Chelsea Miller of Aspen Institute’s UpSkill America has a great new paper this week on “foundational skills”—things like communication, reading, and other “basics” that employers say are lacking in their workers. Drawing on early conversations with employers and training providers, the paper discusses how the broad and squishy way that employers communicate these needs. That doesn’t always provide the specifics that trainers need, leaving the two sides speaking different languages.

The UpSkill paper also notes that some programs that succeeded in training on foundational skills use multiple methods of teaching them. That makes sense. Some workers might not have developed those skills because that typical classroom education doesn’t fit how they best learn.

My former federal colleague Rachel Lipson and co-author Allison Schwartz have a fascinating paper published by Brookings on how “frontier” roles and traditional labor market data don’t sync up. That seems obvious, but the consequences are key, given how federal data plays into workforce funding. That makes it hard to route dollars to new fields—a goal of any administration—because data guiding that money might not fit into old boxes.