Insights for Workforce Developers and Employers

RECENT ARTICLES

• From Accenture: Many long-standing tradeoffs were shaped by the cost of coordinating people and work. Companies, for instance, often had to sacrifice agility to gain scale, or accept less differentiation in pursuit of efficiency. Advances in AI have lowered these coordination costs, so these tradeoffs are no longer as stark, though they still must be resolved. Companies can now pursue more scale without sacrificing as much agility, and more efficiency without giving up as much differentiation. The result: the range of what is achievable has expanded. Click here to read more.

• From The Annie E. Casey Foundation: Today’s young adults are nav­i­gat­ing a com­plex eco­nom­ic land­scape. Slow­er hir­ing and greater com­pe­ti­tion for entry-lev­el jobs is mak­ing it hard­er to gain the ear­ly work expe­ri­ence, skills and con­nec­tions that can lead to fam­i­ly-sus­tain­ing wages and career advance­ment. And the sys­tems meant to guide young peo­ple from the class­room to career — schools, work­force pro­grams and employ­ers — too often oper­ate in iso­la­tion from one anoth­er. Click here to read more.

• From American Economic Association: The authors examine a 2016 zoning reform in São Paulo and related detailed administrative data to assess the impact of zoning policies.By simulating the model for ten years following the reform, the authors estimated that the reform added roughly 39,000 units—a 1.6 percent increase in the housing stock—and reduced average prices by 0.4 percent. The authors suggest that this modest average can be explained by BAR rising only 0.54 overall. But neighborhoods receiving the largest increases saw up to 17.5 percent more units and 3 percent lower prices. Click here to read more. 

• From The Aspen Institute: Most employer partnerships don’t struggle because higher education institutions lack commitment. They are challenged because the institution’s operational systems, coordination, and day-to-day practices weren’t built to support them, and those challenges fall hardest of working learners, who have little room to absorb institutional friction while balancing jobs, families, and coursework. This resource is designed to help colleges and universities become more employer-friendly and build the kind of institutional capacity that sustains and grows partnerships while simultaneously better serving working learners. Click here to read more.

• From Brookings: Leaving young children out of the AI debate will not shield childhood from AI. It will let market incentives, rather than developmental science, public interest, and informed parents, set the terms of children’s exposure. The question is no longer whether our children will encounter it, but what kind of AI childhood we are creating. Some AI tools may ultimately help young children, supporting language and learning, but children should not become the test cases for technology released before we understand its effects. Click here to read more. 

• From Center for American Progress: More work remains to ensure that opportunities to opt in to state paid leave programs are well understood and designed to meet the needs of the self-employed workforce. In addition, the three state paid leave programs that do not currently broadly allow self-employed workers to opt in should be amended to include this crucial option. The self-employed need paid leave, allowing them to heal, to bond, and to care without jeopardizing their economic security. State paid leave programs giving these workers the opportunity to choose coverage are crucial first steps that should be studied and expanded. Click here to read more.

• From Center on Budget and Policy Priorities: It is imperative that we shift the paradigm in this country from simply surviving childbirth to achieving holistic and equitable wellness, so that every person has the foundation to thrive and embark on parenthood without fear that pregnancy and birth might cost them their health. Some WIC agencies have implemented strategies to help address the maternal health crisis, and agencies could build on these efforts to increase the program’s impact. Click here to read more. 

• From Economic Policy Institute: Not all Hispanic workers have avoided a worsening employment situation in the last year. For example, the employment rates of young Hispanic workers between the ages of 16 and 24 have struggled to maintain consistent gains in the last year. While the average employment rate for young Latinos is now improving after a sharp drop last year, employment among young Latinas is falling along with that of other young workers and recent graduates. Click here to read more. 

• From FedCommunities: Nonbusiness, government, and other community contacts reported steady economic conditions in late August and September, although price pressures weighed on future outlooks. State government contacts noted continued resilience in tax revenues. However, small business contacts were experiencing a more stressed environment. Businesses explored ways to cover operating expenses as higher costs, late payments from clients, and lower discretionary spending by customers eroded margins. Click here to read more. 

• From the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta: As the calendar turns to autumn, the labor market appears to be a quintessential on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hand story. Signs like increased monthly job growth point to strengthening. Yet more subtle measures, such as relatively low job quits, suggest less robustness. So is the US employment market decisively turning around after more than a year of sluggishness? Answering that question is complicated, even for seasoned labor market economists. To be sure, there’s a wealth of data to sift through to try and divine the labor market’s health and direction. Yet no single set of indicators consistently charts the path ahead with anything approaching sure-fire accuracy. Click here to read more. 

• From Gallup Workplace Insights: Americans’ appetite for corporate voices in public debates cooled in 2026 after peaking a year earlier. Less than half now say businesses should take public stances on current events. However, the divide masks sharp partisan and generational differences, and majorities still want to hear from businesses on a core set of issues, led by free speech and climate change. Click here to read more. 

• From the International Association of Workforce Professionals (IAWP): Decision-making in the workforce system is moving up, from local to state. Programs are being combined into fewer, larger agencies. And workforce agencies are being asked to take on a new job connected to public benefits and work requirements. Supporters say these changes will cut costs and make services easier to use. Critics worry about losing local knowledge. Right now, there isn’t enough evidence to say who is right. Click here to read more. 

• From Jobs for the Future: Throughout California and across the country, colleges are increasingly recognizing the need to adapt their programs and support structures for the growing population of adult learners seeking postsecondary credentials—including the 6 million Californian adults with some college but no degree. Even while juggling responsibilities for work and family, these adult learners, defined as those over age 25, enroll in postsecondary education to obtain economic opportunities and financial security for themselves and their families. Unfortunately, they too often encounter a collegiate support system that all too often consists of layers of new programs and processes tacked onto structures that were never designed for them. Click here to read more. 

• From JPMorganChase: The changes to our environmental targets are rooted in the lessons we have learned during the prior five years. And we believe these evolutions sharpen our strategy: helping to mobilize more capital, address the energy system as a whole, and use our platform to help address barriers that financing alone cannot solve. Our view across companies, markets, and the policy environment has shown us that viable projects are often held back primarily by workforce gaps, permitting timelines, interconnection queues, supply chain constraints, policy uncertainty, or insufficient customer demand – usually not lack of capital. More financing alone will not remove those barriers. Click here to learn more. 

• From Manpower: Today, many employers are facing what we call a workforce barbell. On the one end are roles experiencing restructuring, consolidation, or increased automation. On the other are highly specialized positions where demand dramatically exceeds supply. Between those extremes sits a growing number of jobs being fundamentally reshaped by technology, creating uncertainty about what skills will be needed tomorrow and how organizations can develop them fast enough. Understanding this shift is critical because the workforce challenges facing healthcare and life sciences organizations in 2027 will require a very different playbook than they did just five years ago. Click here to read more. 

• From McKinsey & Company: The next few years may be uncomfortable for school districts, and leaders will have to decide where to invest the funds they receive, knowing that federal-level support may be more limited than in recent years. Districts can maximize incoming funding by taking advantage of new programs, such as federal tax credits, state matching opportunities, local bond measures, or philanthropic grants. Districts can also act now to do more with less by strategically focusing spending on high-potential initiatives to improve student outcomes, using the highest-quality external providers that offer solid evidence of their results, and focusing on programs that provide the biggest returns on investment. Click here to read more. 

• From the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE): Among Class of 2025 master’s level graduates, those earning degrees in computer and information sciences pulled in the highest starting salary, according to results of NACE’s Summer 2026 Salary Survey. With an average starting salary that is 4.6% higher for the Class of 2025 than it was for the Class of 2024, the overall average starting salary for computer and information sciences bumps up to $111,306. Click here to read more.

• From the National Association of Counties (NACO): Counties play a central role in protecting the communities where nonprofits operate, often serving as the link between those organizations, emergency managers and public safety agencies. Providing nonprofit organizations with better access to funding for security enhancements would relieve pressure on county budgets which often step in to bear those costs to keep the community safe. Click here to read more. 

• From the National Association of Workforce Boards (NAWB): For most of the twentieth century, the American summer job was more than a way for teenagers to earn spending money. In many respects, it was one of the largest workforce development programs in the country. No legislation created it. No grant funded it. No performance measures tracked it. Every summer, millions of young people learned how to show up on time, deal with customers, work alongside people they didn’t choose, take feedback, solve small problems and earn the trust of an employer. We didn’t call it work-based learning. It was simply work. That distinction matters because we spend a great deal of time today talking about talent shortages, career pathways and work-based learning. Click here to read more.

• From the National Conference of State Legislatures: Managing child welfare financing is akin to putting out a house fire and fixing faulty wiring at the same time. The burning house is the crisis of kids with nowhere to go, class-action lawsuits and caseworker shortages. The faulty wiring is the slow-building threat of families losing the supports that keep them together and keep children out of the protective services system. Click here to read more. 

• From the National League of Cities (NLC): For city officials, rising health care costs are more than a benefits issue — they are a budget issue. Employer-sponsored health benefit costs are projected to increase 6.7 percent per employee in 2026, driven by catastrophic claims, specialty medications and chronic conditions such as obesity and diabetes. At the same time, cities are working to recruit and retain employees, support public safety personnel and maintain a healthy, productive workforce — all while protecting taxpayer dollars. Click here to read more.

• From the National Fund for Workforce Solutions: No one person or organization has all the answers. But throughout SHIFT, attendees brought their own pieces of the answer: perspectives from their own region, relationships that opened new possibilities, and questions that pushed all of us to think differently. Sometimes the next step becomes clearer because of something we hear from a stage. Just as often, it emerges during a conversation in the hallway, over a meal, or with someone whose work initially seemed very different from our own. Click here to read more. 

• From the National Skills Coalition: While change has always driven our economy, today it feels as if, more than ever before, business and workers are navigating multiple economic shifts at once with less time to adjust before the next one arrives. And instead of one big economic shift – like the 2008 recession or impacts of Covid-19 – these shifts are happening incrementally. Technology is changing how work gets done task by task. AI is reshaping jobs and the skills they require. Business models and markets are shifting. Skills demands are evolving as new roles expand to respond to this change. Demographic and economic forces are reshaping who works, where, and in what jobs. Click here to read more.

• From Prosperity Now: The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) have proposed changes to the rules implementing the CRA. The agencies’ stated goals include reducing unnecessary burden, providing clearer rules, strengthening CRA’s focus on credit needs, and making sure community development grants reach where they are intended to benefit. Some of those changes could also affect what banks receive CRA credit for, what activities carry weight in CRA exams, and what information banks must report. Click here to read more. 

• From the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM): For decades, the professional career ladder followed a familiar path: Employees demonstrated their skills, earned a promotion, and eventually moved into management. But that model is facing a challenge as more workers question whether becoming a people manager is worth the added responsibility. The trend has been dubbed unbossing, a growing reluctance — particularly among younger workers — to step into management roles, often because of concerns about stress, flexibility, and work/life balance. Recent research found that more than half of surveyed job seekers who are or were managers have left or plan to leave their roles because of a lack of fulfillment or advancement. Click here to read more. 

• From the Urban Institute: As more people turn to AI tools to find and interpret information, making public data usable by these tools is increasingly important. Without reliable access to authoritative data and documentation, a model can produce a confident answer that is wrong and difficult to check. Our results show that data providers can substantially improve how AI systems use their data. Our experience offers lessons for federal statistical agencies, state longitudinal data systems, city open data portals, and other organizations that maintain structured data. Click here to read more.

• From the U.S. Chamber of Commerce: The trucking industry is essential to America’s economy, moving goods across the country and supporting businesses and consumers in every community. But even as truck accident rates have declined, the industry is facing rising litigation costs driven by inflated and disproportionate verdicts and settlements. The paper examines the factors contributing to this trend, including interconnected fraud networks and staged accidents, inflated medical billing, aggressive plaintiffs’ attorney trial tactics, third-party litigation funding, and efforts to expand liability to new categories of transportation defendants. Click here to read more. 

• From Workday: This is the essence of citizen development: giving employees with deep domain expertise the tools to design, deploy, and maintain intelligent agents tailored to their own work. The result isn’t a proof of concept waiting to scale. It’s a working model for how AI delivers real, measurable value when it’s driven by expertise and urgency. For those of us in HR leadership, that’s the real opportunity. The people on our teams who understand a workflow best are the ones best positioned to reinvent it, and with Sana, they can do it without writing a single line of code. Click here to read more.

• From Workforce Monitor: A new tool from the American Staffing Association will allow hiring professionals to examine the impact of artificial intelligence across occupations and workplace tasks. Drawing on data from Anthropic and the U.S. Department of Labor’s O*NET, the index examines the share of each task in an occupation automated and augmented by AI. Occupation-level measures are weighted by the importance of each task with the overall job. As a result, the ASA AI Impact Index provides a snapshot of AI’s impact on tasks, occupations, and broader segments of the labor market. The AI Impact Index will be released periodically based on the releases of the Anthropic and O*NET data. Click here to read more. 

• From WorkRise: When workers cannot achieve economic security through work alone, public benefit programs fill the gap. Although these programs play a critical role in reducing hardship, their growing role in supporting working families raises important questions about labor market policy and public spending. Drawing on national and state-level data, this brief provides state and federal policymakers with evidence that higher wage floors and stronger worker protections, labor standards enforcement, and labor market competition can improve workers’ economic security and reduce reliance on public benefits. 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 dhousing, 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 Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA): BEA is part of the United States Department of Commerce is a U.S. government agency that provides official macroeconomic and industry statistics, most notably reports about the gross domestic product (GDP) of the United States and its jurisdictions. Click here to access the data.

• From Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS): BLS is a unit of the United States Department of Labor and the principal fact-finding agency for the U.S. government with detailed labor economics and statistics. Click here to access the data.

• Career Ladder Identifier and Financial Forecaster (CLIFF): Career Ladder Identifier and Financial Forecaster, or CLIFF, is an umbrella for interactive financial planning tools designed by the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta to provide information about benefits loss along a career path. Click here to access CLIFF.

• From Eviction Lab: TheEviction Lab Tracker shows the past year’s eviction statistics for five Atlanta counties and area census tracks. Click here to learn more.

• From FedCommunities: FedCommunities is offering Using Qualitative Research to Understand the Economy: A Toolkit for researchers, policymakers, employers, and workforce organizations interested in engaging directly with the populations they serve to elevate those populations’ perspectives in policy, programming, and practice. Research that engages communities as equal partners can yield unique, authentic results. This new Worker Voices Project toolkit, “Using Qualitative Research to Understand the Economy: A Toolkit,” offers insights on the community-engaged qualitative research practices used for the Fed’s Worker Voices Project and shows how researchers, policymakers, and workforce organizations might use these methods in their own work. Click here to access the toolkit.

• From the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, Center for Workforce and Economic Opportunity (CWEO): The Atlanta Fed maintains a variety of data intelligence tools for informing workforce partners. Click here to learn more.
  • The Atlanta Fed’s Job Calculator determines the net employment change needed to achieve a target unemployment rate after a specified number of months. The user can adjust the target unemployment rate, the number of months, and the assumed labor force growth.
  • Labor Force Participation Dynamics provides data on the behavioral, demographic, and cyclical factors associated with labor force participation.
  • The Labor Market Distributions Spider Chart allows monitoring of broad labor market developments by comparing current conditions to those in up to two earlier time periods that the user selects.
  • Labor Report First Look provides a concise view of the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Employment Situation Summary. The tables and charts in the First Look offer a quick look at current and historical data along with data constructed from the summary. Data in the First Look will be updated with each release of the summary, which usually occurs on the first Friday of each month.
  • 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.
  • Wage Growth Tracker measures the wage growth of individuals. It is constructed using microdata from the Current Population Survey (CPS) and is the median percent change in the hourly wage of individuals observed 12 months apart.         

• From Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis: The Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED) is an online database consisting of hundreds of thousands of economic data time series from scores of national, international, public, and private sources. FRED, created and maintained by the Research Department at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, goes far beyond simply providing data. It combines data with a powerful mix of tools that help the user understand, interact with, display, and disseminate the data. Click here to access FRED.

• From the Georgia Department of Education (GaDOE): Georgia Insights is an initiative of GaDOE focused on improving and increasing the role of data-informed decision making among education decision makers in the state. Georgia Insights is the go-to location for GaDOE’s dashboards, data files, and data resources. By providing data in a streamlined, usable, and useful manner, Georgia Insights equips educators, parents, and communities with the tools and information needed to enact positive change in Georgia’s schools. 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 Municipal Association (GMA): GMA’s Dashboard includes indicators for each city in Georgia along with city and statewide averages for comparisons. Users can choose economic, education, household, population, demographic, and labor data. 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. This includes Georgia’s Top Industries. Click here to learn more.

• From the Governor’s Office of Education and Workforce Strategy (GOEWS): GOEWS supports accountability and transparency through strategic data use and collaboration with education stakeholders to advance student success. 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 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 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 cannot grow, compete, or thrive. The America Works Data Center captures trends on job openings, labor force participation, quit rates, and more. Click here to learn more.

• From WorkSource Georgia: Through its portal, WorkSource Georgia provides access to labor market facts, area profiles, industry profiles, educational profiles, and occupational profiles. Click here to learn more.

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