Insights for Workforce Developers and Employers

RECENT ARTICLES

• From Accenture: The C-suite is navigating compounding disruptions, from rapid advances in AI and economic volatility to demographic shifts and evolving workforce expectations. CEOs are asking for new levels of leadership capability, more agile operating models, and the organizational muscle to sustain continuous change. Preparedness has slipped since the start of the year, and just 41% of leaders believe their organization is ready for talent disruption. Click here to read more. 
  
• From The Annie E. Casey Foundation: Today, most states offer some form of extend­ed fos­ter care, cre­at­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties for young peo­ple to remain con­nect­ed to sup­port beyond age 18, usu­al­ly to age 21. Ida­ho, Maine and Ten­nessee allow young peo­ple to stay in care to age 23. States typ­i­cal­ly fund these pro­grams through a com­bi­na­tion of state and fed­er­al fund­ing to address the unique needs and expe­ri­ences of old­er youth. Oklahoma’s recent leg­is­la­tion enables it to max­i­mize fed­er­al funds to expand its old­er youth interventions. Click here to read more. 
  
• From American Economic Association:The results suggest that low-skill foreign and low-skill American workers are poor substitutes for one another. The authors’ estimates put the elasticity of substitution between H-2B and US workers at roughly 0.8 to 2.2, far below related studies of immigrants in low-skill work, which typically find an elasticity of 4 to 10, and nowhere near the perfect substitutability assumed in some influential studies. Click here to read more.
  
• From The Aspen Institute: As a nation, we currently face increasing inequality. This is characterized by a K-shaped economy, in which the wealthiest Americans continue to prosper while more and more everyday people struggle to meet their basic needs. While much is being said in the current moment about the affordability crisis, at its roots is really a job quality crisis. A quality job is one that meets a worker’s needs, offering a living wage, adequate benefits, opportunities to build skills and advance, and a safe and supportive work environment. Click here to read more.
  
• From Brookings: Industry can build this research into product design—including cues that redirect children to a trusted adult at moments like a dead battery, rather than inviting the child to solve it alone. Policymakers can ground AI-related child-focused policies in this research. If AI is becoming part of the relationships that shape early childhood, understanding those relationships is no longer a niche research question. It is one of the defining child development questions of the AI era. Click here to read more. 
  
• From Center for American Progress: The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released its Employment Situation report for August 2026, showing that 162,000 jobs were added to the U.S. economy while the unemployment rate stayed the same, at 4.1 percent. This stronger-than-expected job growth is welcome, but it may represent only a brief rebound, given BLS projections over the coming decade. Click here to read more. 
  
• From Center on Budget and Policy Priorities: As our nation celebrates Labor Day, policymakers should consider ways to boost the incomes of people who do important work in our communities for low pay. Currently, more than 19 million children under age 17 receive less than the full $2,200 Child Tax Credit because their families’ incomes are too low — and the vast majority of these children have parents who work. To help children whose parents work in low-paying jobs, policymakers should provide the full Child Tax Credit to these families. Click here to read more.
  
• From Economic Policy Institute: Access to unemployment insurance (UI) also shapes workers’ ability to seek better wages. When a worker is laid off and their household income falls, unemployment insurance supports them and their family until they find another job. UI is a joint federal-state program that relies on state UI systems to effectively deliver benefits to unemployed workers. States differ in their rules and approaches under the federal UI framework, leading to wide variation in the share of unemployed workers receiving UI benefits. Click here to read more.
  
• From FedCommunities: Workforce development has emerged as a critical community challenge as labor supply shortages intensify and pathways to replace retiring workers remain inadequate. Workforce development organizations report that reduced federal funding, staffing constraints, and increased competition for resources have limited their capacity to deliver training programs to low- and moderate-income populations. Employers have struggled to find and retain workers as experienced employees retire without transferring expertise. These challenges are compounded by high costs for transportation, housing, and childcare that prevent workforce entry. Click here to read more.
  
• From the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta: The AI boom has seen stock market valuations rise sharply, led by the so-called Magnificent 7, raising concerns of a stock market “bubble.” We analyze potential factors contributing to downside risk to the stock market if investor sentiment turns decidedly more negative, thereby driving down equity prices. Downside risk to the stock market in turn poses downside risk to consumption spending via the equity wealth effect. We measure the equity wealth effect using data on household wealth, equity exposure, and how strongly households adjust spending in response to an extra dollar of stock market wealth. Click here to read more. 
  
• From Gallup Workplace Insights: Corporate leaders are looking to AI for the future of their business. A recent survey of 102 CHROs participating in Gallup’s Global CHRO Roundtable found 99% say AI is somewhat or very important to their organization’s strategy. At the same time, CHROs are unsure about whether their team leaders have the capability to achieve AI transformation. Fifty percent of the same CHROs say they are not very confident or not at all confident in their managers’ ability to guide employees on using AI at work. Click here to read more. 
  
• From the International Association of Workforce Professionals (IAWP): A WARN notice is an early warning, but it is not always the earliest warning. Declining overtime, reduced shifts, cancelled supplier orders, hiring freezes, equipment being moved, delayed expansion plans and rising requests for short-time compensation may appear before a formal notice. Strong relationships with employers, unions, economic-development organizations and community partners can reveal these pressures earlier. Click here to read more. 
  
• From Jobs for the Future: One of the clearest areas of state interest is expanding how WIOA serves young people. For years, one of the most sought waiver requests has been to reduce the requirement that 75% of WIOA youth funding be spent on out-of-school youth. That interest has continued, with more than half of U.S. states and territories now receiving waivers for this requirement. But states are also taking advantage of new opportunities to reach young people earlier. Following DOL’s waiver guidance released last fall, 23 states and territories have now received approvals allowing in-school youth to access Individual Training Accounts (ITAs). Click here to read more. 
  
• From JPMorganChase: JPMorganChase announced a significant expansion of its support for small businesses across Southern California. Over the next five years, the firm will hire more than 100 additional business bankers across the region—a nearly 30% increase—and plans to scale its Coaching for Impact program to graduate more than 3,700 additional local entrepreneurs. The firm will also open a new Community Center Branch in East Los Angeles next month, deepening support for the neighborhood and connecting local entrepreneurs directly to financial education programming and resources. Click here to learn more. 
  
• From Manpower: AI is not a distant disruption waiting somewhere on the horizon. It is already changing the nature of work, and for frontline workers in manufacturing, logistics, retail, health care, and service environments, that means the skills equation is shifting too. We are accustomed to hearing about how AI transformation is impacting knowledge workers, but this leaves a huge part of the story out. Frontline workers are still the backbone of our economy, and whether they are performing manual labor or showing up to interface with customers, AI-based technologies and automated components are already affecting their job responsibilities. Click here to read more.
  
• From McKinsey & Company: The economics of AI are often framed as a labor story, but that does not explain the magnitude of the returns achieved by leading adopters. Those gains arise because AI enables organizations to make better decisions faster—not simply because it reduces labor costs. Better decisions improve the use of existing assets, increase organizational flexibility, and enable companies to capture opportunities that slower competitors miss. The competitive advantage will come not from having AI, but from building an organization that can consistently turn better decisions into better business outcomes. Click here to read more. 
  
• From the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE): In today’s higher education landscape, faculty engagement has become a central and widely discussed priority, as institutions increasingly recognize that sustainable, scalable career readiness requires faculty leadership. Our goal is not only to participate in this national movement but to model what it looks like when a college invests deeply in faculty as partners and co‑creators of a career‑infused academic experience. Click here to read more. 
  
• From the National Association of Counties (NACO): Counties frequently rely on partnerships with banks to finance local priorities, particularly large capital projects. CRA-motivated lending and investment attracts capital to projects that may otherwise struggle to secure financing, particularly in affordable housing and projects serving LMI communities. CRA-motivated financial institutions contribute more than 80 percent of annual low-income housing tax credit (LIHTC) and new markets tax credit (NMTC) equity, underscoring the CRA’s significant role in financing affordable housing and community development. 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: AI brings down the cost dramatically in a way that’s enabling agencies to maintain much better inventories of the assets that they are charged with maintaining. Many state agencies already are using AI to better deliver their programs and services. It’s really a tremendously valuable technology, and we are still just every day learning new ways that it can be employed as a benefit. Click here to read more. 
  
• From the National League of Cities (NLC): Creating opportunities for young people to participate is important. But these students also draw a distinction between being invited to participate and being given a meaningful role in decision-making. That distinction can be an important one for cities to consider: Are young people being asked what they think before a decision is made, or are they being asked to react to something that has already been decided? Click here to read more.
  
• From the National Fund for Workforce Solutions: Workers leave jobs and job seekers stop searching when the cost of having a job outweighs the benefit. Why apply for jobs that don’t offer the pay or flexibility you need? How do you show up for work when you can’t afford the cost of childcare? Lower-wage work can feel like a dead end, even when you find meaning in what you are doing. The good news is that this challenge is solvable. Click here to read more.
  
• From the National Skills Coalition: AI is new. But many of the weaknesses it exposes in our workforce and economic supports policies are not. As our community conversations affirmed, our public workforce system has long lacked the resources and capacity to help people fully develop their skills and talent. Meanwhile, unemployment insurance and safety net programs are designed for cyclical downturns instead of the ongoing economic disruptions workers increasingly face. AI didn’t create those policy challenges, but it is exposing them and accelerating their consequences. Click here to read more.
  
• From Prosperity Now: Supported by funding from the Wells Fargo Foundation, Prosperity Now launched the Fall 2026 Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA) Support Fund Request for Proposals (RFP), opening a second round of grants for IRS-certified VITA sites and organizations that directly support VITA operations nationwide. Grants will range from $5,000 to $20,000. The VITA program provides no-cost basic tax return preparation to individuals who generally make $64,000 or less, people with disabilities, and those with limited English proficiency who need assistance preparing their own tax returns. Click here to read more.
  
• From the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM): Recent events have forced many employers to take a hard look at their benefits offerings. Data from insurance broker and HR consulting firm Gallagher from late last year found that 40% of employers have considered reevaluating their benefits strategy or philosophy as a result of changing economic and business conditions. Additionally, a SHRM pulse survey of 1,219 U.S.-based workers in March found that while 42% of workers indicated that their organization maintained all their benefits at the same level over the past year, 15% reported reductions in some of their benefits, and 15% noted both reductions and enhancements. Click here to read more. 
  
• From the Urban Institute: Public benefit programs such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Medicaid, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), and housing assistance help support young adults’ healthy development, especially when personal and family resources are limited. Yet accessing these benefits is particularly challenging for this age group because of program rules and processes that do not fit the complex realities of their lives, developmental stages, or strengths. As a result, many young adults do not receive the assistance they qualify for. Click here to read more.
  
• From the U.S. Chamber of Commerce: Every sector of the American economy is becoming more digital. Small businesses use cloud platforms to reach customers. Hospitals manage patient care through connected systems. Manufacturers optimize production with AI-driven tools. None of that works without physical infrastructure: land, power, fiber, and water. Employers investing in AI, advanced manufacturing, and logistics will not locate where the digital backbone is weak. States and communities that can host responsible data center development will attract the next generation of jobs and investment. Those that cannot will watch it go elsewhere. Click here to read more. 
  
• From Workday: In recent years, policymakers have devoted significant attention to AI safety issues emerging from the rapidly advancing capabilities of frontier AI models. Meanwhile, enterprise AI adoption is accelerating, increasing productivity, improving decisions, and freeing time for more strategic work—something we see with our customers every day. These opportunities raise policy questions that demand a response: AI governance focused only at the frontier will not suffice. Click here to read more.
  
• From Workforce Monitor: Staffing employment ticked down during the week of Aug. 10–16, with the ASA Staffing Index slightly declining by 0.1% to hold at a rounded value of 93. Staffing jobs were 5.5% higher compared with the same period last year, up from 5.2% recorded the previous week. New starts, however, increased during the 33rd week of the year, up 5.0% from the prior week. Nearly half of all staffing companies (49%) reported gains in new assignments week to week, above the average of 41% so far in 2026. Click here to read more. 
  
• From WorkRise: Policymakers can use these findings to be cautious about attributing changes in entry-level employment to AI alone rather than to other changes in the labor market. Although the study finds patterns linked to AI exposure, it does not establish AI as the sole cause of the slowdown in entry-level hiring. Researchers and labor market analysts can use measures of how exposed different occupations are to AI, along with information on firm-wide hiring trends, to better assess whether employment changes are linked to AI or to broader economic shifts. 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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