White Paper

A quick review of the most recent labor-market data tells the story. A broader measure of unemployment includes both workers who want full-time jobs but have to settle for part-time work and workers who are marginally attached to the labor force. Defined this way, the unemployment rate in November was 13.2%, more than four percentage points higher than it was at the beginning of the Great Recession. The economy is home to 1.3 million fewer jobs today than when the Great Recession began. The three-month moving average of employment gains is currently 193,000 jobs per month. At that rate, the Brookings Institution's Hamilton Project calculates that the jobs gap will not close until more than five years from now.

In January and February 2017, the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) conducted its annual survey of U.S. employers to gather information on more than 300 employee benefits. The survey asked human resource professionals if their organizations formally offered any of the listed benefits to their employees. This report examines the prevalence of benefits over the past five years to track trends and understand the benefits landscape in the current talent marketplace.

North Carolina confronts an enormous future jobs challenge as two big trends converge: (1) a technological revolution will eliminate or seriously reshape more than a million current jobs, and (2) our demography is shifting rapidly as we age, grow more diverse, and our workforce welcomes more women. According to a recent analysis at North Carolina State University, jobs in some 39 major current employment categories in the state are at least 70% likely to be eliminated within one generation as a result of automation. More than one million North Carolinians currently work in these jobs. (Note: Other analysis implies that an additional one million current North Carolina jobs may be lost during the same time frame to tech enabled offshoring; because detailed analysis is not yet available, however, we have not included this further disruptive factor in our modeling.) North Carolina’s demographic transition presents additional disruptive effects: the state must replace a large cohort of boomer retirees while ensuring the successful integration of a generation of new workers that includes more women and will become majority minority. To draw attention to these important challenges, the Institute for Emerging Issues’ new Future Work Disruption Index for North Carolina offers a comparative metric that helps define relative exposure to the disruptive impacts of technological and demographic changes for North Carolina’s counties and regional Prosperity Zones.

High-tenured displaced workers often experience significant earnings losses that persist for the rest of their working lives. A well-targeted training initiative has the potential to substantially reduce permanent earnings losses for those displaced workers who have the academic preparation, work experience, and interest to complete high-return retraining, with a rate of return on par with, if not larger than, that reported for formal schooling of young people. Current governmental training programs do not provide adequate resources to finance the long-term training needed by displaced workers to meaningfully offset their losses, nor do they provide the right incentives to get longer-term retraining. This paper presents five comprehensive reforms targeted specifically at retraining displaced workers experiencing significant earnings loss: (1) establish a Displaced Worker Training (DWT) Program to provide sizeable grants for longer-term training; (2) use honest brokers to assess and counsel grantees; (3) provide incentives and performance standards for participants and institutions; (4) evaluate training programs and disseminate best practices; and (5) shore up community colleges’ capacity to provide high-quality training, especially during tough economic times.

Cognitive technologies, a product of the field of artificial intelligence, can and will be used to eliminate jobs. But leaders face choices about how to apply cognitive technologies. These decisions will determine whether workers are marginalized or empowered, and whether their organizations are creating value or merely cutting costs.

Are you a US-based organization searching for tomorrow’s workers? Look around your workplace. The oldest Millennials are just 37 and will likely keep working for several decades.1 The demographic changes that determine many of the key characteristics of the workforce happen slowly. But they happen. Over time, those demographic shifts can compound to make a big difference. It’s a difference we can already see. The main long-term changes in the workforce are, in fact, not new; employers have been adjusting to them for decades. Yet they can have real implications for how organizations approach everything, from workforce planning to diversity initiatives.

Well-timed and targeted innovation boosts productivity, increases economic growth and helps solve societal problems. But how can governments encourage more people to innovate more of the time? And how can government itself be more innovative? The OECD Innovation Strategy provides a set of principles to spur innovation in people, firms and government. It takes an in-depth look at the scope of innovation and how it is changing, as well as where and how it is occurring, based on updated research and data.

For decades, the portion of prime-age men (ages 25 to 54) in the labor force has been in decline. More recently, the labor force participation rate of prime-age women has stagnated and also declined. This paper addresses the consequences of, and reasons for, these declines, especially among men. A subsequent effort will address appropriate policy responses.

The growing role of the digital economy in daily life has heightened demand for new data and measurement tools. Internationally comparable and timely statistics combined with robust cross-country analyses are crucial to strengthen the evidence base for digital economy policy making, particularly in a context of rapid change. This report presents indicators traditionally used to monitor the information society and complements them with experimental indicators that provide insight into areas of policy interest. The key objectives of this publication are to highlight measurement gaps and propose actions to advance the measurement agenda.