Perkins V Isn't Preparing Students for an AI-Driven Workforce

• By Thamir Aljobori
• 10/12/26

During a science lesson in my middle school classroom, students were working through an investigation when one of them asked a question teachers hear all the time: "When am I ever going to use this?"

It is easy to dismiss that question as a student trying to escape an assignment. But underneath it is something much more important: Students want to know where their education can take them.

For today's middle school students, that future will include careers transformed by artificial intelligence, automation, robotics, advanced manufacturing, biotechnology, cybersecurity, and technologies that may not yet exist. Our career education policies need to prepare them for that reality.

The Strengthening Career and Technical Education for the 21st Century Act, commonly known as Perkins V, was signed into law in 2018. It provides federal support for career and technical education programs that connect students with academic knowledge, technical skills, and workforce opportunities.

2018 does not sound very long ago. In technology, it might as well be another era.

Generative AI has moved from research laboratories into classrooms and workplaces. Employers are experimenting with AI systems that can write computer code, analyze information, automate administrative tasks, assist with design, and accelerate scientific research. Workers across industries increasingly need to understand not simply how to operate technology, but how to work alongside it.

That changes what career readiness means.

Preparing students for an AI-driven economy should not mean turning every teenager into a programmer. It means helping students develop the technical knowledge, adaptability, problem-solving skills, and judgment necessary to navigate workplaces that will continue changing throughout their careers.

Perkins V provides states and local communities considerable flexibility. That is valuable. But federal career and technical education policy should do more to ensure that emerging technologies become part of how we define career readiness.

Three changes could help:

1. CTE programs should be able to respond more quickly to emerging industries. Schools need pathways connected to fields such as artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, robotics, advanced manufacturing, biotechnology, and clean-energy technology. Federal funding should encourage states to regularly examine workforce trends and update programs before an emerging field becomes an established industry with a shortage of qualified workers.
2. Students need more opportunities to earn credentials that travel with them. The traditional divide between college and career education makes less sense in a labor market where people may move repeatedly between employment, certification programs, apprenticeships, community colleges, and universities. Students should have opportunities to earn industry-recognized credentials, dual credit, and other stackable qualifications while still in high school. Those experiences should become building blocks rather than educational dead ends.
3. Schools need stronger connections with employers and emerging industries. Teachers cannot prepare students for workplaces they rarely get to see. Employers, community colleges, universities, unions, and school districts should have stronger incentives to build programs together. Students need internships, apprenticeships, job shadowing, mentorship, and authentic projects that allow them to understand how academic concepts translate into actual work.

These opportunities cannot be reserved for students who already know how to navigate the system. Multilingual learners, students with disabilities, rural students, and students from low-income communities must have meaningful access to emerging career pathways. If AI and automation create new opportunities while our education system directs only certain students toward them, technology will deepen existing inequalities rather than reduce them.

Back in my science classroom, the student asking when he would ever use what we were learning was asking a reasonable question.

Science could eventually take him into engineering, health care, advanced manufacturing, renewable energy, biotechnology, or a career that does not have a familiar name yet.

I cannot predict which one. Neither can Congress. That is precisely the point.

Career education should not attempt to predict one job a student will perform for the next 40 years. It should give students the knowledge, skills, credentials, and adaptability to keep learning as technology changes the work around them.

Perkins V helped move career education toward the 21st century. Now the workforce is moving faster than the policy. Our students should not have to wait for the next technological revolution to be over before their education catches up.