A new year, a new Congress, and a new administration in the White House have raised hopes around a familiar issue: infrastructure. For decades, federal lawmakers across both parties have called for greater investment in our transportation, water, energy, telecommunications, and similar systems. After all, it’s no secret that infrastructure spending has the potential to stimulate economic growth during recessions, including the current one.

But Washington too often frames infrastructure bills around short-term economic returns, especially when it comes to jobs. By doing so, it overlooks the generational nature of these investments and other long-term economic returns which benefit more people and places. It’s the long-term infrastructure careers that matter and should be the centerpiece of any jobs-focused infrastructure legislation.

While construction jobs help some workers in the short term, policymakers may ignore the full range of operational jobs, which represent three-quarters of all infrastructure jobs nationally. Moving people, shipping goods, pumping water, distributing energy, and fixing broadband—these are the types of long-term, essential activities our infrastructure enables, which have become more visible during the COVID-19 pandemic. Any federal infrastructure action should look toward empowering this workforce by hiring, training, and retaining more workers as part of an infrastructure talent pipeline.

In other words, this pipeline is not about filling one type of job in one place, but rather, having multiple entry points and pathways available for more people in more places. This flexibility matters because a diverse range of unemployed and low-wage workers in hospitality, retail, and other industries nationally need to transition to better jobs, which will require many branching pathways.

Read the full article about investing in the infrastructure sector by Joseph Kane at Brookings.