In skilled trades and health care occupations, talent pipelines remain strained, and the gaps continue to persist and widen. There are also many sectors that were highly dependent on immigrant labor where we’re seeing some challenges in hiring. And areas where, especially after the pandemic, we’ve seen an exodus of workers.
It’s even harder to attract and retain skilled talent in sectors where engineering is required. These are candidates who have advanced education, and, in some cases, terminal degrees. Developing this supply of highly skilled labor is really about creating proactive awareness amongst rising engineering talent of the alternative pathways that exist, particularly in specialized engineering fields where talent is scarce.
VEDP: What role can education and economic development policy play in helping to eliminate those friction points and make it easier for people to shift?
Lands: When I think of the ideal role for education, it’s about creating good labor stock. That could be through the K-12 system, but it can also be through the post-secondary and continuing education system or adult retraining. It’s about ensuring learners acquire highly transferable, durable skills that are going to make them effective in pretty much any job they take. Those are critical thinking, analytical skills, writing skills, numerical sense — a lot of the things that multiple industries say they need as a bare minimum in their workforce.
I think what we need more of is a blurring of the lines between what is education and what is work — making that more of a fluid journey. Most people no longer spend 16 years in formal education and then are off and running in the workforce, education completed. They’re actually moving back and forth between the two over the course of a working lifetime (which is getting longer). We need something that starts to give students exposure to work before they enter the workforce, and then once they start working, for the employer to dip them back into education experiences over time to continually upskill or retrain for whatever the emergent needs are.
VEDP: You mentioned AI and how it’s a reality that people will have to work with. How do you see that manifesting now for first-time job seekers? How should they be navigating this?
Lands: According to recent research by Indeed, at this moment, only about a quarter of job descriptions formally require AI skills. For first-time job seekers and people currently out of work and job-seeking, this is a hidden opportunity. By gaining some basic AI literacy skills and conversancy with tools like Claude or ChatGPT, listing it on one’s résumé, and highlighting it in the hiring process, it’s relatively easy to differentiate oneself from other job seekers. Employers have indicated that they are more willing to hire a candidate who demonstrates AI literacy and conversancy, whether or not they have held that role previously or have related industry background for the job to which they’re applying. In this way, AI literacy — a skill we all need to cultivate — can also become a door-opener to a career pivot in a tight job market.
VEDP: What signals do you watch for to ascertain what kinds of jobs and skills will be important in the next five to 10 years?
Lands: In today’s labor market, anything forecasted that far out is probably futurism, but there are evergreen needs in our economy, like healthcare, care work, construction, and trades. People won’t stop getting old, they won’t stop needing care, we’ll still need shelter and housing. So the real question is how do we make those professions standard-bearers for quality jobs? How do we attract more people into those sectors? How do we make that work more sustainable over the course of a working lifetime?
JFF recently published a report with Gallup called the American Job Quality Study, which found that only four in 10 American workers currently work in a quality job. Employers are creating jobs that don’t meet standards of poverty mitigation, safety, scheduling, predictability, etc. As a result, they create downstream costs and externalities to the Commonwealth that end up eroding the value of the economic development resources put toward creating the jobs. How can we incentivize employers to invest in their people in ways that yield positive spillover effects for both the business and the region? Economic developers are not just in the business of job creation — they’re in the business of healthy regional economies and quality job growth, and that’s what I (and I think, most of our colleagues) find most fulfilling about a career in this field.
