Insights for Workforce Developers and Employers

• From Accenture:  There’s an expectations mismatch between leadership and the workforce when it comes to how they think about—and what they want—from returning to work. And even whether they want to do it at all.  A big part of this expectation gap is grounded in generational differences. A full 90% of GenZ and Millennials—who make up most of the workforce—have zero interest in going back to the office. For them, there is no actual, walk-through-the-front-door return to work moment. And don’t forget, these are the people who make up the future public service workforce.  Click here to read more.

• From The Annie E. Casey Foundation: Children and youth who expe­rience trauma, including abuse or neglect, are at increased risk for long-term emotional, behavioral and physical health problems, among other challenges. KIDS COUNT offers scores of additional measures that describe these types of life challenges for chil­dren and youth, rang­ing from high-risk behavior, such as juvenile justice system involvement and substance abuse, to difficulties with mental health, physical health and academic performance. Click here to read more.

• From The Aspen Institute: The share of U.S. households with negative net worth – meaning that the amount of debt they owe exceeds the value of all the assets they own – jumped above its historical trend during the Great Recession (2007-2009) and never returned to normal. As of 2019, 10.4% of households (about 13 million) had negative net worth.   Click here to read more.

• From Brookings:  Over the past year, colleagues at the Brookings Institution and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, have launched a research project that examines shifting inequities in the post-pandemic recovery. Many researchers, including our colleagues, have framed the effects of COVID as a disease and a turbulent economic moment that punctuated a robust economy. Far fewer have appreciated the asymmetries in the lived experiences of the journey back to normalcy, which have largely been defined by racialized identities, chronic marginalization, and the influence of place in shaping these experiences. Click here to read more.

• From Center for American Progress: Within every demographic group, the disabled population faces the worst employment outcomes; therefore, investing in this population will have an outsize impact on the strength of the labor market and the economic stability of workers. Removing obstacles would reduce supply constraints and lift up economic growth, allowing millions of disabled workers to participate in a more equitable economy.  Click here to read more.

• From Center on Budget and Policy Priorities: Despite growing recognition by policymakers and analysts that having an asset cushion boosts economic security, SSI’s limits continue to penalize saving. When creating SSI in 1972, policymakers set asset limits that let beneficiaries have some savings to cover the cost of emergencies. But they haven’t updated those limits since 1989, even to adjust for inflation, leaving beneficiaries at risk in the event of an accident, unexpected repair bill, or other expense. SSI benefits are very low — only three-fourths of the poverty line — leaving 4 in 10 beneficiaries in poverty even with their benefits.  Click here to read more.

• From Economic Policy Institute: Rising inequality has had serious economic and fiscal effects. Key among them: It has hurt economic growth. By 2018, the rise in income inequality since 1979 was reducing growth in aggregate demand by about 1.5% of GDP. Rising inequality constrains overall economic growth by reducing economywide spending: Spending falls as inequality redistributes income from lower-income households (that need to spend more of their income to meet living expenses) to higher-income families (that have the luxury to save money).  Click here to read more.

• From the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta: The labor force participation rates of prime-age US workers dropped in March 2020—the start of the COVID-19 pandemic—and have still not fully recovered. At the same time, deaths from substance abuse were elevated during the pandemic relative to trend, indicating the number of people abusing substances may have increased, and those who abuse opioids and crystal methamphetamine have lower labor force participation rates than those who don’t abuse these substances. Could increased substance abuse during the pandemic be a factor contributing to the fall in labor force participation?  Click here to read more.

• From Gallup Workplace Insights: Global corporate citizenship is paramount in the modern workplace: Everyone — investors, employees, customers and governing bodies — expects transparency and progress on DEI, ESG, wellbeing, mental health, sustainability and other social responsibility measures. In response, leaders have recommitted to benevolence beyond return to shareholders and are pumping resources into activity and reporting to prove their dedication.  Click here to read more.

• From the International Association of Workforce Professionals (IAWP): Jobs are more disrupted today than ever before, and changing at breakneck speed, according to a new report. Over one-third of the top 20 skills requested in postings for the average US job have changed since 2016, and one in five skills is an entirely new requirement for that job. Drawing on data from more than 15 million online job postings from 2016 through 2021, the authors created the Skill Disruption Index to examine and compare how rapidly and significantly skill requests evolved over time within specific roles.  Click here to read more.

• From Jobs for the Future: Skills-based practices make pathways to careers more accessible to a wider segment of the workforce by focusing on what workers can do, not on the degrees or certifications they’ve earned. They enable the 33 million adults who attended college but did not graduate to curate their own education and employment pathways to adapt to their changing circumstances and priorities. Jobseekers are able to pursue opportunities based on demonstrated skills and verified credentials, rather than relying on connections in their personal networks or going back to school to earn college degrees.  Click here to read more.

• From JPMorgan Chase Institute: Income disparities by race are large and persistent in the U.S. (see table below), and wealth gaps are even larger.1 Moreover, the booms and busts of the overall economy land unequally across the workforce—with lower income individuals and, disproportionately, Black and Hispanic families bearing the brunt of recessions. The relationship between the economic cycles and racial inequality has been prominent more recently in the Federal Reserve’s agenda of supporting broad-based growth and inclusive recovery from the COVID-19 recession. Meanwhile, fiscal policy—through unemployment insurance (UI) and stimulus—can play an essential role in mitigating the tendency for economic cycles to exacerbate disparities.  Click here to read more.

• From Manpower: Third quarter hiring outlooks strengthen in most markets as talent shortages reach highest levels in 16 years. ManpowerGroup interviewed more than 40,000 employers in 40 countries and territories on hiring intentions for the third quarter of 2022.  Click here to read more.

• From McKinsey & Company:  The most important resource in any economy or organization is its human capital—that is, the collective knowledge, attributes, skills, experience, and health of the workforce. While human capital development starts in early childhood and continues through formal education, the McKinsey Global Institute and McKinsey’s People & Organizational Performance Practice have focused new research on the next stage, which spans the full working life.  Click here to read more.

• From Migration Policy Institute: After the COVID-19 pandemic’s unprecedented shock to mobility in 2020, many people hoped that 2021 would bring a return to pre-pandemic cross-border movement. These hopes were bolstered by the rollout of highly effective vaccines, innovation around the use of digital health credentials to facilitate travel, increasing regional and international coordination, and the phased lifting of travel restrictions. Yet efforts to open up were not straightforward, and as of the end of 2021, more than 100,000 travel-related measures remained in place, and movement across borders remained costly, complex, and less accessible to some groups than others.  Click here to read more.

• From the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE): Regardless of how employers ran their programs in summer 2021, the hybrid model is their favored modality for their 2021-22 internships, according to NACE’s 2022 Internship & Co-op Survey Report.  Overall, 46.8% of employers plan to provide a hybrid experience, 25.8% will hold internships exclusively in-person, and just 2.2% are planning internships that are fully virtual. The remaining 25.3% were still deciding at the time of the survey.  Click here to read more.

• From the National Association of Counties (NACO): For months, U.S. parents and caregivers have been contending with dwindling supplies of baby formula due to supply chain challenges and product recalls by a major manufacturer, Abbott Nutrition, at a Michigan based plant. The shortage has reached crisis levels in recent weeks, with the nationwide out-of-stock rate reaching 43 percent in April (compared to a shortage rate of 2 to 8 percent in the first half of 2021). As trusted sources of information, county leaders and county agencies can play a key role in helping families understand the current shortage, access safe sources of formula and avoid dangerous feeding practices.  Click here to read more.

• From the National Association of Workforce Boards (NAWB): The pandemic radically altered business practices all over the world. As a result, workforce development agencies across the country and beyond have been moved to explore creative solutions that allow staff, job seekers, and employers to connect, interact virtually, and conduct business remotely – all while remaining at a safe social distance.  During the pandemic, agencies faced a crushing amount of traffic to their labor exchange and unemployment insurance systems. Contributing to the crushing weight was a nationwide shortage of staff due to sickness, burnout, and social distancing guidelines. Virtual live chat platforms became instrumental in serving large volumes of individuals, filtering them in an organized fashion through a queue, and directing the individual to the appropriate staff member who would be able to serve their needs.  Click here to read more.

• From the National Conference of State Legislatures: Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the landscape of labor had begun to shift. Discussions about the future of work often centered around automation and artificial intelligence. Many employers increasingly relied on machines and algorithms to perform tasks. The pandemic has dramatically quickened the pace of these changes, with many businesses automating more jobs to combat labor shortages and increase profits.  Furthermore, despite businesses and workplaces reopening, labor force participation rates remain lower than before the pandemic began. The pandemic has forced many Americans to reconsider what they value most, and workers have more leverage to demand workplace flexibility. The preexisting trend toward remote work has been accelerated, and many employers have turned pandemic-induced telework arrangements into permanent policies to retain employees.   Click here to read more.
  
• From the National League of Cities (NLC):  As COVID-19 spread in 2020, cities across the U.S. sprung into action by creating local emergency rental assistance (ERA) programs, set up to respond to the financial hardships that millions of people experienced as a result of the pandemic.  With unprecedented amounts of federal aid ready to be distributed for emergency rent and utilities, cities had to quickly launch ERA programs to take applications, evaluate eligibility and distribute funds to tenants and landlords. These emergency efforts to establish ERA programs were herculean ­— but they were also first iterations. By mid-2021, many cities considered how they could improve their ERA programs’ operations and policies as more funding became available for disbursement.  Click here to read more.

• From the National Fund for Workforce Solutions: Now that vaccines, test kits, and COVID-19 treatments are more readily available and COVID-19 variants are becoming less severe, people have begun the return to office and to normal operations as part of what many are calling a “post-pandemic” world. Yet the pandemic isn’t actually over, and it’s likely that the world will have to live with the coronavirus and its variants for years to come.  Nonetheless, more and more companies are asking employees to resume in-person work, which is why it’s essential to do so safely and thoughtfully, with their concerns in mind. The transition process works best when leaders design return-to-office plans in partnership with frontline workers, rather than making top-down decisions without employee support.  Click here to read more.

• From the National Skills Coalition: Making college work for working people, business, and our economy means adopting higher education policies that fully support working people’s needs, career goals and economic mobility – as well as businesses that depend on a pipeline of trained, skilled workers.  Our nation’s higher education policies were developed over fifty years ago and no longer fit the needs of today’s students or the rapidly changing skill needs of today’s labor market. They were designed to support young, full-time students living on campus with support from their parents. Fast forward fifty years, and 70% of today’s students don’t fit the mold around which higher education policy was built more than five decades ago.  Click here to read more.

• From Prosperity Now: Entrepreneurship is an important tool for helping disadvantaged workers build financial security and wealth. It supports workers who may be excluded from the traditional labor market, and small businesses also fuel job creation in their communities. Entrepreneurship can even help narrow the racial wealth gap. Black business owners are wealthier compared to workers who are not self-employed, which can help reduce the disparity between Black and White wealth levels.  Click here to read more.

• From the Roosevelt Institute: In March 2022, 4.5 million people quit their jobs, up by 152,000 compared to February. In 2021, more than 47 million workers quit their jobs, up from the record high of 42 million in 2019. Corporations as well as journalists have deemed the current situation an unprecedented mass exit from the workforce, and taken to calling it the Great Resignation. However, coming off years of inequality and wage stagnation, what high quit rates really represent is a necessary reshuffling of jobs leading marginalized workers to pursue better working conditions and wages.  Click here to read more.

• From the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM): Many employers are putting a lot of their effort into finding and attracting new talent to fill the open positions created by the Great Resignation. During this process, it is important to give the same amount of attention to the employees who remain and are left picking up the slack from their departing colleagues.  Click here to read more.

• From Southern Regional Education Board (SREB): Emotions are running high as students are thrown back into social situations after a year or more of isolation. Anxiety and depression are on the rise. More students are dying by suicide, and waitlists of those seeking school-based therapy are long.  This year, teachers and students are struggling to make up academic losses after many months of all-virtual schooling. Schools are playing catch-up to close learning gaps. But we may be at a point at which students’ mental health needs trump academics. Students can’t learn when their most fundamental physical, emotional and psychological needs go unmet. Without some intervention, their futures — and ours as a nation — look bleak.  Click here to read more.

• From Strada Education Network: Applied connections between education and work are increasingly a part of undergraduate education in the United States. Among students who have work-based learning experiences, those with paid internships stand out for their increased earning power, confidence in themselves, and recognition of the value of their education. However, less than one-third of recent graduates were able to participate in a paid internship and disparities persist for women, people of color, first-generation, and low-income graduates — even when taking into account their fields of study. As universities, colleges, and employers increase their partnership to improve the post-graduation outcomes of students, the evidence points to the value of increasing access to paid internships.  Click here to read more.

• From the U.S. Chamber of Commerce: Both men and women suffered a 3% drop in labor force participation at the height of the pandemic. But more than two years later, men have returned to work at a higher rate than women. Today, women’s labor force participation is still a full percentage point lower than it was pre-pandemic, meaning an estimated one million women are missing from the labor force.  Click here to read more.

• From Workforce Monitor: EMSI analyzed millions of online job advertisements from 2016-2021 to find the skills employers did not ask for in 2016 but do seek in job candidates today, as well as whether such skills were requested more or less frequently over time. Out of that analysis, EMSI came up with a Skill Disruption Index (SDI) marked on a scale of 0 (for least amount of disruption) to 100 (for most disruption) that “assigns greater weight to skills that carry a salary premium in the job market.” Since the pace of these changes have accelerated greatly in recent years, EMSI calls this period of time “The Great Disruption.”  Click here to read more.

• From Workday: Amid the Great Resignation, “money talks” isn’t the whole conversation. While salary still matters, employees want opportunities to develop their skills.  Consider this: Workers are citing stalled career growth as one of the primary reasons for quitting a job, according to a 2022 survey of office workers. Even for workers who stay in their roles, career growth is a top concern. In Workday’s “Employee Expectations Report 2022,” growth-related terms were commonly used in comments left by 1.8 million employees across more than 1,000 companies. And, in the 2022 “PwC Pulse Survey: Next in Work,” employees indicate that they deeply value nonmonetary benefits, which include career growth and upskilling.   Click here to read more.

• From WorkingNation: America’s classrooms are grappling with a shortage of teachers as the strain of the COVID pandemic prompted many of them to quit, leaving school districts to scramble to fill vacancies.  In March, 44% of public schools in the United States reported full or part-time teaching vacancies, according to data compiled by the National Center for Education Statistics.  While the teacher shortage has taken on new urgency, the problem existed long before COVID. A  number of factors have contributed, leaving an underlying challenge of how to create a pipeline of teachers.  Click here to read more.

• From WorkRise: Over the past year, workers in low-wage industries have received significant pay increases from employers struggling to fill positions. Some companies are also raising wages in response to actions taken by competitors. But recent and earlier research indicate that inflation, which is at a 40-year high, can erode the value of wage gains and affects workers across the income distribution differently. A recent Penn Wharton Budget Model analysis estimates that although recent wage gains have been highest for low earners, low-income households have also faced a steeper rise in prices. In this analysis, in absolute terms, low-income households faced higher rates of inflation last year and saw their expenses rise because of higher prices as much as or more than their incomes.  Click here to read more.

DATA TOOLS

• From the Atlanta Regional Commission: The Atlanta Region Eviction Tracker – a collaboration of ARC, the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, and Georgia Tech – is updated weekly, though Fulton County’s census tract level counts have been unavailable since September 2020 due to an omission of certain case details provided via the Fulton Magistrate Court public search site.  Click here to learn more.

• From the Atlanta Regional Commission: Using data from the Georgia Department of Public Health and other sources, ARC has created a regional data dashboard to see the number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the Atlanta region.  Click here to learn more.

• From the Atlanta Regional Commission: ARC’s COVID-19 Weekly Report provides the latest data about the state of the novel coronavirus in the Atlanta area.  Information comes from the Georgia Department of Public Health, Georgia Labor Market Explorer, and Google COVID-19 Mobility Reports, among others.  Click here to learn more. 

• From Atlanta Regional Commission: Each week ARC provides an updated research and analytics through the 33^on blog.  Click here to see data on impacts to low-income workers and people of color.  Click here to see a zip code map of vulnerable jobs.   Click here to see data on social distancing.  Click here to see data on mobility changes.  Click here to see data on mobility patterns by industry.  Click here to see a compendium of other data.

• From Brookings: The COVID-19 Metro Recovery Watch is aimed at informing local and state recovery strategies from COVID-19’s historic economic impacts in ways that link near-term resilience to longer-term economic transformation, racial equity, and economic inclusion.  Click here to review the Metro Recovery Index.

• From Brookings: Using data from hundreds of thousands of real job transitions, the Job Mobility and Smart Growth Toolkit shows how workers can advance through labor markets—featuring national and city-by-city data on wage levels, local labor demand, and job mobility rankings for 441 occupations, from retail salespeople to cooks to computer programmers.  Click here to see the toolkit.

• From Chmura:The COVID-19 Vulnerability Index describes communities most economically at-risk based solely on how a region’s mix of industries is impacted by shutdowns.  This information can inform policy decisions about where state and federal aid should be directed to provide maximum support for the broader economy and to protect our most economically vulnerable citizens.  Click here to see the index.

• From Chmura: Knowing which occupations can be performed remotely—that is, by working from home—is valuable for understanding the future of labor force supply in the post-COVID economy.  The Remote Work Index compares the mix of remote-work employment in the region versus the average in the nation.  Click here to learn more.

• From Emsi: To better understand where and why COVID-19 has spread within the United States, Emsi has developed a Health Risk Index.  This index accounts for the key factors that have given the virus a stronger foothold in some regions, while others have been largely spared. Click here to see the index.  Click here for information on other COVID-19 data tools.

• From Emsi: Track job posting trends by month and compare to 2019 averages through the Job Postings Dashboard.  You can also filter by region, industry, company, job, and skill.  Click here to see the dashboard.  Click here for information on other COVID-19 data tools.

• From the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, Center for Workforce and Economic Opportunity (CWEO): The Unemployment Claims Monitor displays data from the weekly and monthly unemployment claims reports from the U.S. Department of Labor. It is updated every Thursday.  Users will find weekly and monthly data on claims and on who have filed for unemployment insurance, including special unemployment programs like Short-Time Compensation (or Workshare), Unemployment Compensation for Federal Employees, Ex-Service Members, and Extended Benefits programs.  Click here to learn more.

• From Georgia Power: Georgia Power has created a web page to track Community Key Performance Indicators, a compilation of relevant data from some of the most reliable sources to help track key indicators of COVID-19 and how it is impacting Georgia communities.  Click here for data on workforce impacts.  Click here to learn more.

• From Neighborhood Nexus: Neighborhood Nexus, a data partner of ARC, has developed interactive maps that show the location of Georgia’s most vulnerable people – whether they are vulnerable medically or economically.  Click here to learn more.

• From Prosperity Now: The Prosperity Now Scorecard is a comprehensive resource for data on household financial health, racial economic inequality and policy recommendations to help put everyone in our country on a path to prosperity.  Click here to access.

• From Surgo Foundation: Every community in the U.S. will be affected by COVID-19 but the impacts will not be the same in each.  The COVID-19 Community Vulnerability Index identifies which communities may need the most support as coronavirus takes hold.  Click here to see the index.

• From the University of Georgia, Carl Vinson Institute of Government (CVIOG): CVIOG has created a web page to access COVID-19 Economic Data through its Georgiadata.org portal.  Click here to learn more.

• From the U.S. Chamber of Commerce: Right now, there are too many jobs without people to fill them. As a result, businesses can’t grow, compete, and thrive. The America Works Data Center captures trends on job openings, labor force participation, quit rates, and more. Click here to learn more.

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