FOMO on Economic Mobility

The Where You Work Matters list goes deep on career advancement, wages, and retention. Liberty Mutual and GM are among 22 companies getting top marks. Also, the White House wants to track how AI is affecting job tasks, while new research finds risks for clerical work. And essays on women in apprenticeships and how colleges can help companies navigate AI adoption. (Subscribe here.)

Job-Level Data on Big Business

Employers hold the key to economic mobility gains, experts say. A new index tries to prod them into action by tapping into FOMO and corporate competition.

The Where You Work Matters list is an independent rating of how well the largest U.S. companies are doing at creating high-quality jobs. The Burning Glass Institute and the Schultz Family Foundation lead the project, with methodology developed jointly with the Managing the Future of Work Project at Harvard Business School.

“This isn’t based on what companies say they are doing,” says Rajiv Chandrasekaran, a managing director at the Schultz Family Foundation. “It gives them an objective benchmark down to the occupational level.”

Objectivity matters, says Melanie Foley, chief people, purpose, and brand officer at Liberty Mutual Insurance. The company was one of the highest rated in the list. “It reflects how our employees actually experience their careers at Liberty Mutual,” she says, “not just how we describe our culture.”

The Details: Career advancement is a core component of the index, which also assesses the impacts of internal pay and employee-retention practices.

Chandrasekaran, a veteran journalist, describes the list as a big-data project. It used sources like LinkedIn, Glassdoor, Indeed, and Lightcast to draw on the experience of 12M+ workers over a five-year period. The list assesses 1,750 employers, with data on roughly 55K occupations.

For example, it rates 62 occupations at Walmart, the world’s largest private employer, including store associates, supervisors, butchers, marketing managers, data scientists, and truck drivers.

The granular look at specific job roles is a notable addition to the discourse on economic mobility and job quality. That focus mirrors the push in recent years to measure value in higher education at the program level rather than institutionwide. 

For example, the American Opportunity Index was a precursor to the list that analyzed employer quality across roughly 400 U.S. companies by looking at those companies on the whole.

“Even at high-performing companies, not every job is good,” Chandrasekaran says.

The list recognizes 351 companies with its highest overall rating, a platinum badge. Another 351 were awarded gold badges. Businesses at both of those levels scored well across a range of occupations in at least two of the list’s good-jobs archetypes, which include early-career opportunities, growth jobs, and stable roles.

Those recognitions come with measurable benefits for workers, including pay and promotion. For example, compared to employees at firms without the badges, those at platinum companies across a basket of occupations are 26% more likely to stay for at least three years and 68% more likely to be promoted internally within five years.

Job quality in a specific occupation varies widely across companies, suggesting that economic mobility is more about the company than how hard an employee works. For example, retail sales roles pay 91% more on average at platinum firms compared to those without a quality badge. And customer service reps are 85% more likely to be promoted.

“There are a lot of places where those jobs are terrible,” Chandrasekaran says of customer service roles. “But there are other places where those jobs are a pathway.”

The list found that 22 companies do well across the board. They include Fidelity Investments, General Motors, Liberty Mutual, and Procter & Gamble. For now, the index is aimed at companies. But the project hopes to eventually be a tool for workers as well. 

AI’s potential impact on jobs looms large in this work. Chandrasekaran says “storm clouds” are on the horizon. “The companies that have built that mobility muscle internally will be better prepared for the changes that are coming,” he says.

Getting a Jump on Mobility

General Motors, for one, has been heavily focused on building muscle around AI. It trains about 2,500 employees a year through its Technical Learning University, which focuses on robotics and automation in advanced manufacturing, along with electrification and emerging tech. The company also has invested more than $242M in skilled trades apprenticeships and other training in modern manufacturing over the past year. 

Arden Hoffman, SVP and chief people officer, says GM wants to ensure employees “build new skills, refine their expertise, and take on bigger roles driving real impact for the company.”

It’s one of the 22 companies that got top marks across all three career categories in the Where You Work Matters list. Liberty Mutual is another. 

Foley, the chief people officer, says Liberty Mutual takes a long view around employee development and is investing heavily in training, upskilling, and internal mobility across career stages. Those efforts have only been heightened by AI. “As technologies like AI continue to evolve, our responsibility is to help employees adapt alongside them,” Foley says.

And she thinks public recognition, like the new list, could make a difference.

“By spotlighting employers that are prioritizing learning, mobility, and skill building, it helps reframe what good jobs look like today,” Foley says. —By Elyse Ashburn

Tracking AI-Driven Task Disruption

The White House remains bullish on AI as a jobs creator, with administration officials pushing back on what they say are overblown worries about the potential displacement of occupations and workers.

A new policy framework from the Trump administration, released last week, seeks to create a uniform approach to AI policy and to head off a “patchwork of conflicting state laws.” The framework’s six key objectives include one aimed at education and developing an AI-ready workforce.

“The administration wants American workers to participate in and reap the rewards of AI-driven growth,” the White House said.

Specifically, the framework recommends that Congress:

• Use nonregulatory methods to ensure that AI training is being incorporated into education and workforce training programs, including apprenticeships.

• Expand federal efforts to study trends in “task-level workforce realignment driven by AI” to inform policy.

• Bolster capabilities at land-grant institutions to provide technical assistance, launch demonstration projects, and create AI youth development programs.

The Labor Department also just unveiled a free one-week AI literacy course. The Make America AI-Ready skills program is delivered entirely by text message, with bite-size daily content. The course is tied to the AI literacy framework the department released last month.

To translate the policy framework into action, John Pallasch, a workforce development expert and Labor Department official during the first Trump term, says the department should focus on durable skills training. Foundational competencies like critical thinking and problem-solving will enable workers to adapt and innovate regardless of how dramatically tech reshapes the economy, he writes on LinkedIn.

Pallasch also called for the department to take a proactive, structured role in identifying the tasks and occupations that are most likely to be disrupted by AI.

“The department is uniquely positioned to map where disruption is already happening and where it is coming—and then to help develop the training and credentials needed for the AI-assisted and AI-augmented positions that will replace them,” says Pallasch.

As part of its AI Action Plan, the White House last summer called for the establishment of an AI workforce research hub, coordinated by the Labor Department and with roles for other federal agencies. That effort should evaluate the impact of AI on the labor market and the experience of the American worker, the White House said, in part to inform workforce and education policy.

The department later said it planned to launch the hub in January. A department spokesperson said the agency currently has no updates to share on the AI hub.

The Business–Higher Education Forum this week released a framework for building an AI-resilient workforce. The report, which was developed with 100+ cross-industry leaders, seeks to provide practical suggestions for both employers and educators.

The core competencies at the heart of the framework are AI literacy, data literacy, critical thinking and creativity, ethics and responsible AI use, digital and computational skills, collaboration and communication, and adaptability. 

“These aren’t narrow technical skills that will be obsolete in two years,” BHEF says. “They are durable human capabilities that grow in value as AI advances.”

Significant new research on AI’s impacts also emerged this week, with findings that suggest that the jobs most vulnerable to AI may be administrative roles that make up the first rung of the middle class. (Molly Kinder and her colleagues at the Brookings Institution pointed to this risk in late 2024 with a major analysis.)

Economists from the Federal Reserve Banks of Atlanta and Richmond worked with the researchers to produce a survey of roughly 750 CFOs across a range of industries. AI adoption is already widespread and associated with measurable revenue-based productivity gains, found the resulting study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

The CFOs reported that the overall impact of AI adoption on the size of company workforces so far has been minimal and is expected to remain limited this year. Yet the technology may induce firms to shift work away from clerical roles and toward occupations that require higher skill, technical expertise, or managerial judgement.

On average, respondents expect a 2.19% reduction by 2028 in the share of their workforce doing clerical work, which will be partly offset by a 1.35% increase in skilled technical workers.

Likewise, new data from the Anthropic Economic Index showed that Claude’s usage is expanding to work that on average requires fewer years of education. Coding remains the most common use. But adoption last month became more diversified and broadened to lower-wage tasks. That pattern is consistent with a standard adoption curve, the report said.

I asked Claude for a quote that summarized Anthropic’s findings for this audience.

The Kicker: “The report’s warning is subtle but serious,” Claude says. “The workers most exposed to AI disruption are also the ones getting the most benefit from it right now. That asymmetry could widen the gap between knowledge workers and everyone else.”

Open Tabs

Low-Hire, Low-Fire
Young graduates of four-year colleges are facing grim hiring prospects but still are faring better than jobseekers without degrees in the low-hire, low-fire labor market dynamic, reports Sydney Ember for The New York Times. Some economists speculate that longer lives and lower birth rates are making it harder for young graduates to land white-collar jobs. As older workers hold onto their jobs longer, earlier-career employees get fewer advancement opportunities.

AI Infrastructure Jobs
Data centers will need to be updated every four to six years, which will drive labor demand for network engineers, electricians, mechanical engineers, and plumbing and heating contractors, reports CNBC. Specialized workers who move into high-level data roles often see a 25% pay increase. Businesses and governments will need to invest in training programs to keep pace with demand for data center jobs, says Sander van 't Noordende, CEO of Randstad, a staffing firm.

Energy Apprenticeships
Adaptive Construction Solutions is launching a series of registered apprenticeships in collaboration with NVIDIA to hire and enroll 10K new apprentices to work on the expanding AI infrastructure. NVIDIA will help employers standardize the training and make connections with apprenticeship providers. ACS, an energy sector apprenticeship intermediary, says dozens of its business partners have committed to hiring new apprentices for AI infrastructure.

TRIO and College
A new RFP for the federal Talent Search Program, which falls under the TRIO umbrella and serves roughly 300K low-income K–12 students annually, would eliminate up to two-thirds of existing projects, according to the Council for Opportunity in Education. The nonprofit called the plan a “direct assault on college access” that would instead steer students to workforce systems while potentially leaving entire states without TRIO services.

Healthcare IT
Infosys says it is acquiring Optimum Healthcare IT, which offers an apprenticeship program, for up to $465M. Ryan Craig, an education and workforce expert, is a managing director at Achieve Partners, an investment firm that had a controlling stake in Optimum Healthcare IT. Achieve Partners said the company, which was the first investment of its workforce fund, had hired, trained, and deployed 300 apprentices in recent years. 

Barriers to Change
Outdated government systems often prevent startups that work on urgent public challenges, including education and workforce development, from reaching the communities that need them most, finds a report from the Kapor Center. Surveys and interviews revealed common barriers such as slow contracting timelines, complex applications, and compliance burdens. The report’s recommended reforms include reimagining procurement and compliance processes.

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