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Discussion Paper
Financing Workforce Development in a Devolutionary Era
Workforce development financing has changed significantly over the last 25 years. In 2008, federal funding for the traditional workforce development system was 83 percent lower in real terms than it had been in 1980. As the federal system plays a smaller role in workforce development financing, the job training landscape better represents a “marketplace” where students and job seekers use federal training vouchers and grant and student loan money from various sources, primarily the Higher Education Act’s Pell Grant and Federal Student Loan programs. Additionally, increasing volatility ...
Discussion Paper
Utilizing Opportunity Occupations Data for Recovery
The COVID-19 pandemic has created an unprecedented economic crisis, with tens of millions of American workers losing their jobs since March. The disproportionate impact of this crisis on women, communities of color, and particularly those in lower-wage occupations, highlights the need to address intergenerational racial inequity with programs and policies that connect workers to quality jobs. But understanding which jobs are available in a local labor market is often a challenge.Local labor markets can often be quite unique. They might have different skill needs for specific jobs, and in some ...
Discussion Paper
Then and Now: The Changing Landscape of Education Outcomes and Funding in the 21st Century (Part 2 of 3)
This is part two of a three-part series that brings together labor market, workforce, occupational, and educational trends since 2000 to tell a story of American workers through data. This is primarily a decennial retrospective, but some sections include additional years to shape a complete story. Part two looks at policy interventions related to unemployment, health care insurance, and retirement savings. The charts illustrate the mixed experiences of workers over this period.The "Then and Now" series explores data broadly and granularly with a demographic lens, recognizing that general ...
Discussion Paper
COVID-19, Workers, and Policy
As coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) spreads around the world and across the United States, many policymakers and public health officials are encouraging employers to tell workers to work remotely or to stay home when they or their family members are sick. There are significant questions, though, about how many people can work from home. Many U.S. workers in retail, restaurants, manufacturing, and other occupations cannot do so. This Workforce Currents post will explore who can work from home and identify practices and policies to support workers who cannot work from home in the event of a pandemic ...
Discussion Paper
Fragmentation in Workforce Development and Efforts to Coordinate Regional Workforce Development Systems: A Case Study of Challenges in Atlanta and Models for Regional Cooperation from across the Country
The importance of human capital in regional economic competitiveness is increasingly apparent. However, structural changes, fragmentation, the instability of funding, and other factors have led to challenges for workforce development providers as well as workforce development systems. This fragmentation has created a less coherent and coordinated workforce development system. Often, metropolitan areas have many programs and policies in place to train workers for jobs that require sub baccalaureate credentials or skills. The lack of coordination in local training systems may limit the ...
Discussion Paper
Policies to Close the Southern Skills Gap
Southern states have a number of economic and demographic characteristics that make them unique from the rest of the country—and increase the need to build skills to advance economic development in the region.
Discussion Paper
Creating Opportunities for Young Workers
Integrating young workers into the workforce, especially opportunity youth, takes a deliberate approach. Considering the needs and perspectives of young workers is critical to integrating them into the workforce. Involving young adults and opportunity youth in the design and development of programs and curricula that prepare them for work will help ensure that the programs address challenges young workers face in the labor market. Creating opportunities for early work experience also plays an important role.
Discussion Paper
Automation and the Future of Work
There are numerous reports that highlight potential effects that new technology will have on the U.S. labor market, and many of them are not exactly what you would expect. For example, with the advent of the internet and ubiquity of spreadsheets in the 1980s, analyst employment soared. The new technology unlocked latent demand for more analysis that had been simply too expensive before the new communication and productivity technologies became common. The need for more analysis led to more analysts…even though there were new technologies that made the work more efficient or productive.
Discussion Paper
Reemploying the Unemployed
From March 14 to 28, roughly 9.9 million people (when seasonally adjusted) filed new claims for unemployment insurance across the country.1 That represents roughly 3 percent of the entire population of the United States actively filing for unemployment insurance in two weeks. In addition, the vast proportion of people who are eligible for unemployment insurance do not make a claim. During “normal” times, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that 74 percent of unemployed workers do not file a claim, primarily because they think they are not eligible for unemployment insurance.
Discussion Paper
Who Has COVID-19 Impacted and What’s Been Done to Help?
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reports the unemployment rate monthly. Generally, it gives an idea of the number of Americans who are out of work and looking for new employment. During times of economic stress, however, this metric may not paint a full picture of those who are out of work.Headline unemployment numbers can be misleading, and the COVID-19 pandemic has affected the accuracy of the picture painted by the headline unemployment numbers. For instance, the October jobs report from the BLS identified 11.1 million unemployed workers, or 6.9 percent unemployment. But this ...