, arguing that SHEEO agencies are uniquely positioned to lead on talent and economic strategy. JB Holston, Executive Director of the Colorado Department of Higher Education, is in the middle of it: the General Assembly approved the first phase of Governor Polis' new Department of Higher Education and Workforce Development this spring, with a Transition Advisory Committee now underway and full merger still requiring legislative action.

The session asks a question that matters well beyond these three states: What if the state higher education agency was the economic engine for the state, not the compliance office?

We will dig into governance design, organizational culture, data system integration, and political durability across gubernatorial transitions that structural reform actually changes outcomes for students and employers.

The session is Tuesday, August 5 at 10am CT in the Henry Clarke Room at the Marriott Marquis Chicago. Message me if you will be in Chicago and want to connect!

On Thursday, July 30, the U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor, & Pensions (HELP) Committee is set to mark up several higher education bills, based on a summary from our colleagues at the PEER Center. 

The College Transparency Act — longstanding bipartisan legislation that would lift the current federal ban on a student-level data system and direct the National Center for Education Statistics to build a secure, privacy-protected network measuring enrollment, completion, and post-college outcomes across institutions. The goal is to give students, colleges, and policymakers a far clearer picture of which programs actually lead to good jobs.

The State-Based Loan Awareness Act — a bipartisan bill that would exempt state education loan programs from the transparency and disclosure requirements that apply to "preferred lender arrangements" under the Higher Education Act, changing how those state loan options are presented to student borrowers.

The Special Education Administration Protection Act — a bipartisan bill to block the Trump Administration's interagency agreements by prohibiting the transfer of Department of Education offices and functions—spanning special education, higher education, and K-12—to other federal agencies.

The markup is scheduled for 7:45am MT, and the committee is expected to livestream it.

The Rise Report welcomes updates from our colleagues across Colorado. Think of this as your one-stop-shop for conference updates, new research + reports, job postings, and career moves.

This week, Rachel Lipson, co-founder and director of the Project on Workforce at Harvard's Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy, published "Getting in the Front Door in the Age of AI: Policies to Help Early-Career Workers," arguing that governments need a dedicated early-career strategy for the AI transition and not tools built for temporary downturns, as the entry-level labor market weakens. Her standout "no-regrets" takeaway: strengthening education-to-work transitions, already weak in the U.S. before AI, is worth investing in no matter how the technology's impact unfolds. Read it here.

The Colorado Community College System has opened a Phase 1 RFP to pilot Comprehensive Learner Record and Learner and Employment Record (CLR/LER) technology as a core piece of its Learner Mobility strategy – digital records that let students carry verified skills and credentials across education and into the workforce. It's a public procurement process, so qualified respondents are encouraged to explore the details directly through the official postings on Bidnet and Colorado VSS. The RFP closes on August 14.

Trellis Strategies has issued a RFP inviting researchers at the intersection of postsecondary education and workforce outcomes to put the 2025 State Opportunity Index data to work. Collected in partnership with the Strada Education Foundation, the data offers a chance to examine how quality career coaching and work-based learning connect to students' economic and social mobility. Proposals are due August 14; interested researchers can find full details here.

The Aspen Institute's UpSkill America and Economic Opportunities Program will host a virtual conversation on August 18 entitled, "The Impact of Foundational Skills on Workforce Success," examining how gaps in core competencies including literacy, numeracy, digital proficiency, and language skills hold back workforce development. The session will preview early findings from a forthcoming national analysis and spotlight how employers are building solutions. The webinar is free to attend and begins at 12pm MT. Register here.

Save the Date: Apprenticeships for America’s 2027 Summit in Washington, DC will be held from June 9-11, 2027. Registration will open in October.

I spend a lot of these issues writing about systems that help people find a clear path to what they need. Last week I tested the theory in the most personal way possible: outfitting a dorm room.

My son starts his first year of college in a few weeks, and the packing list he handed me was — let's call it aspirational in its brevity. So last week I asked you, some of the sharpest people I know, for your must-haves. You delivered:

Turns out the best systems are the ones where people help each other build the map. Consider mine more complete than it was a week ago.

It's not too late to add your ideas — we leave in two weeks.

Until next week,
Alison