YAHOO FINANCE: Employee flexibility 'is a lot of the reason why workers stay': Burning Glass Institute president

October 20, 2022

Burning Glass Institute President Matt Sigelman joins Yahoo Finance Live to discuss the best companies to work at to grow your career and what employees are prioritizing.

Video Transcript

- Welcome back. In today's labor market, you might not need a bachelor's degree to work your way up the ladder and land a strong job. A new index measures which companies are most likely to create economic mobility for workers without college degrees.

Joining us now, we want to bring in Matt Sigelman. He's president of the Burning Glass Institute for today's installment of Career Control, which is brought to you by Straight Talk Wireless. Matt, it's great to see you. So let's get into the index and what you found. The American Opportunity Index. You revealed which large companies are doing it best in terms of advancing workers in the workplace. What did you find?

MATT SIGELMAN: Well, Seana, what we found is that where you work matters a lot for whether you move ahead in your career. We constructed an index to be able to essentially create a yardstick for the American dream. A lot of us are concerned about intergenerational mobility. In other words, do you better than your parents? If you were born in the 1940s, about 90 plus percent of people were going to do better than their parents. If you're born in the 1980s, that was down to at best even odds.

And so what we wanted to look at is the role that companies play in facilitating mobility for their workers. We tracked 3 million workers of the Fortune 250 over five years-- sorry. From 2017 to 2021. And we looked at how they progress, both within their companies and beyond their company.

- And who are the companies that did best? Are they concentrated in particular sectors?

MATT SIGELMAN: So it was actually very interesting to see how broad spread good practice is. If you look at the top companies, you're looking at folks like AT&T on the one hand. Amex. You're looking at Cisco, but also companies like PG&E, Southwest Airlines, International Paper. Across the top 50 companies in America in terms of they're creating opportunity for workers, they represented 21 of the 27 industries that we track.…

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