Center for
Education Transformation
Building pathways from learning to opportunity across schooling, higher education, work, and life.
“If you believe you are an out-of-the-box thinker, the box just moved.” JF
Overview
The Future Talent Council and Professor Emeritus John Fischetti launched the FTC Center for Education Transformation in 2025 to bring together global leaders across schooling, higher education, industry, government, and lifelong learning. The Center helps leaders redesign education for a rapidly changing world shaped with AI, demographic change, economic disruption, and new expectations of work, citizenship, and human capability.
This Center brings together approximately 40 senior leaders from around the globe to explore how education systems can move from insight to action. Together, members examine and reimagine the major components of education transformation, including governance, learning design, credentials, assessment, partnerships, research, and future talent pathways.
The Work of the Center
The pace of technological, economic, and demographic change means the world can no longer afford disconnected and siloed education systems. The future of talent begins in the earliest years of learning, develops through schools, community colleges, and universities, and continues across careers, communities, and later life.
Our work focuses on building the bridges, partnerships, and pathways that help people access opportunity, develop human capabilities, and lead meaningful, productive, and flourishing lives.
The Center is designed to help leaders get out of our current silos. Future talent cannot be developed inside walls and barriers that separate schools, community colleges, universities, employers, governments, and communities. True partnerships co-design pathways, align learning with emerging opportunities, and share responsibility for equity and outcomes. This is how we move from separate institutions doing important work to a connected education system capable of developing future talent across a lifetime.
The Center advances equity, excellence, and innovation across the full education ecosystem. We support leaders who are ready to move from insight to action, redesigning institutions, learning models, credentials, assessment, research, engagement, and partnerships for a future shaped with AI, demographic change, economic disruption, and new expectations of work and citizenship.
Imagine a pathway where secondary schools, community colleges, universities, and employers co-design credentials aligned with emerging AI-enabled capabilities and roles.
At its heart, the Center asks one powerful question:
How do we create education pathways that give every person, anywhere on Earth, the opportunity to build a great life and contribute to a better world?
Why Act Now?
Professor Emeritus John Fischetti,
Group Chair
“For too long, schools and universities have been places where young people go to watch their teachers work. And for too long we have been holding onto the schools of the past rather than evolving the schools we need. We are preparing our learners for their future, not our past.”
Emeritus Professor John Fischetti has worked for more than 40 years across school reform, teacher education, educational leadership, equity, assessment, university transformation and the future of learning. His work connects K-12 schooling, higher education, lifelong learning and the human capabilities needed in a generative and agentic AI world.
His leadership roles include Pro Vice-Chancellor of the College of Human and Social Futures, Pro Vice-Chancellor of the Faculty of Education and Arts, Head of School and Dean of the School of Education at the University of Newcastle, Dean and Professor of Educational Leadership at Southeastern Louisiana University, and senior leadership roles at the University of North Carolina Wilmington and the University of Louisville.
Center Members
40 leaders, 29 institutions, 1.5 million students, 200,000 staff members
Our Three Core Areas
1. Schooling: Building the Foundations of Future Talent
We work with school leaders, systems, policymakers, and communities to reimagine schooling for a world shaped by rapid change, AI, and new demands for human capability.
Our focus includes:
- Developing human capabilities such as creativity, ethical judgment, collaboration, resilience, and adaptive problem-solving — the human skills that strengthen our human intelligence.
- Designing future-ready pedagogies in learning, teaching, and assessment
- Prioritizing equity, access, and student flourishing
- Embracing AI, digital transformation, and human capability
- Envisioning new pathways and measures of success
- Leading for innovation and community trust
- Building stronger bridges between schools, higher education, and work
Schooling is where future talent begins. The Center helps education leaders design learning environments that prepare young people for their future, not our past.
2. Higher Education: Leading Transformation Across the Learning Ecosystem
Higher education is central to the Center’s mission.
Community colleges and universities are positioned as essential anchors in a connected education ecosystem. Higher education institutions have a unique role in teaching, research, credentialing, professional preparation, civic leadership, innovation, and lifelong learning. They also sit at the critical intersection between schools, employers, governments, and communities.
Higher education is not one sector among many; it becomes a critical connector across the sectors that shape future talent.
The Center supports higher education leaders as they:
- Redesign teaching, learning, curriculum, credentials, and assessment
- Strengthen equity, access, and student success
- Develop AI-enabled and human-centered learning models
- Build stronger school-university-industry partnerships
- Rethink research, workforce preparation, and public value
- Govern for transformation, not just institutional stability
3. Lifelong Learning: Future Talent Across the Lifespan
Talent development does not stop at graduation.
The Center advances lifelong learning as a core part of education transformation, from early childhood through schooling, higher education, work, career transition, civic life, and the senior years.
Our focus includes:
- Reskilling and upskilling for changing economies
- Career pathways and human capability development
- Learning across work, community, and later life
- Flexible credentials and recognition of prior learning
- Partnerships between education providers, employers, and governments
- Inclusive access to opportunity across the lifespan
Future talent is not a single stage of life. It is a lifelong commitment to learning, contribution, adaptability, and flourishing. Your leadership will shape this next chapter.
Activity and Output
6 virtual meetings, 5 in-person gatherings, more than 30 one-on-one sessions with 35 global education leaders to co-design the future of education
Global Strategic Plan Benchmarking:
The Center conducted an extensive analysis of institutional strategic plans to identify how universities are aligning their long-term goals with the rapid evolution of generative AI and shifting global talent demands.
The Global AI Policy Compendium:
We created a comprehensive resource cataloging institutional AI policies from around the world, providing members with benchmarked templates and governance frameworks for responsible AI adoption.
Labor Market & Portfolio Reimagining:
In collaboration with Lightcast, the group analyzed accelerating skill transformations in the global labor market to help provosts and deans align their academic portfolios with emerging workforce needs.
Institutional Transformation Case Studies:
In our session on navigating radical institutional change, we used Victoria University’s “Block Model” as a primary case study to explore the complexities of whole-system redesign, including curriculum overhauls, regulator approvals, staff learning, union engagement, and the reconfiguration of physical campus spaces for interactive learning.
2026 Calendar
Center-Specific Meetings
All meetings are recorded, and a detailed meeting report is shared afterward with every member.
Each member institution will have the opportunity to schedule one-on-one sessions (once every 6 weeks) with the group chair and the FTC project lead.
Member Testimonials
This is the place to be once a year. The FTC summit talks about issues that really matter to all of us, in countries all over the world.
I really believe in the collective and the network. We all make mistakes in organizations. FTC gives us this network that helps us deal with them quickly and with better ideas.
Where else do we see three important groups coming together: policy-makers, higher education, and corporate entities to discuss real talent-related challenges? I have been so impressed by the level of authenticity and collaboration to not only grow as human beings but to make our societies thrive.
FTC’s Stockholm Summit is by far the top conference I look forward to every year for two reasons. One is that it is multi-industry. The combination of different thoughts and ideas really does come together here. Two is that I actually don’t have to bite my tongue. I can ask the controversial questions here.
FTC is the only place that brings all these different stakeholders, government agencies, NGOs, industry leaders, tech companies, higher education institutions, to the same platform to have very casual yet top-quality conversations without any script. I have learned so much.
I think what FTC represents as a young organization is that it’s not only a beacon for traditionalists in the world who need to come and learn, but it’s also a meeting place and a catalyst for conversation and change. FTC also encourages very deep levels of research, tries to encourage people to think differently, to challenge the status quo, and creates a place of safety.
I really appreciate the space that Future Talent Council created, and the sense of the ability to take a risk with some ideas.
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This is more than a network.
It’s your invitation to help shape the future of education across schooling, higher education, work, and lifelong learning.
Don’t miss the opportunity to lead the future of education and join a network of global innovators.
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Globally distributed organization headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden
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