Research
Selected research published by the Burning Glass Institute independently or in partnership with other leading workforce innovation and higher education organizations
Which Skills Matter Now?
AI is reshaping which skills matter for professional success—and, therefore, what students need to learn. This report provides a data-driven framework for K-12 educators to navigat this shift, analyzing AI’s impact on 1,000 workforce skills and mapping the implications for 140 high school learning objectives. It offers a clear method for identifying where and how curriculum needs to be rebalanced. Three key themes emerge:
The cognitive bar is rising. Skills with high automation exposure now demand deeper conceptual understanding, not less, to empower students to direct and evaluate AI tools.
The real divide is within subjects, not between them. No discipline loses relevance, but every discipline contains skills that require new instructional approaches alongside skills that remain foundational.
Traditional assessment faces new challenges. When AI can generate polished outputs, evaluation must focus on the students’ thinking, reasoning, and judgment.
The report introduces a four-quadrant framework—Deepen, Transform, Streamline, Anchor—that helps educators make evidence-based decisions about what to emphasize, what to redesign, and what to protect in their curriculum.
The AI Skill Domains Reshaping Work
The conversation around AI has moved past "what if" to a more challenging question of "how." And while managers believe having a workforce trained in AI will be critical for their organization's success, very few workers are considered “fluent” in AI. Tool access alone has not yet translated into transformation and the result is a persistent disconnect: employers want AI-skilled talent and workers want the benefits, but both lack a clear roadmap for delivering measurable returns.
To solve this clarity problem, The Burning Glass Institute worked with the Skills-First Workforce Initiative to combine labor market research with real-world insights from talent leaders. Together, we’ve moved beyond the hype to identify where and how AI is reshaping work.
Measuring What Matters
Current evaluation frameworks focus too narrowly on short-term wage gains, overlooking many effective non-degree credentials; using a broader lens that includes career mobility and field entry more than doubles the share of credentials deemed valuable. While many credentials still offer minimal return, a more comprehensive approach reveals significant hidden long-term and career-launch value that wage-only metrics miss.
Out of Sight, Out of Data
Rural communities are not “data-poor” because nothing is happening—they’re data-poor because current systems were not built to capture how rural economies actually work. When rural work, learning, and mobility are invisible in data, communities are locked out of investment, planning, and opportunity.
This paper outlines practical ways to modernize workforce and education data so rural communities are better represented and better served. Solutions include designing data systems in partnership with rural communities, expanding who and what counts in existing datasets, improving the timeliness of local data, and piloting next-generation tools that capture nonlinear work and learning pathways. Together, these approaches can help rural leaders make more informed decisions, target resources more effectively, and surface the full range of talent in their regions.
The Detroit Region’s Jobs That Mobilize: Connecting Workers and Employers in Healthcare and Automotive Manufacturing
Metro Detroit is at a turning point as public investment, technological change, and evolving industry needs reshape the labor market, creating hiring challenges for employers and unclear pathways for workers. This report identifies “Jobs That Mobilize” in healthcare and automotive manufacturing—roles with strong wages, accessible entry points, and clear advancement potential—using labor market data, career histories, and employer validation. It finds that many high-priority jobs pay over $70,000 without requiring a four-year degree, depend on durable and communication skills, and could better support worker mobility if training and credentialing pathways were more visible and aligned.
Beyond the Binary: How Automation and Augmentation Are Combining to Reshape Work
Nearly three years into the ChatGPT era, early labor-market data suggest AI is reshaping work in a more complex way than simple job loss or job creation. Skills exposed to automation are seeing demand decline while augmentation-exposed skills are rising, and the same roles often experience both effects at once. The key question now is how quickly jobs will change and whether workers and institutions can adapt in time.
The Skillability Index
Despite a clear business case for skills-based practices, including 20% higher retention and 25% salary increases for workers, most organizations struggle to translate policy into practice due to a lack of measurement tools. To address this challenge, we’ve created the “Skillability Index”, a tool to address this barrier by evaluating organizations across three critical phases: posting practices (recruitment), hiring practices, and career growth (advancement). This dual focus ensures that companies not only help non-degree talent "get on the ladder" by removing unnecessary credentials but also allow them to "move up the ladder" through meaningful internal mobility.
The research reveals striking variances in performance, even among direct competitors in the same industry. To help organizations contextualize their progress, the Index categorizes firms into archetypes based on their results. For example, "Skills Champions" show high alignment between degree removal and actual non-degree hiring, while "Quiet Reformers" hire non-degree talent at high rates despite maintaining traditional job postings. Conversely, "Front-Door Employers" excel at initial hiring but struggle to promote those employees, creating a "glass ceiling" for those without degrees.
To learn more, and see trends for specific industries and metrics, download our report below.
Mind the Technician Gap: Why the UK Lacks the Skilled Workforce to Deliver Its Industrial Strategy
New research from the Burning Glass Institute, funded by the Gatsby Foundation, reveals a hidden labour crisis at the heart of the UK economy: Britain does not have enough technicians to deliver its own industrial strategy.
The recent Skills White Paper highlights the scale of the challenge, estimating that the UK will need 900,000 additional skilled workers in priority sectors by 2030, with skills-shortage vacancies already accounting for a quarter of all open roles. Our analysis shows the problem is even more acute in technician occupations central to the UK’s industrial strategy, where more than one in three roles already faces severe shortages.
As the government commits to helping more employers invest in workforce development and enabling more young people to secure apprenticeships, our reports underline both the centrality of apprenticeships to the technician pipeline and a major missed opportunity: the failure to draw on underrepresented talent, particularly women and girls. In seven in ten technician occupations with skills shortages (69%), fewer than 5% of workers are women—and in many of the best-paid, highest-demand trades the figure is effectively zero. We propose a target equivalent to a 10-percentage-point increase in female representation in relevant apprenticeships, which would bring nearly 70,000 additional workers into the technician workforce over the next decade.
With the government seeking to expand the technician workforce, our findings also highlight the appeal of these roles: they are among the most AI- and automation-resilient jobs in the economy and offer strong wages, clear progression routes and high retention—alongside sustained employer demand.
If the UK is to deliver its industrial strategy, closing the technician gap must now be treated as a national priority—one in which apprenticeships, and a broader, more inclusive talent pipeline, are essential to success.
From Alignment to Action: Help BGI Drive Skills-First Implementation in the Workforce
The Burning Glass Institute is advancing the Skills-First Workforce Initiative from alignment to active implementation, aiming to embed shared skills standards into the actual infrastructure of the labor market. Building on the creation of taxonomies for 30 high-impact roles, the initiative is now accepting applications for two partnership opportunities designed to integrate these standards into hiring, training, and advancement systems.
The Skills-First Implementation Fellowship provides up to $100,000 in grant funding to "activator" organizations—such as technology platforms and education networks—that can integrate shared taxonomies into live workflows. Alternatively, the Regional Taxonomy Implementation track seeks intermediaries to lead pilot efforts in two U.S. regions, where they will convene local employers to co-develop and validate localized skills frameworks with those employers.
Applications for both opportunities are due January 9, 2026.
Decision Skills in the Workforce
As artificial intelligence reshapes the nature of work, decision-making skills—such as problem solving, risk analysis, and strategic thinking—stand out as one of the most enduring and economically valuable human capabilities.
A new report by the Burning Glass Institute, in partnership with the Alliance for Decision Education, analyzes more than 6.8 million U.S. job postings from 2022-2024 to quantify where and how employers demand and reward decision skills across industries and occupations. The findings show that 41% of postings explicitly reference decision-making skills, with prevalence reaching 68% in computer and mathematical occupations. Employers reward these abilities with substantial wage premiums—up to 23% for skills tied to risk and strategic decision-making.
The research offers the first data-driven evidence base connecting decision-making skills to labor market value, highlighting how these skills evolve with career progression and remain a durable advantage in the age of AI.
The Singapore Opportunity Index
A landmark new study by the Burning Glass Institute, Singapore’s Ministry of Manpower, and the Singapore University of Social Sciences, the Singapore Opportunity Index (SOI), has unveiled the clearest evidence yet of how employer practices shape workforce development, long-term competitiveness, and sustainable growth.
Drawing on anonymised employment, wage and career records covering nearly one million Singapore residents across almost 1,500 firms, the SOI tracks how workers progress through the economy—who gets hired, how long they stay, how pay evolves, and where advancement occurs.
It delivers evidence‑based insights into how opportunity develops within firms across five dimensions—pay, growth, parity, retention, and hiring—using a comprehensive, anonymised dataset of occupation, wage and hiring records from nearly one million Singapore residents working in almost 1,500 firms.
The Index gives policymakers, employers, and jobseekers a transparent and actionable view of how career development, inclusiveness, and competitiveness are unfolding in Singapore’s labour market.
Skills-First Workforce Initiative Expands to 30 Roles, Encompassing over 35 Million Workers
The Skills-First Working Initiative is moving into a new chapter. Convened by Walmart, led by the Burning Glass Institute and comprised of a cross-industry group of some of America’s largest employers, the Initiative is working to create more opportunities for American workers. Our starting point: establishing a shared language around skills.
For decades, the labor market has lacked a shared language around skills: employers describe the same roles differently; workers lack the means to demonstrate their skills; and training providers struggle to discern what skills learners need to succeed.
In April 2025, the initiative released shared, skills-first taxonomies for nine of America’s most common roles. Today we’re proud to announce our continued progress:
· Expanding to 30 roles that represent 35 million U.S. jobs (25% of the nation’s private-sector workforce)
· Introducing skills workers will need to thrive in an AI-enabled economy
· Bringing prominent HR tech providers along for the journey
· Creating an implementation playbook for companies of all sizes to get started
The impacts of this will be transformative: make skills transparent, clear, and transferable across jobs, companies, and industries.
Retail’s Tech Transformation: Upskilling Frontline Employees forNext-Gen Careers
The same retail companies where so many young people start their working lives are also technology firms employing not only cashiers and stock clerks but also software developers, data scientists in their computing operations as well as logisticians and vehicle technicians in their transportation and warehouse operations. Despite working within the same companies, relatively few workers advance from those early-career retail functions into technology roles. The Burning Glass Insitute, along with our partners FSG, Jobs for the Future, and the Education Design Lab explored how young people can build on those frontline retail experience to access opportunities in technology, and how retail employers can develop the workers they already have to address tech workforce needs.
The Expertise Upheaval
Generative AI isn’t just changing workflows—it’s changing how people get good at work. This report shows where AI is compressing time-to-mastery, where it’s stripping away the entry-level rungs that used to build expertise, and what that means for teams, talent pipelines, and mobility. Leaders will find a clear, accessible map of which roles open up as AI lowers technical barriers and which become harder to enter as junior tasks disappear—plus practical guidance on reorganizing teams, rebuilding on-ramps, and widening hiring pools. Read the full report to discover what's what’s shifting, what’s at risk, and where the biggest opportunities lie.
No Country for Young Grads
For the first time in modern history, a bachelor’s degree is no longer a reliable path to professional employment. Recent graduates face rising unemployment and widespread underemployment as structural—not cyclical—forces reshape entry‑level work. This new report identifies four interlocking drivers: an AI‑powered “Expertise Upheaval” eliminating many junior tasks, a post‑pandemic shift to lean staffing and risk‑averse hiring, AI acting as an accelerant to these changes, and a growing graduate glut. As a result, young degree holders are uniquely seeing their prospects deteriorate - even as the rest of the economy remain robust. Read the full report to explore the data behind these trends.
Holding Credentials Accountable To Outcomes
Despite a marketplace flooded with over 1.1 million credentials, only 1 in 8 deliver material wage gains for workers. This landmark report from the BGI, in partnership with the American Enterprise Institute, cuts through the noise, using data from 65 million career records to reveal which credentials actually boost earnings, enable career switches, and help workers advance. While the best programs yield wage gains of nearly $5,000 and dramatically increase upward mobility, the majority fall short. With Workforce Pell and other public investments on the rise, the report calls for a rigorous, outcomes-based approach to credential funding—one that protects learners and taxpayers alike.
Building a Common Language for Skills with Major US Employers
Starting in September 2024, the Burning Glass Institute has partnered with Walmart to host the Skills-First Working Group – bringing together a group of 11 of America’s largest employers to rigorously develop, test, and share a common language for skills. Together, we’ve helped build a shared language for how we define, develop, and deploy skills across roles employing millions of US workers.
The Jobs That Mobilize Framework
Across the country, millions of good jobs offer strong wages and career mobility without requiring a four-year degree. Yet too often, workers struggle to access these opportunities, and employers face persistent talent shortages. The Jobs That Mobilize framework provides a data-driven solution, identifying high-mobility jobs and mapping clear pathways for workers to transition into them.
Using real-time labor market data and employer insights, this report demonstrates how skills-based hiring and targeted upskilling can transform workforce systems, ensuring that economic growth benefits workers, businesses, and communities alike. Piloted in Houston, this approach demonstrates how aligning skills with employer needs can transform local economies and create long-term prosperity.
The British Opportunity Index
As Britain faces its toughest economic challenges in decades, understanding which employers truly foster career growth and upward mobility is more critical than ever. The British Opportunity Index steps in as a first-of-its-kind tool, leveraging real-world data to assess the mobility, pay, hiring practices, and culture of leading British companies. By comparing employees in similar roles across firms, the Index provides unparalleled insights into corporate practices shaping worker outcomes. This assessment reveals that corporate practices—not industry constraints—play a decisive role in shaping opportunities for employees.
Launchpad Jobs
The Launchpad Jobs report, developed by the Burning Glass Institute and American Student Assistance®, highlights how nondegree workers can achieve career success through strategic job choices. It reveals that nearly 2 million workers without college degrees earn six-figure salaries, demonstrating that fulfilling and well-paying careers are accessible without a traditional four-year education.