Research
Selected research published by the Burning Glass Institute independently or in partnership with other leading workforce innovation and higher education organizations
Untapped Potential: How new apprenticeship approaches will increase access to economic opportunity
Economic shifts in the wake of the pandemic have left many US industries scrambling for talent. Despite the possibility of a recession, there are still about 50% more jobs than job seekers, and many experts predict that even in a sluggish economy, the labor market will remain tight. At the same time, three quarters of US workers have jobs that offer neither the prospect of better pay nor concrete opportunities for advancement.
For employers struggling to find the talent they need and for workers whose careers are stalled, apprenticeships offer a powerful solution. Apprenticeship isn’t just a critical new avenue for broadening the talent base. It’s also an important tool for diversifying talent pipelines. Individuals from low-income backgrounds and communities of color – who tend to be underrepresented among college graduates – are often overrepresented in lower-wage fields with few viable career pathways to quality jobs and careers. By pulling employees up from within, employers can both close their skills gaps, and leave behind the zero-sum game of wrestling one another for candidates. Instead, they can actually grow the pie, increasing the number of qualified workers for sought-after jobs. The resulting increased racial and gender diversity in higher-paying jobs helps employers meet inclusion objectives and advances equity across the economy.
Cities on the Tech Frontier
What drives regional economic growth in the knowledge economy? What is the best location for new and growing firms dependent on a highly skilled workforce? Where should educators, policy makers, and industry invest to advance their city’s prospects as a rising tech hub? In an environment of rapid technology change, growing utilization of advanced artificial intelligence, and fluid work formats, conventional approaches to answering these questions miss many of the contours of regional competitiveness. Traditionally, a sector’s regional competitiveness has been measured by the size and projected growth of the industry’s workforce, with typical worker earnings used to impute output. However, these measures do not adequately capture the quality of the workforce. Skills are the yardstick of competitiveness in the human economy. A city might have a large tech workforce but, if that workforce is largely oriented toward legacy technologies, the city will soon find itself losing out to places with a greater investment in leading edge skills. But how can it track these dynamics before it has already lost its edge? Assessing the quality and competitiveness of the workforce requires innovative metrics of skill concentration.
In an analysis of regional skill concentrations, the Burning Glass Institute has identified several forces that offer insight into the likely shape of future growth. Utilizing real time labor market data, including the Burning Glass Institute’s database of the career histories of over 65 million US workers and Lightcast’s database of US job postings, we analyzed concentrations of the highest growth, highest value tech skills and occupations in order to understand which cities are out front, which are on the rise, and which are falling behind. Those concentrations vary widely across the nation, with some regions far better primed than their peers for investment at the frontier of America’s tech- and data-enabled economies.
A Playbook for the Inclusive Hiring of Later-Career Workers
As employers struggle to fill open jobs and hire the talent they need to prosper and grow, they often overlook and even exclude a time-tested asset: older workers.
Workers aged 50+ will make up a growing share of the labor force in the coming decade, and their expanding presence will be increasingly important to business operations and economic prosperity. Older workers offer employers the skills and knowledge needed to fill vacancies and mentor younger generations of workers. However, recruiting and screening processes continue to be plagued both by explicit discrimination and other mechanisms that disfavor older workers and lead to disparate hiring outcomes. Even as many companies embrace a broad movement toward inclusive hiring, few include the role of older workers in these commitments. In fact, despite older workers being a federally protected class, fewer than half of companies worldwide specify age in their diversity and inclusion policies, according to a previous AARP survey.
This often-neglected critical step is an important, easy win for employers to move toward more inclusive hiring. Research by the Burning Glass Institute in partnership with AARP demonstrates the imperative for change among employers and policymakers –to ensure not only that older workers can contribute to the labor market at their highest capacity, but also so that employers gain access to a broad pool of experienced talent, which is critical with so many jobs going unfilled.
Women’s Work
Growth in Women's College Attainment Will Drive Blue-Collar Labor Shortages
It’s well known that the US working-age population is currently barely growing and that this trend will likely continue at least over the next decade. There are barely enough young people to replace the large baby-boomer cohort that is now retiring.
However, less well reported is how trends in educational attainment will cause labor shortages to be more severe in blue-collar and manual services jobs. While the number of working-age people with a bachelor's degree is solidly and uninterruptedly growing at about 2% annually, the working-age population without a college degree has been shrinking at about -0.5% annually for a decade.
On top of that, and perhaps more significantly, is showing that this decline is much more dramatic for women than for men, because the increase in college attainment has been much greater for women. These trends are expected to continue over the next decade.
Those aged 65+ comprise a growing share of the workforce yet their low labor force participation rates, especially for women without a college degree, will exacerbate the large decline in the noncollege working population.
Due to the trends discussed above, labor shortage can be expected to be more severe in jobs employing a large share of women without a bachelor’s degree, such as healthcare support, childcare, and personal services.
U.S. Labor Market Outlook July 2023
Despite persistent recession fears and aggressive tightening measures by the Fed over the past year, the US economy has proven to be resilient. American consumers, dipping into the savings they accrued during the pandemic, keep increasing their spending. Recent economic indicators even suggest an upward trend in the economy.
In the first half of 2023, overall job growth remained strong. The primary reason for this positive trend, particularly in job growth, is the robust recovery of in-person service industries such as restaurants, hotels, entertainment, and healthcare, as well as in government. While job growth in these sectors is slowing down, it is projected to remain higher than normal for the rest of 2023.
Not all is rosy. Consistent with their sectoral composition, the jobs being created through this boom have largely been lower-wage service jobs. What’s more, another factor contributing to the rapid job growth and tightened labor market is sluggish productivity growth. With productivity stagnant, any economic growth has to translate directly to a growing demand for labor.
Growing Quality Green Jobs
Combating climate change and the ripple effects of its impact is one of the major imperatives of our time. As extreme weather, resource shortages, and other challenges worsen, the U.S. economy is gradually shifting in response. While demand is increasing for well-known green job roles such as solar photovoltaic installer, environmental scientist, and electric vehicle technician, there are currently only 900,000 estimated green jobs within the United States, representing just 0.6% of the workforce. They also represent sectors that lack critical representation from the populations that climate change is hurting the most: people from low-income communities, people of color, and people from rural areas.
Indeed, it’s becoming increasingly clear that our country faces multiple, interrelated climate challenges. A transition to a green economy is not happening quickly enough to minimize significant health hazards brought on by climate change, nor is it building equitable resilience against devastating and ongoing natural disasters impacting communities nationwide. Emerging green jobs that could provide a foundation for change—particularly those that demand science, technology, engineering, and math skills—tend to require at least a bachelor’s degree and lack entry-level roles or clear pathways for people from underserved and underrepresented populations. A truly just transition to a green economy requires solutions that not only limit the root causes of our warming planet but also lead to accessible, equitable, and quality jobs for a sustainable future…
Making the Bachelor’s Degree More Valuable
The bachelor’s degree is facing an identity crisis.
In the last year and a half, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Utah have stopped requiring a four-year degree for most jobs in their state governments. The private sector, too, has moved toward skill-based hiring, with Delta, General Motors, Google, Apple, and IBM, among others, dropping the B.A. prerequisite for many positions. Even the federal government is urging its agencies to rely on job-seekers’ skills rather than the sheepskin to fill vacancies.
As we show in this paper, the B.A. remains a valuable commodity in the job market. But colleges and universities can no longer coast on the historical value of the four-year degree to enroll students going forward. The onus is on institutions to make the B.A. more valuable in a marketplace where it faces competition from microcredentials, industry-based certificates, and increasingly well-paying jobs that don’t require a four-year degree.
U.S. Labor Market Outlook March 2023
This is what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object.
In the March 2023 edition of the Burning Glass Institute Labor Market Outlook, we will provide an outlook for the US economy and labor market before focusing in on the pandemic’s main long-term impact.
2022 taught us that the demand for US workers was more unstoppable and the labor supply more immovable than we had expected. That is, on the one hand, demand for talent remained strong despite rapidly rising wages while, on the other, the lure of high pay and greater flexibility in work did little to draw workers back to the market. The result is a labor market that has remained tight, driving further upward wage and inflation pressure.
2023 Skills Compass Report
Our report on strategic skills planning for upskilling and reskilling the workforce.
For many years we’ve been observing that jobs and organizations have been trending towards disruption, upheaval, and accelerated change. COVID-19 has dramatically increased the speed at which technology is fundamentally changing business. One major effect on this is on the rate of disruption for jobs. The World Economic Forum predicts that 85 million jobs will be displaced by 2025, which means they just simply won’t exist due to algorithms or new technologies. More shockingly, 40% of what organizations now deem core skills will change by 2025
The 2023 Skills Compass Report has been created to help leaders build meaningful learning programs and skill planning strategies by helping define and prioritize skills requirements by understanding the intersection of time to skill, skill value, and skill longevity, inform their build vs. buy learning strategy to design more effective learning programs, drive digital literacy to upskill and reskill talent, and justify the ROI for specific skills to help leaders resource strategic learning initiatives.
How Skills Are Disrupting Work
Our report on the transformational power of fast-growing, in-demand skills.
In 2021, one in eight job postings featured four skill sets that share two startling common features. These high-demand sets of skills—in Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning, Cloud Computing, Social Media, and Product Management—are both among the country’s fastest growing and the economy’s most rapidly spreading into new industries. In some industries, skills from these sets are represented in up to a third of all job postings. They are showing up in surging numbers across the workforce, affecting an ever-widening diversity of jobs and industries and, together with similar skill sets, are entirely transforming work as we know it.
U.S. Labor Market Outlook November 2022
Propped up by strong consumer spending on services, healthy business spending on R&D, and the continued recovery of key sectors adjusting to a new normal, the U.S. economy has managed to skirt recession thus far.
But recession isn’t far off. Continued tightness in the labor market will be a key driver of inflation, forcing the Fed to keep raising rates to lower demand for labor.
Even during a recession, labor shortages would linger, particularly in low- and middle-skill occupations where low rates of workforce participation, an aging workforce, and misalignment in the educational contours of the workforce will continue to challenge supply chains.
Labor shortages are not a temporary problem but a persistent challenge that will significantly limit economic growth for the rest of the decade.
Businesses can take reasonable steps to offset the impact of the ongoing labor shortage and to better weather the storm, while policymakers could return the economy to a growth footing through a series of reforms—but only if they can muster unwonted bipartisan resolve to address thorny issues.
The American Opportunity Index
The American Opportunity Index: A Corporate Scorecard of Worker Advancement is a new effort to give companies and other stakeholders a set of robust tools that measure how well major employers are doing in fostering economic mobility for workers and how they could do better. The Index is a joint project of the Burning Glass Institute, Harvard Business School’s Project on Managing the Future of Work, and the Schultz Family Foundation. The Index assesses America’s 250 largest public companies based on real-world outcomes of their employees in roles open to non-college graduates—not merely their statements on corporate policy. It draws upon a new source of insight: bigdata analysis of career histories, job postings, and salary sources of more than 3 million workers at those firms.
A Guide to Improving Recruitment, Retention, Advancement and Equity
Our analysis in partnership with the Business Roundtable and Lightcast on how to enhance workforce inclusion via skills-based talent strategies
U.S. companies have traditionally relied on four-year degree requirements as a critical credential, particularly for white collar jobs, and a proxy for job candidates’ qualifications for roles. This practice has excluded many talented Americans, including employees of color, from hiring and promotion and has made it harder for employers to find a sufficient number of skilled employees.
Increasingly, U.S. companies are shifting their hiring and talent management practices to emphasize the value of skills, rather than degrees alone. Taking a more inclusive approach around educational credentials as a job criterion, where possible, can help companies meet their hiring needs and unlock new employment and advancement opportunities for workers from diverse backgrounds.
Shifting Skills, Moving Targets, and Remaking the Workforce
Our analysis of 15 million job postings illuminates the future of work
Discussions about the job market usually focus on jobs created and destroyed. But even in the most tumultuous times, that is not what most workers or most business experience. Jobs do come and go, but even more significantly, jobs change. For the vast majority of workers, their job is much less likely to go away than to evolve into something new…
The Through-the-Looking-Glass Recovery
New, complex dynamics in the U.S. Economy suggest that employment in some industries won’t come back from the pandemic.
New, complex dynamics in the U.S. Economy suggest that employment in some industries won’t come back from the pandemic.
A permanent shake-up of U.S. industries is underway. While the economy sustained massive, near-instantaneous employment loss in the early days of the pandemic, the job market has now returned to 99% of is prior strength after just two years, far faster than the job market recovered from past shocks. But the economy we have returned to usn’t the same as the one we left behind…
HBR: Skills-Based Hiring Is on the Rise
Two decades ago, companies began adding degree requirements to job descriptions, even though the jobs themselves hadn’t changed. After the Great Recession, many organizations began trying to back away from those requirements.
To learn how the effort is going, the authors studied more than 50 million recent job announcements. The bottom line: Many companies are moving away from degree requirements and toward skills-based hiring, especially in middle-skill jobs, which good for both workers and employers. But more work remains to be done.
The Emerging Degree Reset
Employers are resetting degree requirements in a wide range of roles, dropping the requirement for a bachelor’s degree in many middle-skill and even some higher skill roles. Based on these trends, we project that an additional 1.4 million jobs could open to workers without college degrees over the next five years.
Dynamos for Diversity
For higher education to live up to its diversity imperative, universities need to go beyond an exclusive focus on enrollment numbers and bring more attention to outcomes – both for existing students and for the broader community of learners they’ve been missing.
HBR: Manage Your Talent Pipeline Like a Supply Chain
In supply-chain management, you get what you plan for. It’s time for companies to get serious about developing a good supply chain for talent. Here are ideas for how to get started.