Insights for Workforce Developers and Employers

• From Accenture: As the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that there were 10.1 million job openings in the United States in August 2022, attracting frontline workers is still at the top of the agenda of many businesses. And while feeling the effects of high inflation is driving 70% of Americans to look for extra work, there is no real guarantee that, across multiple industries, employers that are hurting under the dire necessity to hire frontline workers will find the talent they need. Click here to read more.

• From The Annie E. Casey Foundation: Com­munity colleges can play an important role in helping students build life­long careers, according to two documents recently released by public policy think tank New America and funded by the Annie E. Casey Foundation. Click here to read more.

• From The Aspen Institute: Changemakers—citizens and grantmaking foundations, nonprofits and social enterprises, businesses, and government—have the power to solve society’s shared problems and steward our common resources. They do it best when they do it together. The Program on Philanthropy and Social Innovation (PSI) helps strengthen these social actors and their capacity to work together. It focuses on this nexus of an active citizenry, a resilient society, and a robust democracy and considers the central role of trust. The program gathers changemakers to share ideas, collaborate, and achieve new heights for our nation. Click here to read more.

• From Brookings: One of the most enduring blind spots in U.S. educational outcomes is the implementation of policies and approaches that support excellence for Black boys both within and outside of schools. Although outcomes frequently do not reflect the ongoing advocacy for supporting the achievements of Black boys, for over five decades, there has been a continued, impassioned, and innovative conversation on how to ensure that Black boys achieve successful outcomes with regularity and in high numbers.  Click here to read more.

• From Center for American Progress: Multiple rounds of fiscal support during and following the COVID-19 recession have created a resilient labor market, which has recovered faster and more equitably than in prior downturns. Over the past few months, consistent, stable job growth has continued alongside rising interest rates and a notable decline in job openings, signaling that there is room for the Federal Reserve to act cautiously and restore price stability without causing mass job loss. Click here to read more.

• From Center on Budget and Policy Priorities: SSI is crucial for its 7.6 million beneficiaries who are disabled or elderly and have little income and few assets; more than half of SSI beneficiaries have no other source of income. SSI reduces hardship for beneficiaries and lessens the need for support from family members and others — support that is not available for everyone. But key features of the program, like asset limits and income disregards (the rules governing how much income from other sources beneficiaries can keep without penalty) haven’t been updated in decades, even to account for inflation. Click here to read more.

• From Economic Policy Institute: There are a great deal of systemic issues plaguing the public education system today that require systemic solutions. To do so, the nation needs to move beyond fake education debates and find ways to address the teacher pay gap, one cause of worsening shortages in education, and the growing stress among students and teachers, which has only been exacerbated by the ongoing pandemic. Click here to read more.

• From the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta: Securing the right talent is crucial for every employer. Especially challenging in a tight labor market, it is a perennial issue for certain industries, occupations, and geographies. At the same time, persistent employment outcome disparities exist. The labor mismatch—where current job seekers’ credentials, or lack thereof, do not match employer job requirements—has prompted a widening trend in which employers have shifted from prioritizing degrees in favor of evaluating potential workers based on their transferable skills. Click here to read more.

• From Gallup Workplace Insights: In a worst-case scenario, quiet firing happens when managers allow employees to have truly toxic or miserable experiences at work as a way to squeeze them out. It’s a form of gaslighting. And while this may be a common practice in today’s workplace, it isn’t good leadership, productive or the right thing to do. At the very least, it tarnishes your employer’s reputation as a good place to work, poisons team trust and can even hurt your ability to keep customers happy when key employees exit. Click here to read more.

• From the International Association of Workforce Professionals (IAWP): The nature of work continues to evolve, and so do the needs and wants of employees. Now, in many ways, employees have the upper hand as companies experience labor shortages and competition for top talent. Employers seeking to recruit and engage employees during these labor market shifts need to offer top-quality learning and development programs to entice potential candidates and engage their employees who are looking to develop their skills, advance in their jobs, and grow in their careers. To learn more about the current industry sentiment, Amazon commissioned research firm Workplace Intelligence to conduct a blind survey of 3,000 U.S. employees from a variety of industries and companies. The study revealed that most employees are concerned they lack the skills (78%) and education (71%) required to advance their career, and the pandemic is at least partly to blame. In fact, 58% of employees are afraid that their skills have gone stale since the onset of the pandemic, and 70% feel unprepared for the future of work. Click here to read more.

• From Jobs for the Future: IT support is a high-demand field that has only grown with the rise of remote work. The industry counted more than 316,000 job postings nationwide in 2021, representing a 21% increase from the previous year. The typical salary for IT support roles is around $50,000 per year, according to data from Lightcast, a labor market analytics firm formerly known as Emsi Burning Glass, and those jobs have high career-advancement potential. Click here to read more.

• Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies: Given the role of community colleges during economic downturns and the disproportionate enrollment of Black students, it is essential to understand how community colleges can be tools for economic recovery in the context of COVID-19 when Black adults continue to face high unemployment rates. From our analysis of the limited data on Black community college students, we find that while Black students are disproportionately represented at community colleges, the system does not produce equitable outcomes. Click here to read more.

• From JPMorgan Chase Institute: A notable component of ARPA was the expansion of the existing Child Tax Credit (CTC) program. Among other things, this expansion introduced automatically disbursed cash payments to the overwhelming majority of families with children under 17. It was both novel in its structure and unprecedented in its scale—characterized by its designers as “the largest child tax credit ever and historic relief to the most working families ever”. Accordingly, the program provides a unique opportunity for policymakers to understand how effective future policies like the CTC might be. Click here to read more.

• From Manpower: With employee attrition at an all-time high, employers are struggling to find out what workers want. The answer, for many, is greater meaning, purpose, and fulfillment in their careers. It’s a widespread phenomenon we’re calling the Great Realization. One way that companies can meet this challenge head-on is by providing a line of sight to a career that allows employees to learn, grow, and have a positive impact. Call it upskilling, training or career pathing, companies that meet these needs will not only drive productivity and retention of their current talent, but help to attract the best talent in the market. Click here to read more.

• From McKinsey & Company: Should employers limit themselves by considering only degrees when hiring? The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, a potential recession, still-rising inflation rates, and the Great Attrition have driven employers to rethink their approach to human capital and talent management. Namely, they’re moving beyond degrees and job titles to focus more on the skills a job requires and that a candidate possesses. And they’re doing so in greater numbers, based on McKinsey research conducted in partnership with the Rework America Alliance, a collective that helps millions of workers from lower-wage roles move into positions that offer higher wages, more economic mobility, and better resilience to automation. Click here to read more.

• From the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE): The unusual and uncertain times experienced by the college Class of 2021 in its final year was reflected in its outcomes, which improved from last year, but remained down from pre-pandemic levels, according to NACE’s First Destinations for the College Class of 2021 report. The outcomes rate for the Class of 2021 was 84.1%, a gain from what was reported for the Class of 2020 (82.4%, the lowest recorded rate in the history of the report), but off from where graduates were pre-COVID. The Class of 2019 posted an outcomes rate of 86.0%, and the Class of 2018 wasn’t far behind with a rate of 85.7%. Click here to read more.

• From the National Association of Counties (NACO): Momentum is growing in efforts to reduce the number of people with mental illness in jails. The Stepping Up program, which has gained significant visibility and participation by counties, encourages public, private and non-profit partners to work together to help people with mental illness connect with support services instead of incarceration when appropriate. The initiative, launched in 2015 by NACo, the Council of State Governments (CSG) Justice Center and the American Psychiatric Association (APA) Foundation, now has participation from 540 counties in 43 states. The focus is on increasing collaboration among behavioral health, criminal justice, housing authorities and other systems to develop shared solutions that address the full spectrum of need. Click here to read more.

• From the National Association of Workforce Boards (NAWB): The heart of work-based learning–– purposeful embrace of the ongoing education and growth that is part of every job– is what makes it such an impactful and critically important strategy. Work-based learning allows for a set of possibilities that conventional skills training doesn’t. In turn, apprenticeships are the exemplar among work-based learning approaches, and the gold-star tool in the workforce development toolkit. Click here to read more.

• From the National Conference of State Legislatures: Employment opportunities for people with disabilities have grown significantly since the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act. However, with only 19.1% of people with disabilities currently employed, they remain an underrepresented and underutilized group in the labor force. Click here to read more.
  
• From the National League of Cities (NLC): Hispanic/Latinx homeownership rates have consistently increased over the last seven years, due in part to decreases in poverty rates, gains in educational attainment, and a young population — the median age for Hispanic/Latinx people is 30, the lowest among non-Hispanic/Latinx white, Black, and Asian people — approaching homebuying age. The Urban Institute projects this growth to continue, estimating that 70 percent of new homeowners between 2020 and 2040 will be Hispanic; however, gains may not be even among the Hispanic/Latinx population. In 2019, the Afro-Latino homeownership rate was 41.8 percent while Hispanic/Latinx people of Guatemalan, Dominican and Honduran descent had a homeownership rate below 32 percent. Click here to read more.

• From the National Fund for Workforce Solutions: What it means to “shift the future of workforce” is largely informed by where one sits within the broader workforce ecosystem. For us at the National Fund, it means changing the conversation about workforce development so that workers have the supports they need to thrive, race does not dictate employment outcomes, and all jobs are good jobs. Click here to read more.

• From the National Skills Coalition: Our country is emerging from the most devastating economic crisis since the Great Depression. During the past couple of years, Congress has made billions of dollars in investments that have given states the opportunity to support and strengthen the workforce through skills training. With the implementation of historic investments on the horizon (and already underway in some cases) it is critical that we prepare advocacy and implementation strategies for these workforce development investments that don’t repeat the mistakes of the past and, instead, promote an inclusive vision of the future. Click here to read more.

• From Prosperity Now: In 1996, then-President Bill Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act, replacing the New Deal-era federal assistance program Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) with the more restrictive Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). Even over a decade ago, the resulting argument was familiar: the program was said to disincentivize work. Others argued that an excessively restrictive replacement program would increase child poverty and needlessly plunge many single mothers into unemployment. Click here to read more.

• From the Roosevelt Institute: Many economists, including within the Federal Reserve, are arguing that today’s 3.5 percent unemployment rate is below the “natural rate” of unemployment and needs to rise to help bring down inflation. However, the unemployment rate was 3.5 percent in 2019, when inflation was low and stable. What changed between then and now that the supposed “natural” unemployment rate went up? Click here to read more.

• From the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM): With Democrats maintaining control of the Senate and Republicans taking charge of the House of Representatives following Election Day 2022, there are implications for workplace policy. Split control of the federal government means we should not expect significant legislative progress in the 118th Congress. Instead, workplace issues will be addressed by federal regulatory actions, court decisions and state legislation. Click here to read 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 U.S. Chamber and Chamber Foundation’s America Works initiative is mobilizing business and government to swiftly address the crisis. This page captures the trends on job openings, labor force participation, quit rates, and more, for a quick understanding of the state of the workforce. Click here to read more.

• From Workforce Monitor: According to the Pew Research Center, GenZers “look very much like Millennials” but also have their own unique characteristics. For example, they are more likely to attend college and have college-educated parents than generations before them. There are many things about GenZers that set them apart from the other generations. For instance, Pew explained that working-aged GenZers have been hit harder financially during the pandemic than Millennials, GenXers, and Boomers because GenZers are more likely to hold jobs in high-risk service sector industries. Click here to read more.

• From Workday: The 2020s have been a time of uncertainty and upheaval. From COVID-19 and remote work to a global skills shortage and potential economic headwinds, professional services firms have navigated unprecedented change over the past three years. As a result, leaders must ensure their business models and financial plans are poised to deliver a new level of agility to navigate this change. Click here to read more.

• From WorkingNation: Marrying an active-duty service member comes with the understanding of – and committment to – the possibility of frequent geographical moves. Relocating, while taking care of a family, makes it especially challenging for military spouses to build careers. t’s no surprise that unemployment and underemployment are major concerns for military spouses who face a jobless rate of 20%, according to a Blue Star Families report created in collaboration with the D’Aniello Institute for Veterans and Military Families. Click here to read more.

• From WorkRise: The forces of climate change, automation, and digital transformation could widen inequities and leave workers—particularly those in low-wage industries and others facing structural disadvantage—further behind. The decline in worker power and inconsistent investment by employers in training and upskilling are also long-term trends that need to be addressed and, ultimately, reversed to support workers’ economic mobility. Click here to read more.

DATA TOOLS

• From Atlanta Regional Commission: Each week ARC, in partnership with Neighborhood Nexus, provides updated research and analytics through the 33^on blog. From a look at housing, rental rates, and cost of living to the job market and latest on wages, this blog is a one-stop portal to a treasure trove of local and regional data. Click here to learn more.

• 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 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.  The Opportunity Occupations Monitor displays opportunity employment and its prevalence across labor markets. Opportunity employment is an estimate of the number and share of jobs accessible to workers without a bachelor’s degree that pay more than the national median wage. Click here to learn more.

• From the Georgia Department of Labor: The Georgia Department of Labor provides access to a complete set of data tools for workforce developers to better understand the labor market conditions in Georgia. The portal also includes resources for job seekers and employers. Click here to learn more.

• From Georgia Power: Georgia Power’s Community & Economic Development team maintains interactive tools to take a deeper dive into the data on target industries, the labor force, and more. Click here to learn more.

• From the National Fund for Workforce Solutions: The National Fund for Workforce Solutions’ Workforce Equity Dashboard provides disaggregated data that uncovers racial gaps in workforce outcomes, identifies opportunities to advance racial equity across systems, and informs high-impact strategies to build a future where employers, workers, and communities prosper. This dashboard was developed in partnership with the National Equity Atlas. Click here to learn more.

• From Neighborhood Nexus: Neighborhood Nexus, a data partner of ARC, developed Data Nexus, a powerful tool to find, visualize, analyze, and download community data including demographic, education, health, and economic indicators from state and national sources, all in one place. Click here to learn more.

• From the Partnership for Southern Equity: The Metro Atlanta Racial Equity Atlas (MAREA) is designed to offer an immersive, story-centric experience that contextualizes personal narratives with engaging, interactive community data and historical background. This tool has been developed by the Partnership for Southern Equity, Neighborhood Nexus, and archi. 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 Rework America Alliance: The Rework Community Insights Monitor provides a metro-level view on good jobs and training within the local labor market. Click here to learn more.

• From the Technical College System of Georgia: TCSG’s Data and Research provides access to the System Scorecard, enrollment data, and more. Click here to learn more.

• From the University of Georgia, Carl Vinson Institute of Government (CVIOG): CVIOG has developed toolkits and other resources on a variety of workforce topics. 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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