AI is transforming the nature of work faster than any technology before it. The jobs we spent decades preparing people to pursue are now the most exposed, and our education system has not kept pace with the rapid change. Meanwhile, as America industrializes again, there is a shortage of people with the skills needed to do the critical work of physically building and maintaining the country.

The result is a growing chasm between labor demand and supply that fails both sides at once. By 2030, 2.1 million skilled trades jobs will go unfilled, five tradespeople will retire for every two who enter, and the AI buildout alone will demand $500 billion in new construction labor. At the same time, half of recent college graduates are underemployed a year out from graduation, and entry-level hiring at the biggest tech companies has fallen by half since 2019. Industrial growth is stalled by a shortage of talent on one side of the economy while workers are stranded on the other.

America’s vocational institutions were designed for a time when careers evolved over decades. Today they change in months, yet schools still train students over multiple years in a one-and-done model where the capstone is a credential, not a job. Americans who need work cannot afford to wait that long, and neither can the critical infrastructure projects bottlenecked by a shortage of skilled talent.

The AI transition demands a solution that can match its speed and scale. We must reimagine what vocational training looks like, and the trades are the best place to start. They are AI-resilient, pay well, and are the most acutely bottlenecked jobs in the country. The skilled trades are also uniquely meaningful to society and to the individuals who are qualified to do this work: tradespeople literally keep the lights of civilization on, from the plumber who brings clean water into a home to the electrician wiring up data centers.

Frontier is building a new vocational training institution. We partner closely with companies, deploying within the organization to understand their most pressing hiring needs. We then work backwards from the exact skills they require, designing custom talent pipelines that source, train, and place job-ready technicians via an AI-powered learning platform. Students can hear about Frontier on Monday and join an accelerated training onsite at a data center buildout by Friday. Just a handful of weeks later, they’ll have an enduring job in the industry and the foundation for a meaningful career.

Our mission is to help people do their life’s work.

And our life’s work is this: creating new pathways to achieve the American Dream. We believe anything is possible with enough tenacity and optimism, and we are bringing both to Frontier. My cofounder, Rosalie Nathans, spent eight years at Tesla where she built leadership and workforce development programs spanning manufacturing, service, and energy teams. I built AI products at DeepMind that optimized the industrial HVAC systems at Google’s data centers. At our core, we are operators who believe this growing labor supply and demand mismatch, and the implications for both industry and individuals, is the single most important problem to solve in this moment of intense transition.

Ultimately, our work shapes our lives. Work is not only how we sustain ourselves but also how we find our place in our community and in the world. Work has dignity because civilization depends on it. The potential to do great work lives in everyone, and Frontier exists to cultivate that potential.

If you are ready to build a lasting institution to help people do their life’s work, join us.