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What if we think of education more like HR?
A recent visit to Switzerland left me with a question I have not been able to shake: What if the future of education looks more like human resources? Not in the bureaucratic or compliance sense. In the talent-development sense.
Think about it: In most organizations, human resources is not just about hiring people or managing the administrative tasks associated with having employees. It is about developing people. HR teams design onboarding experiences, mentor new employees, provide ongoing feedback and create pathways for growth. They think about how people build skills over time, how they are supported and how their work becomes more meaningful and valuable.
Teachers, on the other hand, are expected to organize their time around subjects and activities rather than purpose, and students’ progress is measured through completed courses rather than demonstrated capability. Professional skills such as collaboration, perseverance and reliability are treated as secondary, even though adults often say those are the skills that matter most.
As a result, American education increasingly lacks relevance, with too many students moving through school without a clear sense of why their learning matters. They complete work that feels disconnected from anything real. They make major decisions about their futures with limited exposure to actual careers. Many emerge from school prepared for more school or training, not for life beyond school.
In Switzerland, I saw a different approach. School and work are intentionally connected. Employers do not sit at the end of the process waiting to decide whether students are ready. They help define the skills, experiences and credentials students develop along the way.
Meanwhile, schools act more like talent developers, with educators supported not only as content experts but also as coaches, mentors and designers of learning experiences grounded in real contexts.
Students are treated less like passive recipients of school and more like emerging professionals, expected to contribute value, not just simulate it. Assessment looks more like a portfolio of demonstrated abilities than a list of completed requirements. Performance and conversation matter as much as tests.
And, when they emerge from school, students can answer a simple question that too many of them struggle with: “Why am I learning this?”
Of course, shifting to this kind of model comes with challenges. Systems like this require flexibility in scheduling, transportation and funding. They require new approaches to accountability. They require stronger partnerships between schools and industry. And they require us to rethink long-standing assumptions about what counts as learning.
But holding onto the current system has greater costs. It costs us when students disengage because they don’t see relevance. It costs us when they make high-stakes decisions with little real-world experience. It costs us when employers say young people are unprepared, even after years of schooling.
Fortunately, the Indiana Career Apprenticeship Pathway — or INCAP — is helping to build a better system for Indiana, one that connects learning and work more intentionally, bringing together schools, employers and state leaders to rethink how students move from education into meaningful careers. The vision taking shape can spark an important shift: Instead of treating education and workforce development as separate conversations, it designs them together.
In Switzerland, I was struck by how natural it felt to connect learning and work, education and development, school and contribution. In the United States, we often treat those as separate worlds.
I’m not suggesting that Switzerland is giving us a verbatim script to follow. Instead, it offers a model that’s proven overwhelmingly successful. It — like the human-resource development model we’re so familiar with — shows that people grow best when their experience is intentional, their work is meaningful and their development is continuous.
Our students are no different.•
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Philhower is superintendent of Eastern Hancock Schools, a rural district just east of Indianapolis.
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