Career and technical education (CTE) is the appropriate and preferred channel for leading a software-supported experiential mission shift to prepare, support, and evolve flexible, information-producing, high-performance knowledge workers for a continuous innovation society. Knowledge management attempts to capture human knowledge in the form of units or objects that can be networked to other people or to software/machines. Five learning approaches share this common purpose: human capital development and application. Heuristic scenarios of work forces using these learning approaches and their supporting technologies convey a profound shift away from learning and performance as ends in themselves, in favor of continuous innovation as a process of working, living, and learning. Deconstruction of repetitious tasks frees human and other resources for continuous innovation. Information-based skill-concentrated distributed competence (DC) software is at the same time a direct threat to all repetitive human functions at work, in learning, or in community and the most hopeful and compatible equalizer for the ignorant, unskilled, slow, blind-sided, and unimaginative. Performance-based learning can effectively create learning in the context of tasks supported by DC software. CTE, with its technical focus and performance innovation outcomes mandates, is ideally positioned to lead the rest of education into new leadership and prominence. (Contains 61 references.) (YLB)