Research
Selected research published by the Burning Glass Institute independently or in partnership with other leading workforce innovation and higher education organizations
Labor Market Outlook, April 2024
With inflation rates accelerating beyond the Federal Reserve's 2% target, the possibility of a "soft landing" this year grows dimmer. However, emerging dynamics, including increased immigration and the strategic integration of Generative AI, hint at a promising shift toward stability by 2025. Dive into our latest economic report for a detailed analysis of the current inflation trends, labor market conditions, and the technological advancements shaping our economic future. Discover what these changes mean for businesses, policymakers, and consumers as we explore the potential for sustainable growth amidst evolving economic challenges.
Skills For A Sustainable Future
Massive investments are being made into the new technologies that will help us meet challenge of climate change. But so too must we make new investments into building the green skills that will enable workers to effectively deploy, integrate, and operate these pivotal new technologies. As the green economy evolves, digital skills are becoming increasingly essential in green roles. This report analyzes the increasingly overlap of green-digital skills, and how these shifts will impact workers across the economy.
The Importance of Understanding Non-Degree Credential Quality
The number of non-degree credentials (NDCs) has ballooned in the past decade. But despite having hundreds of options to choose from, learners, funders, and employers have little guidance on which NDCs may be best for them. This report offers an overview of NDCs, their significance in the modern labor market, and the pressing need for a framework to evaluate non-degree credential quality.
Reimagining the Public Library’s Role in Local Workforce Development
Gallup has found that Americans go to libraries far more often than they go to the movies, sporting events, concerts or the zoo. A chief reason that libraries are such powerful magnets is that they offer so much more than books. People from all walks of life come for classes, an array of social services and a bridge across the digital divide. People trust the library—a rarity at a time when they’ve lost faith in so many other institutions. “The library,” sociologist Eric Klineberg observed in his book Palaces for the People, “is where they feel cared for and connected.”
All of these qualities have helped to thrust many of the nation’s 9,000 public library systems into the realm of local workforce development. It is a role that, by all accounts, has been growing steadily (with surges in demand during economic downturns, such as the Great Recession and the COVID-19 pandemic). In a 2010-11 study, nearly 92% of libraries reported that providing employment services was vital to their communities, up from 66% in 2008-09 and 44% in 2006-07…
Data Science Is for Everyone
The term 'data science' often conjures images of people hunched over laptops furiously typing out lines and lines of abstract computer code, yet the reality of today's career landscape offers a far different picture. From Wall Street to Main Street, work is evolving to the point that data skills are now essential competencies across a surprising range of jobs, industries, and educational levels.
American industry runs on data, and an increasing number of workers now find that skills in data collection, analysis, and visualization are becoming critical to their careers. The message to policymakers and education leaders is clear: data science skills are vital for securing quality jobs. For states aiming to foster economic growth, investing as early as in K-12 education to provide high-value data science skills is key to unlocking a new era of worker mobility in jobs and sectors not historically thought to be “data intense.”
The Burning Glass Institute and ExcelinEd partnered to document the explosive rise in demand for data science skills to help workers, learners, and education leaders understand these trends. What we found not only reinforces the need for strong investment in data science skill attainment, but also shows just how extensive its reach now extends into the 21st century American workforce.
How America's Largest Employers Advance Economic and Social Mobility
In 2023, Business Roundtable and the Burning Glass Institute (BGI) partnered to examine the career outcomes for millions of U.S. workers at America’s largest companies to examine whether large employers are successfully providing economic opportunity to their workers.
To find out, BGI analyzed the wages and career histories of 16 million American workers at the largest U.S. employers, including the workforces of Business Roundtable member companies. The analysis shows that America’s largest companies provide considerable mobility for their workers.
Closing Racial Gaps in Economic Opportunity: Progress Made, More Needed
America needs a labor market that offers strong opportunity for all. That requires addressing persistent gaps in racial representation and workforce equity. A strong labor market can create good jobs and upward mobility for all groups. Our analysis below suggests that the tight labor market we’ve seen in the past few years has indeed contributed to gains for Black Americans. However, these gains are not uniform and there are clear opportunities for further progress.
Aside from a relatively brief interruption during the COVID pandemic, the strong labor markets of the late 2010’s and early 2020’s show the power of labor markets in action. Last year, the unemployment rate of black Americans fell to its lowest level on record, and the gap between black and white unemployment has also fallen to its lowest level on record – from a peak of 12 percentage points in the early 1980s to less than 2 percentage points in early 2024…
Talent Disrupted: College Graduates, Underemployment, and the Way Forward
Most students, families, policymakers, and educators look to higher education in large part as a bridge to economic opportunity and upward mobility. Today, however, some are calling into question whether higher education is delivering on that promise. While a college education is still worth it for the typical graduate, it is not a guarantee: college students face an increasing degree of risk. One of the biggest risks students face is that their degree will not provide access to a college-level job. Today, only about half of bachelor’s degree graduates secure employment in a college-level job within a year of graduation.
Using a combination of online career histories of tens of millions of graduates, as well as census microdata for millions of graduates, we developed a comprehensive picture of how college graduates fare in the job market over their first decade of post-college employment. We measured the prevalence and severity of underemployment and the cost in lost earnings, as well as analyzed how these are associated with a range of factors, including degree field, student characteristics (e.g., race/ethnicity and gender), institutional characteristics (e.g., selectivity, concentration of low-income students, and type), and internship participation.
Skills-Based Hiring: The Long Road from Pronouncements to Practice
For many employers in recent decades, adding college degree requirements seemed an efficient filter. More proxy than direct measure, degrees were perceived as indicators of persistence, of foundational skill, and of general capability. For hiring managers who themselves had traveled that cursus honorem, it seemed only natural to value the implied endorsement of college admissions officers and the presumed rigor of the college experience as an effective way of separating the wheat from the chaff.
Shortages have a way of inciting challenges to tired assumptions. In the tight labor market that emerged leading up to the pandemic and that returned during the recovery, hiring has become a key operational challenge, causing employers to reevaluate their requirements. In the face of these pressures, it has become increasingly difficult to justify a filter that summarily disqualifies the roughly two-thirds of Americans (62 percent) who lack a degree. At the same time, a growing focus on equity commitments has caused employers to question practices that likely contributed to suppressing broader representation.
Amidst this backdrop, the Skills-Based Hiring movement has gained momentum, as more and more employers committed to stripping degree requirements from their postings, replacing the proxy of a college degree with actual evaluations of candidate skill. An initial flurry of high-profile pronouncements by private-sector and government employers alike has become a blizzard. But do these proclamations result in a real increase in access for workers?
Generative Artificial Intelligence and the Workforce
Automation is nothing new. In fact, much of the course of economic history since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution has been shaped by successive waves of automation propelled by technological innovation. However, the latest developments in generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) stand out as unique. Unlike in the past, when mechanization replaced physical labor, GenAI will have the greatest impact on high-skilled, professional work—the kinds of roles that define the 21st-century knowledge economy and that have long been considered safe havens from roboticization. As such, the coming transformations are likely to be as unfamiliar as they are profound. The goal of this report, a collaborative effort between The Burning Glass Institute and SHRM, is to enable CHROs and other business leaders to anticipate these repercussions and develop workforce strategies for a new reality.
America’s Tech Hubs Are Multiplying
The Burning Glass Institute recently worked with the Wall Street Journal to analyze the tech talent base of each US city in order to find the ones with the greatest concentrations of cutting-edge skills. Across the full range of skills within the tech workforce, there are some at the frontier of advances in technology – those that are growing fastest and commanding the highest wage premiums. Cities with large concentrations of these Frontier Skills stand to define the future tech talent landscape.
A key finding of this work was that America’s storied tech hubs – Seattle, Silicon Valley, San Francisco – remain dominant. Yet our research reveals another important phenomenon. These cities aren’t just magnets for talent. They have also become incubators for and sources of talent. Even as they strengthen their lead, they are giving rise to a talent diaspora that is propelling a new generation of challengers: already thriving tech centers like Austin, San Diego, and Portland, as well as emerging contenders like Sacramento, Boise, Bentonville, and Boulder.
In fact, our research finds that the cities with the greatest concentrations of Frontier Skills are also those with the greatest concentrations of diasporic talent from the West Coast tech giants.
U.S. Labor Market Outlook December 2023
The recent combination of robust economic growth and notable decrease in inflation has fueled optimism for a "soft landing" in 2024, with inflation aligning with the Federal Reserve's 2 percent target without triggering a recession. However, we hold a different view. While a soft landing is more likely now than it seemed even a few months ago, our analysis of labor market dynamics suggests that a more plausible scenario is that inflation will fail to drop down to the 2-percent target in 2024, leading to a 'no landing' scenario.
The rapid expansion of the U.S. labor force in 2023 was driven by temporary factors, such as an influx of immigration and high labor force participation rates, which are unlikely to continue through 2024. With immigration rates slowing down and labor force participation rates already at peak levels with limited potential for further increase, we can expect a significant slowdown in labor force growth in the year ahead. This shift could stabilize or even reverse the recent rise in unemployment rates.
This is significant because this expansion in the workforce has been a major factor in loosening the labor market over the past several months. However, as workforce growth slows, the labor market will remain tight, leading to sustained upward pressure on wages and, consequently, inflation. In such a scenario, it seems likely that the inflation rate will stay above 2 percent in 2024 – what we refer to as “no landing”.
The 2023 American Opportunity Index
The 2023 American Opportunity Index—a partnership between the Burning Glass Institute, Harvard Business School’s Project on Managing the Future of Work, and the Schultz Family Foundation—follows the career trajectories of 4.72 million employees across 396 of America’s largest companies. Through this work, we have gained unprecedented visibility into the question at the heart of the economic mobility equation: how workers rise.
The Index represents a revolutionary departure from other job quality metrics, which typically focus on corporate policies and rely on self-reported data or surveys. Instead, we observe real-world outcomes directly, as gleaned from analysis of millions of career histories – drawn from how workers report changes at work history of social media platforms, online resumes, etc. – as well as comprehensive salary and job posting data. We believe job quality is best measured by what actual workers experience.
Our analysis focuses on workers who don’t necessarily hold college degrees – and therefore don’t have the assurance of mobility that a degree was long assumed to represent. In many respects, these workers are a bellwether for how likely the majority of Americans are to achieve economic progress. Through this analysis, we hope to widen a lens that often focuses on access to jobs, but loses sight of what happens once employees get in the door.
Measuring the ROI of Degrees in the UNC System
A comprehensive study of the UNC System in North Carolina demonstrates the substantial financial benefits of degrees from its public universities. Despite prevailing doubts about the worth of a college education, the study reveals that UNC System graduates significantly outperform their peers without degrees in lifetime earnings. For instance, UNC System bachelor’s degree holders earn a median lifetime amount of $1.2 million, about $572,000 more than those without degrees, leading to a nearly $500,000 median ROI. Graduates with advanced degrees fare even better, earning a median of $2.1 million, resulting in over $930,000 in ROI.
The study, conducted by Deloitte, rpk GROUP and The Burning Glass Institute and backed by the North Carolina General Assembly, evaluated the ROI for 724 undergraduate and 575 graduate programs. While it focused on financial returns, it didn't account for other benefits of higher education like civic engagement and mental well-being. The data underscore the value of a public university diploma in North Carolina, offering positive returns across diverse majors including engineering, education, health sciences, and humanities.
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…