What We’re Missing About Justice-Impacted Talent

What if the biggest barrier facing justice-impacted individuals is not a lack of skills, but a lack of recognition?

That question emerged in our recent work with the Missouri Department of Corrections, funded by Ascendium Education Group. We set out to explore how employability skills could be more intentionally developed within postsecondary and Career and Technical Education (CTE) programs in prison.

We began with familiar strategies: instructor training, embedding employability into coursework, program-level certification, and digital badging. These approaches matter. They help make skills more visible and easier to communicate. But early on, something did not quite add up.

In our initial assessments, participants demonstrated a much deeper understanding of employability than we had assumed—even before that understanding was explicitly surfaced or named. They already understood a great deal about what it takes to succeed at work.

Then we saw it more clearly.

In partnership with the Formerly Incarcerated College Graduates Network, we piloted a success coaching model led by justice-impacted individuals supporting others as they prepared for release and transition into education and employment. The coaching cohort was one of the most capable groups we have worked with. They demonstrated strong communication, adaptability, reflection, judgment, and leadership—the very qualities that often define long-term success in the workplace.

It raised a simple question: if these capabilities are already there, what is actually missing?

In many cases, justice-impacted individuals already bring significant experience through work, life responsibilities, labor performed during incarceration, and navigating highly constrained and complex environments. And yet, much of that experience goes unrecognized. That is not a small problem.

Work performed during incarceration—sometimes highly skilled and demanding—is rarely treated as legitimate work experience after release. There is often no clear way to translate that work into résumés, credentials, or career pathways. People who have done real work, under real conditions, often reenter the labor market as if they are starting from zero.

At the same time, research and field observations continue to challenge common assumptions. Workers with records often perform as well as, or better than, their peers. The issue is not simply capability or motivation. It is whether that capability is seen, understood, and valued.

In other words, in many cases, the problem is not that skills are missing, but that they are invisible—or misunderstood. Many individuals have also been repeatedly exposed to environments that reinforce a sense of insufficiency, making it harder to recognize and confidently communicate their own capabilities. And even when those capabilities are visible, structural barriers—from hiring practices to licensing restrictions—continue to shape access to opportunity.

In many cases, the challenge is not whether capability exists, but whether it is translated and communicated in ways that employers can understand and trust. The same experience that builds resilience, judgment, and leadership in one context may not be legible in another. Without that translation, real capability remains invisible.

Recognition is further complicated by a range of structural and individual barriers. Within correctional and education systems, limited access to technology and rigid constraints make consistent skill development difficult. At reentry, basic needs—housing, employment, transportation, supervision requirements, and stability—compete for attention. Beyond reentry, employer perceptions, stigma, and inconsistent hiring practices continue to shape who gets seen. At the same time, many individuals are navigating gaps in digital literacy, misaligned communication norms, and the lasting effects of trauma and internalized self-doubt.

Too often, success in this space is defined as placement: you got a job, so you are doing fine. But that framing is too narrow.

Many of the individuals we encountered had far more to offer than entry-level roles alone would ever reveal. They had the capacity for leadership, advancement, and long-term contribution. What is often missing is not just access to work, but access to trajectories—and the ability to signal readiness for them.

That points to a different challenge, one that receives far less attention: not just barriers to reentry, but barriers to advancement. Or, more directly, barriers to greatness.

If we take that seriously, the questions change. Not just: how do we prepare people for work? But also: how do we recognize the capabilities they already have? How do we help translate those capabilities into opportunity? And how do we ensure that opportunity extends beyond the first job?