Remember daylight savings starts on March 8th. Every year we go through this ritual, lose sleep, feel slightly off for a few days, and still no one can explain why we are committed to it. It is one of those systems we keep running simply because it has always been there. Manager training can feel the same way.

It looks productive. There are thoughtful slides, strong facilitators, and engaged conversations. In the moment, it feels like progress. Then the week begins, real pressures return, and very little actually changes in how managers lead.

If you are responsible for a team, you have probably experienced that gap between intention and execution. That is why I want to pass along a training that may be worth your time. Lisa Friscia, a Strategic Advisor and Fractional Chief People Officer, is leading a free 45-minute session on why most manager training fails to translate into real-world behavior shifts and how to design development efforts that actually stick. Register below:

Events for You:

Last week, I attended the Con Edison Power of Giving event, surrounded by hundreds of nonprofit leaders working across extreme weather adaptation, clean energy careers, and community resilience. If you work in workforce development long enough, you start to see the same faces at different convenings. We swap war stories, compare notes on funding cycles, but what caught me off guard was realizing how many of the organizations are funded by the same corporate partner.

During the event, I struck up a casual conversation with a man named Tim. We talked about grid reliability, the rising demand from data centers, and why a utility company would care about workforce development. He kept thanking me for the work we do at The Knowledge House. By the third time, I finally asked why he was so appreciative. That is when I learned I had been speaking with the CEO of Con Edison.

It was a reminder I share often with clients that people are just people. Titles matter less than substance and curiosity travels further. You never know who is standing across from you, and in a world obsessed with hierarchy, that humility still wins.

If I had to reduce the entire event to one word, it would be infrastructure. The clean energy transition is not a marketing slogan. New York’s mandates to electrify buses, delivery fleets, and commuter vehicles are already reshaping demand. Utilities are not waiting for 2035. Con Edison is investing billions into substations, feeders, and grid modernization across New York City and Westchester. This is long-term capital allocation designed to support an entirely new economic architecture.

This is where the opportunity sits. Infrastructure spending creates durable demand. When capital flows into physical systems, talent follows. Con Edison has directed $22 million through its philanthropic programs to prepare New Yorkers for clean energy and technology careers. That funding supports training pipelines into HVAC, solar installation, renewable energy technology, and other high-demand roles. If you electrify a city, you need people who know how to install, maintain, and optimize the systems that power it.

The third theme that stood out was equity. Clean energy without affordability is a fantasy. Con Edison’s Energy Affordability Program supports hundreds of thousands of low- and moderate-income customers, while foundation grants back energy-efficient housing and climate resilience projects in disadvantaged neighborhoods. Environmental justice is not an abstract concept when you live near aging infrastructure or flood-prone streets. It becomes a question of who benefits from modernization and who bears the cost.

As someone who spends his days thinking about workforce systems and career mobility, I walked away with a simple conclusion. Infrastructure is no longer just concrete and steel. It is talent pipelines, grid intelligence, apprenticeship programs, and equitable access to opportunity. It is public policy meeting private capital and corporations deciding that the communities around their business should also benefit from the jobs that corporation creates.

If you are thinking about your own career resilience, pay attention to where infrastructure money is flowing. Utilities, energy, grid modernization, climate adaptation, advanced manufacturing, logistics. This is something that’s foundational and industries like this tend to outlast hype cycles because society cannot function without them.

Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Subscribe here to get weekly insights that help you navigate your career with more clarity and confidence.

Robert Half, a leading staffing firm, released its 2026 Tech and IT Hiring Trends report and we’re here to break it down for you. This report includes survey responses from industry leaders and decision-makers. First, let’s focus on the disruption that AI has been causing.

With AI’s accelerated continuous improvement, technological skills gaps are growing in the workforce. Aside from AI and ML, skills gaps in IT operations and infrastructure have become most apparent to tech leaders surveyed by Robert Half. They also noted the need for more skills in governance and compliance, cloudOps and architecture, and data engineering and analytics. To the community at Cocoon Careers, these findings should sound like opportunities.

The report also noted key software proficiencies for technologists to start mastering. The top six are Apache Kafka, Databricks, Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Power BI, Splunk, and Terraform. Other technical skills to consider are DevSecOps, workflow automation, and product management. But what might be most interesting from the report’s deep dive in tech are the non-technical skills. 

72% of leaders cited critical thinking and problem-solving as the top “soft” skills to complement AI. We call them durable skills. Coming in as a close second were adaptability and continuous learning at 69%, while scoring at 65% were creativity and innovation. Emotional intelligence was only reported by 22% of leaders. 

Keep in mind that leaders in decision-making roles are taught to remove emotion from difficult choices that have to be made. With the ability for technology to get increasingly granular insights, decisions are increasingly data-driven, if not data-dependent. So if you hear a top leader speaking on the importance of emotional intelligence publicly, consider how much of that might be public relations and marketing tactics in-play.

The top three durable skills cited by tech leaders in the report are clearly focused on maximizing the business case of AI, not emotions, and not ethics. One day, likely following a disaster, a focus on emotional intelligence and ethics will rise to the top. But right now, if you want a job or a better one in tech, tech leaders have reported what they really want. 

So the big takeaway here is to upskill in as many ways as possible to show that you can maximize AI’s business case in your domain of expertise.

The federal government just did something that most people will scroll past, but shouldn’t. The Department of Labor released a new AI Literacy Framework workforce policy. When something becomes workforce policy, it means the conversation has shifted from experimentation to expectation.

If you’ve been reading Cocoon for a while, you know we’ve already mapped where AI is quietly embedding itself. It is optimizing marketing campaigns, screening resumes in HR, forecasting in finance, drafting legal summaries, assisting customer support, reshaping sales outreach, and accelerating operations workflows. None of that lives exclusively inside a tech department. AI is not staying in the server room. It is sitting inside spreadsheets, CRMs, inboxes, dashboards, and strategy decks.

The government is acknowledging what the labor market already knows. This is an economy-wide shift. The DOL’s framework does not focus on turning everyone into engineers. It focuses on understanding what AI does and does not do, directing it effectively, evaluating its outputs, and using it responsibly. That tells you something important. The competitive edge will not belong to the person who knows the most code. It will belong to the professional who can integrate AI into decision-making while applying judgment, context, and accountability.

We are watching the early stages of standardization, and standardization is how skills quietly move from optional to required. Funding is aligned to this initiative. Training programs and specialty certifications are already here, and employers have started to embed those competencies into job descriptions. For you, as a mid-career professional navigating responsibility, family decisions, financial goals, and long-term security, this matters. Early-career professionals will adapt quickly because they have less to lose. Senior executives will shape direction because that is their mandate. The pressure will sit squarely in the middle, where you operate. You are the engine of execution. If that layer does not evolve, organizations will automate around it or redesign it.

It may sound a little dramatic, but it is how efficiency works. The uncomfortable truth is that AI literacy is about to become the new basic requirement. Knowing how to use intelligent tools will not earn applause. It will be assumed. Not knowing how to evaluate, direct, and apply them will quietly limit mobility.