Insights for Workforce Developers and Employers

RECENT ARTICLES

• From Accenture: Most manufacturers concentrate AI efforts on operations and maintenance, where data is richest and ROI is easiest to prove. That focus misses the bigger opportunity. Manufacturing value accrues across the full plant lifecycle, from design through construction, commissioning, ramp-up and decades of operation. An AI program targeting only the operating phase is likely to stall. Fragmented data, unclear ownership and workforces not yet designed for AI are not late-stage problems; they run through the entire lifecycle. Click here to read more.

• From The Annie E. Casey Foundation: The Jim Casey Fel­low­ship is open to young peo­ple who have com­plet­ed the Foundation’s Youth Lead­er­ship Insti­tute (YLI). Jim Casey Ini­tia­tive net­work sites, and oth­er local orga­ni­za­tions that serve old­er youth with fos­ter care expe­ri­ence, nom­i­nate young lead­ers who are involved in local advo­ca­cy efforts to attend YLI. Dur­ing the five-day insti­tute, par­tic­i­pants immerse them­selves in prin­ci­ples of authen­tic youth engage­ment to effec­tive­ly advo­cate for their well-being and their peers. The train­ing also strength­ens their under­stand­ing of how data can sup­port child wel­fare advo­ca­cy and deep­ens their knowl­edge of child wel­fare poli­cies and practices. Click here to read more. 

• From Brookings: As policymakers and industry leaders around the world work to develop governance solutions to keep pace with AI development and deployment, they face a shared fundamental challenge: effective governance relies on the ability to measure. Any system of accountability, liability, or oversight depends on a reliable and scalable way of understanding what AI systems are capable of and verifying that they are fit for purpose. Without robust measurement tools, many claims about the capabilities, risks, and impacts of AI can be difficult to verify independently. Click here to read more. 

• From Center for American Progress: State climate action is moving beyond long-term goals to real-time decisions about clean energy deployment and cost allocation, pollution reduction, electrification, and accountability. The actions advancing across states aim to address questions such as who pays for the grid, whether renters can access solar, whether communities near warehouses breathe cleaner air, whether low-income households can keep the lights on, and whether the companies responsible for decades of fossil fuel emissions will contribute to the cost of recovery. Click here to read more. 

• From Center on Budget and Policy Priorities: Federal lawmakers must act now to give states the time and resources they need to improve payment accuracy while protecting access to food assistance for eligible low-income households struggling to afford groceries. Congress should start by delaying the cost-sharing requirement for food benefits for all states — not just the states with the highest error rates — and postponing cuts to federal funding for states’ administrative costs. A bipartisan coalition representing governors, state legislatures, and other state and local officials is calling on Congress to do just that. Click here to read more. 

• From Economic Policy Institute: Rural districts have the most to lose when states enact voucher programs. For rural communities, vouchers are not a cost-free policy that simply expands education options for children—they are a subsidy for wealthy urban and suburban families at the expense of strong public schools. Voucher programs also introduce a large potential cost for the students that remain in rural public schools. The public spending declines associated with the introduction of vouchers will reliably cause significantly worse educational outcomes at a time when states should be spending more—not less—on public schools. Click here to read more. 

• From FedCommunities: In a semiannual survey of nonprofit organizations, most respondents reported a decline in their clients’ financial well-being over the past six months due to elevated prices. One respondent said more people sought foreclosure prevention services amid rising property taxes and insurance, while a homeless shelter operator observed longer stays due to the lack of affordable housing. Some respondents who assist jobseekers noticed fewer entry-level positions available. By contrast, others noted more openings for low-paying jobs—manual labor, part-time or temporary jobs, and gig work—that typically lack health-care benefits or a reliable income. Click here to read more. 

• From the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta: On employment, most firms held head count steady or hired only to replace departing workers. Turnover remained low, and there were few reports of layoffs. At the same time, most companies cited a return to prepandemic wage increases of from 2 percent to 4 percent. However, contacts reported that competition for workers increased wages more swiftly in certain jobs in healthcare, warehousing, and skilled trades. Lower- and middle-income consumers continued to face significant pressure. Retailers continued to see widespread trading down from pricier to cheaper products, and food banks and other support agencies noted more requests for assistance. Click here to read more. 

• From Gallup Workplace Insights: Use of AI in the workplace continues to expand across the U.S. workforce, with half of employees now reporting that they use artificial intelligence at least a few times a year in their role. As adoption of AI in business grows, employees in organizations implementing AI are also more likely to report disruption and workforce changes. Many organizations are still adjusting how they organize work and manage staffing as AI becomes more common. Click here to read more. 

• From the International Association of Workforce Professionals (IAWP): Interviews are another area where our assumptions haven’t caught up. We treat them as the central test of a candidate’s ability. But interviews are inconsistent, often unstructured, and heavily influenced by communication style and confidence. In many roles, they reward how well someone can talk about work more than how well they can actually do it. Some employers are moving toward skills assessments and work samples, but our preparation models are still anchored in answering questions rather than demonstrating capability. Click here to read more. 

• From Jobs for the Future: Over the past several decades, the default response to deep structural problems in education and career preparation has been to add more programs: college access initiatives, career academies, short-term credentials, mentoring schemes, and new grant-funded pilots. Each may do real good for a subset of students, but together they have produced a proliferation of disconnected initiatives layered on top of an architecture that has barely changed. Click here to read more.

• From JPMorganChase: Sustainable buildings are a practical way to run a more efficient business. At JPMorganChase, we strive to increase efficiency, lower costs, and reduce waste throughout our global real estate portfolio, which supports more than 300,000 employees operating in 66 countries. From our corporate offices – including our new Manhattan headquarters – to Chase branches and data centers, we aim to create healthy, efficient, and responsible spaces for our employees, customers, and communities. By integrating advanced design features we can support comfort and well-being while managing the environmental footprint of our buildings and reducing emissions. Click here to learn more.

• From Manpower: Two parallel forces dominate the engineering sphere right now. Like much of the economy, the field is no longer in a general slowdown. Engineering-related industries have turned the page and are in a fragile recovery period. But as organizations return to staffing demanding projects at a rapid clip, they face talent scarcity. We simply aren’t training enough engineering professionals globally to account for increased demand. Click here to read more.

• From McKinsey & Company: The education financing challenge is too large—and too urgent—to be met through grants alone. While grant-making will remain essential, particularly for advocacy, innovation, and equity, it can be complemented by a broader tool kit. By deploying innovative financing mechanisms, philanthropy can punch far above its weight: mobilizing new capital, improving accountability for outcomes, and accelerating progress toward universal, high-quality education. Click here to read more. 

• From the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE): The average intern conversion rate is the highest it has been in five years. The conversion rate has surged to 63.1% for 2024-25 interns, a steep climb of nearly 13% from the rate for 2023-24 interns. Other key metrics for internship programs—namely offer and acceptance rates—increased as well. The offer rate climbed nearly 10% from 2023-24, while the acceptance rate reached 88.3% among 2024-25 interns, up from 82.8% for their 2023-24 counterparts. Click here to read more. 

• From the National Association of Counties (NACO): The SBHC grant program provides competitive funding to support the establishment and operation of school-based health centers. Grants can be used to acquire or lease equipment, support workforce training, pay staff salaries and cover operational and management costs. The program prioritizes communities facing significant barriers to care, including areas with high rates of uninsured children. SBHCs are a critical access point for care, particularly for students who may not otherwise receive regular medical services. Click here to read more. 

• From the National Association of Workforce Boards (NAWB): If you follow the daily news cycle, the electric vehicle (EV) industry can seem like a rollercoaster. Between shifting federal investments, political debates, and fluctuating automaker commitments, it is easy to wonder about the true state of the EV economy. But when we tune out the noise and look at the actual labor market data, a much clearer, undeniable reality emerges: The EV mobility market is not just a speculative future endeavor—it is here, it is massive, and it is critically starved for skilled talent. Click here to read more. 

• From the National Conference of State Legislatures: A sweeping reorganization of the U.S. Forest Service signals that the agency is planning to lean heavily on states to help manage millions of acres of federal land. State officials and timber industry leaders say they’ve been given scant details about the plan, which will move the agency’s headquarters from Washington, D.C., to Salt Lake City, restructure its regional management, and close scores of research stations in dozens of states. While they wait for the dust to settle, they’re preparing for the Forest Service to ask more of its partners under the new model. Click here to read more.

• From the National League of Cities (NLC): The improvements in rail safety are not accidental — they are the result of a highly skilled workforce and key investments that are improving rail operations through new tools. Advanced systems such as automated track inspection, detectors and real-time monitoring are helping railroad workers identify issues before they become incidents. Positive Train Control (PTC), which has been fully deployed across 57,536 required route miles since 2000, is specifically designed to prevent certain types of serious accidents. Click here to read more.

• From the National Fund for Workforce Solutions: Our childcare sector has been chronically underfunded for years. Educators in this space love their work and often subsidize classrooms with their own money and work long hours with low pay. This reliance on their passion rather than fair compensation is especially unbalanced, as over 90 percent of early care professionals are women and more than a third are people of color. Investing in quality jobs for early childhood educators is not just about strengthening a workforce. It is critical to ensuring that families have access to high-quality and reliable care options. Click here to read more. 

• From the National Skills Coalition: The AI economy is here – and it’s not just changing the way we look for a doctor, pay for a parking meter, or navigate daily life. It’s beginning to reshape how people do their jobs. In the next few years, AI’s impact on the labor market will accelerate. The question isn’t whether or when AI will change the economy, but who will benefit and who will bear the cost. If AI hasn’t affected your job yet, it will soon. But AI won’t affect every job in the same way. Some roles will disappear, others will change, and still others will experience a boom. Click here to read more.

• From Prosperity Now: For many families, tax season is one of the most important financial moments of the year. A refund can mean catching up on rent, paying down debt, covering childcare, or finally having a small buffer that helps households stay financially stable during uncertain times. Filing taxes takes time, costs money, and can be confusing. For the 2024 tax year, Americans spent billions of hours and hundreds of billions of dollars navigating the tax system. On average, people spent about 13 hours and $300 just to file. For households already managing tight budgets, that is a real barrier. It can also mean missing out on credits they have already earned. Click here to read more. 

• From the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM): At the recent WorldatWork Total Rewards Conference in San Antonio, conversations about artificial intelligence — and its place in compensation and benefits — were everywhere. In one panel session April 20, the message wasn’t just that AI is starting to be used in the benefits field; it was that employees are already using the tech when it comes to benefits, whether employers are ready or not. It’s a reality that’s forcing HR leaders to rethink how benefits are delivered, communicated, and managed — and one that’s causing employers to embrace their own AI tools. Click here to read more. 

• From the Urban Institute: As technology advances at an unprecedented pace, the demand for skilled workers in the tech sector who can adapt to ever-changing industry needs has never been greater. While tech employment is projected to grow up to twice the rate of overall employment in the next decade, the industry faces a retention problem. This brief explores how apprenticeships can improve retention outcomes by examining data on apprenticeships and the tech workforce. Click here to read more.

• From the U.S. Chamber of Commerce: We welcome the introduction of comprehensive legislation that would establish a single national privacy standard, building upon state privacy frameworks with proven, strong consumer protections developed on a bipartisan basis. A clear nationwide standard would strengthen trust, help individuals exercise meaningful control over their information, and give businesses the certainty needed to innovate, protect data, and drive growth. Click here to read more. 

• From Workday: Each year across the United States, more than 200,000 service members transition from military life to the civilian workforce, carrying with them exceptional capabilities honed in high-stakes, mission-driven environments. They bring their technical skills, but more importantly, they bring a level of leadership, adaptability, and grit that is essential to the modern workforce. Yet for many veterans, the transition is met with a language gap, where their military experience doesn’t always align with civilian job descriptions, making it difficult for hiring teams to recognize their full potential. Click here to read more.

• From Workforce Monitor: U.S. staffing companies employed an average of two million temporary and contract workers per week in the fourth quarter of 2025, according to data released today by the American Staffing Association—up by 65,000 workers from the third quarter. A decline in year-to-year total staffing employment narrowed to 6.1% in the fourth quarter, an improvement from a year-to-year decline of 7.5% recorded in the third quarter. 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: Evidence shows that workforce practitioners, such as workforce program managers, career counselors, and training coordinators, can take practical steps to support young people’s mental health without requiring clinical expertise. Through low-cost staff training, simple screening and referral processes, and leveraged resources provided by the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, workforce development professionals can help improve completion rates and job placements for opportunity youth, elevating their prospect for long-term economic mobility. 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.