Rural communities are not waiting for the future of work to arrive. They are building it now.

Over the last three years, the Center on Rural Innovation (CORI) worked with rural communities across the country through Advancing Digital Skilling in Rural America, a national initiative funded by Ascendium. The goal was novel and ambitious: to build a model that helps rural communities create stronger, more scalable tech talent pathways that connect local people to good-paying tech-based careers and enable local employers to grow.

This work took place in six very different rural communities: Ada, Oklahoma; Selma, Alabama; Chambers County, Alabama; Cochise County, Arizona; Wilson, North Carolina; and Taos, New Mexico. Each community brought its own assets, challenges, employers, education partners, and workforce realities. But across all six places, one theme became clear: rural tech workforce development works best when it is built as an ecosystem, not a one-off program.

A training course alone will not build a talent pipeline. A single-employer partnership will not shift a local labor market. A new credential will not create opportunity unless people know it exists, employers value it, and support systems help learners complete it.

Rural communities need connected systems that align employers, educators, workforce agencies, nonprofits, local government, and young people around a shared strategy. That work is not always easy. But it is possible, and it is one of the clearest paths rural communities have to expand opportunity, strengthen local economies, and help more residents build careers where they already live.

Here are seven lessons we learned along the way.

1. Employer engagement is key

Strong talent strategy begins with a clear understanding of local demand.

In rural workforce development, it is not enough to ask, “What training can we offer?” Communities have to ask, “What jobs are employers trying to fill, what skills do those jobs require, and what would make them hire local talent?”

That is why employer engagement was central to this work. We did not want communities to build programs based on assumptions and train people for jobs that did not exist locally. Instead, we helped communities bring employers together to explain their needs directly.

Employers hold critical information that no one else can provide. They know which roles are hardest to fill. They know which technical skills matter on day one and which can be learned on the job. They know where soft skills, communication, problem-solving, or reliability are creating barriers. They can offer mentors, work-based learning, job shadowing, internships, and real feedback on curriculum.

But that information often stays inside individual businesses. Without a trusted convener to gather it, organize it, and share it with educators and workforce partners, communities risk building training programs that miss the mark.

The takeaway: Start with employers, but do not make engagement informal or occasional. Identify a trusted local convener, establish a regular employer feedback process, and use what employers say to shape training, credentials, career exposure, and work-based learning.

2. Rural employers need to share talent, not just compete for it

In many rural communities, employers feel like they are competing for the same small pool of workers. That pressure is real. But treating talent as a zero-sum game can weaken the entire local economy.

A stronger approach is to build a local talent network where employers see themselves as part of the same ecosystem. When one worker reaches the ceiling at a company, another local employer may have the next step in that person’s career. When a candidate is not the right fit for one role, they may be a strong fit somewhere else. When companies communicate, they can help people stay in the community instead of losing them to another labor market entirely.

This does not require a complicated system to start. A shared referral process, a quarterly employer roundtable, or even a simple contact list of HR leaders and business owners can help shift the culture from competition to coordination.

The goal is to help employers recognize that retaining talent locally benefits everyone.

The takeaway: Create simple ways for employers to refer, share, and retain talent across the community. In small labor markets, the real competition is often not the business down the street. It is the opportunity somewhere else.

3. A talent pipeline has to serve more than the person who gets hired

Many workforce systems define success in terms of selected candidates. But a healthy talent ecosystem also pays attention to everyone who was almost ready, not quite ready, or not chosen this time.

In an ideal hiring process, an employer may want three to five qualified candidates for every open role. But in many rural communities, employers are not seeing that depth in the candidate pool. At the same time, training providers may not know whether they are preparing too many people for one type of role or not enough people for another.

That gap creates risk on both sides. Learners can complete training without a clear job pathway. Employers can disengage when programs fail to produce the candidates they need. Communities can oversaturate one field while leaving another area of demand untouched.

The solution is a stronger feedback loop. Employers, educators, and workforce agencies need to keep talking after a training program launches. They should review who applied, who was hired, who was not selected, what skills were missing, and what supports would help more learners succeed the next time.

This is how communities move from one-off training to a real pipeline.

The takeaway: Track what happens to candidates beyond the hire. Use employer feedback to improve training, support near-miss candidates, and keep the supply of talent aligned with real demand.

4. Collaboration is not a nice-to-have. It is necessary infrastructure.

Rural communities cannot afford fragmented workforce systems.

When community colleges, nonprofits, employers, workforce boards, K-12 schools, local government, and economic development organizations work in silos, residents experience the system as confusing and disconnected. Employers do too. Programs may duplicate one another, miss key gaps, or compete for the same participants and funding.

In this project, one of the most powerful steps was also one of the simplest: getting the major workforce stakeholders in the same room and asking them to map what they were already doing.

That exercise often revealed more assets than people realized. It also surfaced gaps, overlaps, and opportunities to coordinate. Just as important, it helped partners see that they were not working on separate problems. They were working on different pieces of the same system.

The communities that made progress did not wait for perfect alignment. They created a habit of collaboration and used it to solve practical problems over time.

A strong rural tech talent coalition should meet regularly and ask:

  • What skills and jobs are in demand now?
  • What skills and jobs will be in demand over the next year?
  • How can education and training programs adapt to employer needs?
  • What supports do learners need to complete training and enter the workforce?
  • How can the community build, attract, recruit, and retain talent locally?

The takeaway: Treat collaboration as core workforce infrastructure. Convene partners at least quarterly, make the work specific, and keep the focus on shared outcomes rather than individual programs.

5. Career exposure is the entry point into tech

It’s hard to pursue a career if you can’t visualize it.

In many rural communities, “tech” can feel abstract or out of reach. Too often, people hear the word and think only of software engineers in major cities or advanced degrees they do not have. That narrow picture hides the real opportunity.

Digital skills already show up across the rural economy. A sales representative uses customer relationship management software. A Main Street business runs digital marketing campaigns. A health care provider manages electronic records. A manufacturer uses connected equipment. A farmer uses data to improve yields. A local nonprofit needs cybersecurity, website support, and digital systems.

Once people see that tech is not one job but a set of skills used across industries, the pathway becomes more accessible. Learners can connect what they already know to what they could learn next. Employers can explain real roles in plain language. Educators can design programs that feel connected to local opportunity.

Exposure has to start early and happen often. That means bringing employers into classrooms, arranging site visits, creating job-shadowing opportunities, connecting students with mentors, and helping adults understand how digital skills can advance their current careers.

The takeaway: Do not lead with jargon. Show people where digital skills already exist in their community, then build clear on-ramps into training and careers.

6. Hidden outsourced tech work is a local opportunity

One of the clearest opportunities we saw was hiding in plain sight.

When we asked local employers whether they outsourced tech-related tasks like IT support, cybersecurity, website management, or digital marketing, 90% raised their hands. When we asked whether they would consider bringing some of that work back into the community if reliable local talent existed, those same hands went up again.

That matters. These are not always full-time jobs inside a single business. A small business may need five hours of IT support a month. A nonprofit may need help maintaining a website. A local government office may need cybersecurity guidance. Individually, those needs may not justify a new hire. Collectively, they can create real local work.

This is where rural communities can think creatively. A locally based tech service provider, cooperative, apprenticeship model, or shared services strategy could aggregate demand across employers and create flexible work for local talent.

This approach does more than create jobs. It helps local businesses modernize, keeps more dollars circulating locally, and gives emerging tech workers real experience serving the community around them.

The takeaway: Audit the tech work local employers already outsource. Then explore shared service models that can turn fragmented demand into local jobs, contracts, or work-based learning opportunities.

7. Young people need a seat at the table

Communities cannot build strong pathways for young people without young people helping shape them.

This was one of the most important lessons we learned. Early in the work, many conversations about the emerging workforce were happening without the emerging workforce in the room. Once young people joined the process, the quality of the work changed.

They helped employers understand how early-career candidates read job descriptions. They gave educators better insight into what makes work-based learning meaningful. They helped community partners see what kinds of exposure, support, and communication actually resonate.

Young people are not just future workers. They are current experts in how the system feels to navigate. They know where information breaks down, where opportunities feel inaccessible, and what would make them more likely to stay, work, and build a life in their community.

Invite them in early. Listen to what they say. Compensate them when possible. Give them real influence, not symbolic participation.

The takeaway: Include young people in workforce planning, employer conversations, and program design. They will make the strategy stronger, more honest, and more likely to work.

The bigger lesson: build the system, not just the program

Rural tech talent development is not about chasing the latest trend or copying a model from a major metro area. It is about building practical, connected systems that help local people move into better opportunities and help local employers find the talent they need to grow.

The communities we worked with did not have perfect conditions. No community does. They had capacity constraints, coordination challenges, employer questions, learner barriers, and the normal complexity that comes with building something new.

But they also had real assets: trusted institutions, committed local leaders, employers willing to engage, educators ready to adapt, young people with insight and ambition, and residents who wanted a clearer path into the digital economy.

That is the work. It’s getting the right people in the same room, even if you aren’t on the same page. It’s about taking the talent you already have, giving it a clear place to go, and building from there.

Rural communities do not need to become something else to compete in the digital economy. They need the systems, partnerships, and investment to help their people connect to the opportunity already taking shape around them.

The future of rural work will not arrive on its own. It will be built by communities that organize around talent, treating it as one of their most important economic development assets.