Insights for Workforce Developers and Employers

RECENT ARTICLES

• From Accenture: Commodity trading has always rewarded speed, judgment and risk appetite. But the basis of advantage is changing. Today, the constraint is no longer access to information but the ability to interpret, prioritize and act on it faster than competitors. AI is not just improving decisions. It is enabling a new system for making them. We call this the commodity decision engine. Click here to read more. 
  
• From The Annie E. Casey Foundation: Emerg­ing adult jus­tice is a reac­tion to the dis­mal results for the age group. The lat­est nation­al data reflect long-term trends. Peo­ple aged 18 to 25 are over-rep­re­sent­ed through­out the crim­i­nal legal sys­tem, have the high­est recidi­vism rates and expe­ri­ence the most extreme racial and eth­nic dis­par­i­ties, par­tic­u­lar­ly in cor­rec­tion­al facil­i­ties. Too often, the jus­tice sys­tem fails to rec­og­nize the devel­op­men­tal needs of this pop­u­la­tion and treats emerg­ing adults in almost the same man­ner as old­er, ful­ly mature adults. Click here to read more.  
  
• From The Aspen Institute: The data make clear that the majority of Americans are navigating an economy in which building the wealth they need is structurally out of reach—not for lack of effort, but for lack of the right conditions, tools, and investments working together. The essential wealth metric gives us a sharper way to see that gap and a more precise way to close it for families who need a foundation to weather shocks, seize opportunities, and build something lasting; and for leaders who want their investments to actually move the needle. Click here to read more.
  
• From Brookings: We may be seeing a rise in anthropomorphic AI discussions among other teacher organizations around the globe: The Alberta Teachers’ Association resolutions will be shared at a global teaching profession conference in Madrid later this month, where over 100 teacher organizations and unions will be represented. Teachers are the ultimate arbiters of the teaching and learning approaches in their classrooms. It will benefit kids, policymakers, and communities at large to ensure educators have a seat at the table when discussing AI. Click here to read more. 
  
• From Center for American Progress: Vocational education, now more commonly known as career and technical education (CTE), has recently been on the rise as students and workers navigate a changing economy. Since only 39 percent of Americans above the age of 25 have a bachelor’s degree or higher, the majority of the country is left navigating career options without a clear system such as that for pursuing a four-year college degree. Vocational education can help train and connect these students to careers that do not necessarily require a four-year degree. Click here to read more.
  
• From Center on Budget and Policy Priorities: In recent years, WIC (the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children) has been offering virtual services, including telephone and video certification appointments, as part of a broader modernization initiative. Research shows that waiving in-person requirements increases WIC participation. But without action by Congress, the temporary waivers allowing these critical flexibilities will expire. Click here to read more. 
  
• From Economic Policy Institute: At its most basic, the joint employer standard simply requires that when multiple employers co-determine or share control over a workers’ terms of employment (such as pay, schedules, and job duties), each of those employers is responsible for compliance with worker protection laws. Given the realities of the modern workplace, in which employees often find themselves subject to more than one employer, workers deserve a joint employment standard under the FLSA that guarantees these basic rights and protections. Click here to read more. 
  
• From FedCommunities: Contacts across nonprofits report significant workforce challenges marked by tight labor availability, rising costs, and pressure to operate with leaner staff. Difficulty hiring and retaining employees persists, with turnover, wage constraints, and burnout particularly acute in caregiving, social assistance, and emergency services. Several contacts emphasized that salaries have not kept pace with rising living costs, forcing some nonprofit workers to rely on the very services their organizations provide and making it difficult for others to remain in their communities. Click here to read more.
  
• From the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta: Analysis of 2025 SBCS data of small businesses in the Sixth District suggests many continue to navigate difficult conditions. Most firms across the district (69 percent) reported poor or fair financial conditions. As in prior years, firms most commonly cited rising costs of goods, services, and/or wages; paying operating expenses; and managing uneven cash flow as the most common financial challenges. These pressures contributed to mixed revenue performance in 2025, though many firms expressed optimism about future conditions. Click here to read more. 
  
• From Gallup Workplace Insights: For financially stressed adults, the most pressing priorities are foundational, including reducing debt, increasing income, and building the stability needed to move forward. Financially fulfilled adults are more likely to prioritize stewardship and purpose, including managing money responsibly and making a difference with their money. This different focus does not mean financial fundamentals no longer matter to the fulfilled; rather, these are more firmly in place. Click here to read more. 
  
• From the International Association of Workforce Professionals (IAWP): Employers frequently cite uncertainty about candidate quality, lengthy recruitment processes, and concerns about onboarding as barriers to hiring. Workforce organizations can play an important role by helping employers streamline recruitment, expand work-based learning opportunities, develop internship pathways, support job trials, and create stronger connections between employers and talent. The broader lesson is that workforce challenges are not solely supply-side problems. They are also information problems, perception problems, and decision-making problems. Click here to read more. 
  
• From Jobs for the Future: Across interviews with CFA staff and employer partners, one theme came through clearly: trust is not built through a single ask. It is built over time by understanding what employers need, meeting them where they are, and helping turn interest into action. For other intermediaries, the lesson from Arizona is straightforward: start with listening. Listening also shapes how CFA responds when employers raise concerns about student readiness, time, or capacity. Rather than minimizing those concerns, staff work through them and offer alternatives. Click here to read more. 
  
• From JPMorganChase: JPMorganChase announced a significant expansion of its community banking efforts to help more people build the knowledge and confidence to manage their money. To scale proven local solutions faster and further, JPMorganChase will hire more than 150 additional Community Managers and double the number of Community Centers to expand financial health education programming with the goal of reaching 5 million people. Click here to learn more. 
  
• From Manpower: More than 4,000 Tech & IT Services employers across 42 countries were asked about their third quarter hiring intentions in the latest edition of the Experis Tech Talent Outlook. Employers reported a global Net Employment Outlook (NEO) of 35% as they consider  their hiring plans for July – September. The NEO decreased since the previous quarter by 7 points and year-over-year by 1 point. Click here to read more. 
  
• From McKinsey & Company: The next phase of AI competition will be shaped as much by economics as by model capability. While advances in intelligence will continue, adoption will increasingly depend on how efficiently that intelligence can be delivered. For investors and industry leaders along the supply chain, the key question is not only which technologies lower the cost of inference, but also which companies control the capabilities required to deliver those reductions at scale. Click here to read more. 
  
• From the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE): For decades, one of the pervasive arguments in college recruiting has been the effectiveness of high-tech versus high-touch practices. That argument persists with the integration of AI into college recruiting. Perhaps one of the key determinations employers should base their college recruiting approach on should not be what they think college students want throughout the process but what college students actually want. Click here to read more. 
  
• From the National Association of Counties (NACO): Counties support and fund local modernization efforts through local sources of revenue, but a federal program geared to flexibly meet needs at the local level would provide much needed support to accelerate the transition to modernized and secure services at the county level. The legislation comes amid a growing recognition that many counties are facing rising costs for new IT equipment as aging legacy technology systems must be retired and the demand for modernized local services continues to increase. Click here to read more. 
  
• From the National Association of Workforce Boards (NAWB): Apprenticeship is one of the most practical, proven strategies we have to strengthen our workforce and our economy. Even for those of us who have been doing this work for years, it’s worth stepping back and naming what makes apprenticeship so effective. It starts with alignment. Apprenticeship meets employers where they are. Instead of asking businesses to adapt to available talent, it gives them a way to shape it. Training becomes relevant, immediate, and tied directly to real work. Click here to read more.
  
• From the National Conference of State Legislatures: Special education is a state-federal partnership. Federal laws and regulations direct states to establish processes to ensure children with disabilities can receive early intervention services and attend school in a setting that meets their individual needs, while maximizing their time with nondisabled peers. With the U.S. Department of Education’s recent announcement that it will shift oversight of special education and civil rights enforcement to other agencies, here are five questions about what the changes might mean for states. Click here to read more. 
  
• From the National League of Cities (NLC): Communities across the country are growing, whether they are ready or not. The question is whether we plan for that growth in a way that creates more opportunity and stronger neighborhoods. In Everett, we did this through our recent Comprehensive Plan and Development Regulations update – led by a shared vision for what the city can become. Our plan invites residents to imagine walkable neighborhoods filled with diverse housing choices, thriving commercial centers linked by transit and communities where every person has a place to call home. Click here to read more.
  
• From the National Fund for Workforce Solutions: Inflation is on the rise again, and many families are struggling to make ends meet. Childcare and transportation costs soar while wages stagnate. These pressures are especially acute for workers in low-wage roles, which account for nearly half of U.S. employees. These workers are more likely to be women and people of color, deepening racial and gender inequities in income and wealth. Click here to read more. 
  
• From the National Skills Coalition: Many of the employers that NSC spoke with frankly confessed that they were unfamiliar with some of the technology-related credentials they saw on jobseekers’ resumes, and unsure of how those credentials translated into real-world skills. This was true across industries, even among companies that identified themselves as being in the tech sector. In the worst cases, this led to disregarding or minimizing the importance of credentials presented by job seekers. Click here to read more.
  
• From Prosperity Now: As new pathways for early-wealth building emerge, it is critical that American households have the tools and resources necessary to access these opportunities. This report offers clear, actionable insights that all of us working in the child savings landscape can draw from as we support low-income families in strengthening financial security and resilience for their children. Click here to read more. 
  
• From the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM): To identify jobs facing high automation displacement risk, SHRM researchers estimated the share of employment in any given occupation that meets two conditions: at least 50% of tasks were automated and no nontechnical barriers were present. Using that definition, SHRM estimated that 5.1% of U.S. wage-and-salary employment — or about 7.9 million jobs — faces high automation displacement risk. Click here to read more. 
  
• From the Urban Institute: Together, these findings suggest that cities must reconsider their growth strategies. Investments in housing, education, safety, and child care that are tailored to families’ needs can yield both short-term fiscal benefits and long-term economic resilience. The benefits from attracting and retaining families with children can also improve life for lower-income families, childless adults, and elderly people, further boosting a city’s economic and fiscal vitality. Click here to read more.
  
• From the U.S. Chamber of Commerce: Not long ago, patients with severe obesity faced a stark choice: major surgery or a lifetime of managing a condition that medicine had largely given up on. Today, that has changed. A new generation of anti-obesity medicines – including GLP-1 therapies – are delivering meaningful, lasting weight loss while reducing the risk of heart disease, diabetes, and other life-threatening complications. For the roughly 42% of U.S. adults living with obesity, it’s a transformation that touches every community and every workplace. Click here to read more. 
  
• From Workday: With natural language-driven tooling and agent-based patterns, developers are no longer constrained by the old enterprise pace. Teams can go from idea to meaningful prototype much more quickly. That acceleration raises the bar on architecture and design discipline: if more people can build, then patterns, controls, and testing matter even more. Fast is good. Fast and repeatable is where value shows up. Click here to read more.
  
• From Workforce Monitor: Staffing employment edged up during the week of June 8–14, with the ASA Staffing Index increasing by 0.3% while holding at a rounded value of 89. Staffing jobs were 5.6% higher compared with the same period last year, up from 5.2% recorded the previous week. New starts, however, decreased during the 24th week of the year, down 6.3% from the prior week. Three in 10 staffing companies (30%) reported gains in new assignments week to week, below the average of 41% so far in 2026. Click here to read more. 
  
• From WorkingNation: There’s no single definition of rural America. Some rural communities are a small, but bustling, town center surrounded by vast swatches of farm land. Other communities are mountainous with a few homes and businesses scattered about the region. What they have in common is a population that wants to live and work in a community that offers a slower pace of life, one with financial stability. Providing quality jobs is key to making that happen. It takes a coalition of partners to make it work. While the number of U.S. farms continues a slow decline, and with tech playing an expanding role in all industries, the rural American job market is diversifying. The shift from traditional agricultural jobs towards manufacturing, clean energy, and health care is creating new opportunities that can provide that economic mobility and security. Click here to read more.

• From WorkRise: State policymakers and program administrators should work with tribal governments to design and communicate state policies to improve access to paid family and medical leave among all AIAN parents. State-level policies should align with tribal values and build upon the work already being done by tribal communities. Tribal governments’ participation in Washington PFML could improve paid leave access and reduce inequities within the AIAN population. Click here to read more.

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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: The Eviction 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 Student Achievement (GOSA): GOSA 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 can’t 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.