- From Accenture: Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, business and political leaders recognized that the 2020s require new strategies and commitments to address the world’s most pressing problems: climate change, economic fragility and inequality, the skills challenge and the negative consequences of some new technologies. Responsible leadership is crucial to creating value for all stakeholders. Click here to read more.
- From The Aspen Institute: As the nation witnesses increasing public support for a reimagining and transformation of the criminal justice system, calls for defunding the police and reinvestment of those funds have dominated recent discourse. This moment also presents an opportunity to simultaneously achieve safety and justice through a more community-driven approach. How do we and our leaders make change happen in a way that takes into consideration historic injustices, as well as the underlying social, economic, education and health disparities in the United States? Click here to read more.
- From Brookings: The COVID-19 pandemic has inspired an outpouring of gratitude for essential workers, whose critical and often low-paid work has kept the country functioning. Millions of these essential workers have risked their health on the COVID-19 frontline, while thousands have lost their lives. Click here to read more.
- From Chmura: Ten months have passed since the COVID lockdowns began in the United States, and the job market is still not all the way back to pre-COVID levels. There were 200,000 fewer online job ads posted in January 2021 compared to January 2020. Click here to read more.
- From Credential Engine: Learners, educators and policymakers understand that high school completion and education beyond high school are critical to thrive in the workforce. However, until recently an inventory of the number or type of secondary and postsecondary credential opportunities in the United States did not exist. This is the third annual report from Credential Engine that attempts to count all these credentials. The report identifies 967,734 unique credentials in the U.S. in 16 detailed credential categories across four types of credential providers. Click here to learn more.
- From Emsi: In a world where there are multiple job titles for (relatively) the same position, things can get chaotic quickly. What one company calls a “product specialist” might be a “product analyst” (or the more quirky “product ninja”) to another. Unique job titles are great, but given the wildly diverse terminology, they can complicate how companies advertise open positions, compare their skills to industry benchmarks, and track employee skills (and skills gaps). Click here to read more.
- From the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta: The COVID-19 pandemic has created an unprecedented economic crisis, with tens of millions of American workers losing their jobs since March. The disproportionate impact of this crisis on women, communities of color, and particularly those in lower-wage occupations, highlights the need to address intergenerational racial inequity with programs and policies that connect workers to quality jobs. But understanding which jobs are available in a local labor market is often a challenge. Click here to read more.
- From Gallup: The latest update to Gallup’s ongoing COVID-19 tracking survey was conducted Dec. 15-Jan. 3 as coronavirus cases and deaths surged in the U.S. and Americans began to receive their first vaccinations against the disease. During this period, the percentage of Americans who reported that they had avoided small gatherings in the past week rose seven percentage points to 57%, the highest level since late May. Click here to read more.
- From Jobs for the Future: To ensure that individuals across the country rebound and advance, federal programs must prioritize high-quality education and training opportunities while also providing other assistance—income supports, food assistance, safe housing, and child care—that make it possible for people to take part in skill development programs and make successful and lasting transitions to employment. Click here to read more.
- From McKinsey & Company: Most of us are optimists or pessimists by nature. But the COVID-19 pandemic has found ways to make both sides question their perspective. Not only is it the biggest public-health emergency in modern times, it has also been a volatile narrative with ample reasons for hope and despair, often on the same day. Click here to read more.
- From MIT Task Force on the Work of the Future: The manufacturing industry continues to occupy a central place in the American economy. Compared with other sectors, manufacturing plays an outsized role in overall productivity growth rates and innovation across the economy, and remains a promising source of opportunities for workers looking for higher wages. Understanding the contemporary dynamics of the industry can thus yield valuable insight into the future of work and the near-term prospects for growth-generating innovation and technological change. Click here to read more.
- From the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE): Recruiters agree that self-awareness is absolutely essential to success—it’s imperative—that a student know what they can bring to an organization. The start of the semester would be a great time for a student to take a critical look at their background. As they think about their experiences, they need to determine which they found both enjoyable and challenging. What skills seemed the most “natural” or easiest to employ? The skills that are identified in this process should be the foundation of a student’s communications with employers. Click here to read more.
- From the National Association of Workforce Boards (NAWB): Resilience is defined as “The capacity to recover quickly from difficulties.” If I were to pick one word to capture the essence of our local business community, it would be resilience. We all know the impact this pandemic has had on our local companies. Businesses who are the lifeblood of our local economies are fighting hard to safeguard their employees, keep their businesses open, and turn the page on the pandemic and its subsequent economic recession. Click here to read more.
- From the National Fund for Workforce Solutions: In this time of social upheaval, racial reckoning, and public health crisis, our nation has been forced to confront deep vulnerabilities in our economic system. The painful truth is that the U.S. economy is built on far too many low-wage, low-quality jobs and deeply entrenched racial occupational segregation that has left 100 million people in the country economically insecure. Our nation cannot afford another inequitable “recovery” like the one that followed the Great Recession. Click here to read more.
- From the National Skills Coalition: Gaining access to supportive services is one of the most challenging barriers students face when seeking a career. A lack of childcare or reliable transportation can prevent them from completing training programs that lead to good-paying jobs. This is especially true of the growing number of non-traditional students across the country. Click here to read more.
- From Prosperity Now: Each year, millions of households struggle to cover their basic needs in the face of economic fluctuations. Prosperity Now’s Scorecard reports have documented over the years the many ways the U.S. economy has failed families and left millions on the outside of prosperity looking in. From the upside-down tax system to decades of stagnated household incomes, it’s clear that the economic system is not designed to prioritize universal economic security, and is instead evolving to become less equitable and transfer even more risk onto the shoulders of working families. Click here to read more.
- From the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM): The idea of inclusive organizational design (see “Defeat Diversity Derailers: Inclusion by Design” for the introduction) was born out of trying to explain a startling paradox: an 85 percent unemployment rate among a subset of professionals with college degrees, high levels of self-motivation and often exceptionally analytical, systematic, and innovative thinking. Click here to read more.
- From Southern Regional Education Board (SREB): Student debt disproportionately affects students of color and could contribute to a lack of diversity among college faculty. The SREB-State Doctoral Scholars Program aims to reduce this barrier by providing financial support for its participants. This brief presents findings from a survey of Doctoral Scholar Program alumni compared with data collected from a national survey to provide insight on the impact of program participation on student debt burden. Click here to read more.
- From Strada Education Network: Community colleges endured a more severe drop in enrollment than four-year institutions in fall 2020, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. Yet community college students nationwide are more likely than their peers at four-year institutions to say they believe their education will be worth the cost and that their institution does an excellent or very good job connecting education to a meaningful career. Click here to read more.
- From WorkforceGPS: As the world of work and changing education environments adapt, many education and training programs may continue to utilize alternative strategies to temporarily substitute or replace in-person service delivery. This Workforce System Strategies announcement highlights two evaluation implementation studies from education centers in rural communities that used online and virtual learning. Click here to read more.
- From WorkingNation: At a time when all communities are relying on their health care professionals more than ever, providing a high-quality medical sciences education, and then forcing that talent away for clinical training, simply doesn’t make sense. A new collaboration brings together universities and health care providers to help underserved and underrepresented communities in medicine, while at the same time diversifying the talent pool. 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 33on 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 the National Conference of State Legislatures: The State Action on Coronavirus (COVID-19) Database includes up-to-date, real-time information about bills related to and responding to the pandemic that have been introduced in the 50 states and the District of Columbia. Click here to access.
- 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.
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