Playing Matchmaker

A statewide platform in Arkansas seeks to make it seamless for residents to verify their skills, find training, and land a job. Also, a new survey finds that Black workers are AI power users, and a growing chorus worries educators are missing the forest for the trees when it comes to AI. (Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Subscribe here.)

Making Better Matches

When Mike Rogers, Arkansas’ chief workforce officer, set out to design a new jobs platform for residents of the state, he envisioned “eHarmony meets Indeed.” The goal: successful pairings of workers and employers.

“I wanted to make a love connection, and both parties have to be able to offer something,” Rogers says.

The result was Arkansas LAUNCH, a platform that’s part job board and part career map. It also flips the typical one-way job search model by letting employers proactively search for candidates based on skills—not just résumés.

The Big Idea: Arkansas LAUNCH is at the forefront of state efforts to better use data to match people and employers. It’s one of a growing number of states, including Alabama, California, and Colorado, that are working to make postsecondary education and workforce training more cohesive.

In Arkansas, that work began about a decade ago under Gov. Asa Hutchinson and has continued under Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who appointed Rogers as the state’s first-ever chief workforce officer and last year rolled out a new statewide workforce strategy. It aims to boost the state’s labor force participation rate, which lags other states at 58%, while accounting for the fact that three-quarters of Arkansans don’t have a bachelor’s degree.

The state is trying a range of approaches to get more residents into high-need jobs, including a currently suspended work requirement for Medicaid recipients, investments in apprenticeship degrees, an overhaul of government structures, and now the statewide skills and job-matching platform. Rogers hopes that LAUNCH, in particular, will bridge the disconnect between employers’ hiring methods and jobseekers’ talent, which isn’t always captured in formal credentials.

“We’re trying to standardize career pathways with a person’s life and their education,” Rogers says.

The Details: With funding from Walmart and development support from the organization Research Improving People’s Lives (RIPL), the goal is to ultimately build out a full-fledged learning and employment record system that will map residents’ credentials, certifications, and skills. Currently, users complete a profile and then can navigate to a personalized job board or explore career paths.

The algorithm optimizes recommendations for jobseekers based on unemployment data, wage data, and other market information, says Alec Lintz, a partner-enablement strategist at RIPL who helped develop LAUNCH. The goal is to recommend jobs that would lead to wage increases based on data from other people with similar skills and experiences. 

RIPL has helped other states, including Colorado, Hawaii, New Jersey and Rhode Island, build similar platforms. LAUNCH is unique, Lintz says, in how it engages businesses and other organizations looking to hire.

Employers create their own profiles where they can upload job postings. But rather than waiting passively for applicants, the platform recommends workers based on their skills and allows employers to send them an application proactively.

“Arkansas has been sort of a sandbox for us,” Lintz says. “It’s the first state where we’ve really implemented the employer side of the tool.”

Getting Uptake: Still, making good on that potential will require workers and employers to use it. Randy Zook, president and CEO of the Arkansas State Chamber of Commerce, says LAUNCH will have to compete with more well-known websites like Indeed.

“The advantage of LAUNCH is that it’s tailored to Arkansas institutions and Arkansas employers and is a little more focused,” Zook says. “That’s going to be a value proposition that will take some time for people to understand.”

The state hopes to increase the appeal by verifying and translating skills for workers, like the state’s large veteran population, who have extensive work experience but no certificates or degrees. LAUNCH is working with SOLID and the Manufacturing Institute, for example, to help turn military experience into tangible credentials for the civilian world.

Goodwill Industries of Arkansas has also been a significant partner in the work and is incorporating LAUNCH across its career centers. The state is also integrating LAUNCH with new online tools, such as CiviForm, designed to streamline access to government benefits.

The Kicker: Rogers envisions a future where LAUNCH is part of a digital one-stop shop for everything a resident might need from the state. It’s a future where an Arkansan could find a local food pantry, look for a job, apply for a training grant, and even renew their car registration, all in the same place. 

“We want to move someone from a crisis to a career,” Rogers says. Read the full story on Work Shift. —By Colleen Connolly

A Signal in the Noise on AI?

The flood of commentary on AI recently has featured an uptick in concern about the technology’s potential effects on the labor market. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, hardly a disinterested observer, told Axios that AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs in the next one to five years, driving a mass elimination across technology, finance, law, and consulting.

A message on job disruption also comes from Alex Kotran, the co-founder and CEO of the AI Education project. Yet he says too many leaders in education are missing the forest for the trees by focusing on AI tools rather than jobs.

Writing in his newsletter, Kotran cites findings on the worsening labor market for recent college graduates. He also rounded up AI-driven layoffs across major corporations, including Intuit, Cisco, IBM, Activision Blizzard, Duolingo, Klarna, UPS, Amazon, and IKEA. (Interestingly, Klarna this month said its tech-fueled cost-cutting in customer service had gone too far.)

“Precious few resources are being directed to addressing the need for urgent, system-wide investment in helping schools build the capacity to understand and prepare students for this new era,” Kotran writes. “Instead, everyone seems to be focused on building tools and widgets.”

Emerging Impacts: Some software engineers at Amazon say their jobs have begun to resemble warehouse work, Noam Scheiber reports for The New York Times. “One Amazon engineer said his team was roughly half the size it had been last year, but it was expected to produce roughly the same amount of code by using AI.”

However, a major study found that the economic impacts of AI chat bots remain minimal, a view The Economist amplified this week. Two surveys covering 11 exposed occupations and 7K workplaces found no significant effects on earnings or recorded work hours, according to the paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

AI adoption in the job market has been uneven, finds Revelio Labs, a labor market data company. Exposure and adoption is concentrated in high-paying roles, including data analysts and software engineers. “AI is no longer just a looming possibility across many jobs,” write three economists from the company. “It is now being actively integrated into specific high-value roles and workflows.”

Job postings seeking workers who hold at least a bachelor’s degree are more likely to require at least one AI skill than postings that require an associate degree or high school credential, according to new research from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, which drew data from Lightcast. But AI skill demand is rising for jobs requiring at least a two-year degree, particularly in computer and math-heavy occupations.

And a recent survey by JFF found that workers without a four-year degree were less likely than workers overall to say that AI was impacting their jobs. However, people of color, especially Black adults, were much more likely to say their jobs were changing. And they emerged as power users, in part driven by high engagement with social media and an orientation toward “creativity and ingenuity” in the face of limited resources. (More on that here and below.)

Entry-Level Jobs: The technology poses a real threat to a substantial number of jobs that serve as the first step for each new generation of young workers, Aneesh Raman, the chief economic opportunity officer at LinkedIn, writes for The New York Times. He cites a LinkedIn survey of 3K senior executives, where 63% of respondents agreed that AI will eventually take on some of the mundane tasks currently allocated to their entry-level employees.

Office jobs are expected to feel the biggest crunch, predicts Raman. “Unless employers want to find themselves without enough people to fill leadership posts down the road, they need to continue to hire young workers,” he writes. “But they need to redesign entry-level jobs that give workers higher-level tasks that add value beyond what can be produced by AI.”

Byron Auguste, the CEO and co-founder at Opportunity@Work, says he’s begun referring to AI as “amplified intention,” because the technology “does not set its own goals. We do.” 

People could use AI to exclude other people from employment, he says, which has long been a challenge for workers without college degrees. Given our current systems, it’s much harder to do “skills-based inclusion,” says Auguste. Even so, he’s optimistic that AI will help employers tap into everyone’s talent.

“We’ve got too many problems to solve,” he says. “We need all the talents to solve them.”

(Both Kotran and Raman were interviewed last year on The Cusp, Work Shift’s podcast.)

Related from Work Shift

Open Tabs

Trade Schools
President Trump said this week that he’s considering taking $3B of federal funds away from Harvard and giving it to “trade schools” across the U.S. His post on social media appeared to refer to previously frozen or eliminated funds, rather than new cuts. The administration shared no details about the possible move, which almost certainly would raise legal questions. It’s unclear if the White House will follow up on the idea.

Career Mobility
Almost half (44%) of U.S. workers who responded to a broad survey by McKinsey say they are willing to change occupations. The top barrier to finding a new job, according to these workers, is their need for more or different work experience, relevant skills, credentials, or education. Among all respondents, 42% say they are interested in upskilling, with the strongest interest cited by young, lower-income, immigrant, and Black workers.

Federal Grants
Recipients of grants from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Career, Technical, and Adult Education recently received an email from the office saying they need to request approval to access funds from those grants. A department spokeswoman says the agency is updating OCTAE’s grants-management system. Observers predict that the Trump administration will move the office to the Labor Department, as called for in the Project 2025 report.

State Competition
JobsOhio will spend $50M to help companies in high-growth industries hire workers from other states. The private economic development group’s relocation incentive program, described here, seeks to recruit about 3K engineers, technicians, and tech workers by 2030. Firms will receive a $15K reimbursement per hire across targeted industries, including advanced manufacturing, life sciences, and AI. Companies can choose how to use the funds.

Community Colleges
An online, three-year bachelor’s degree from an Arizona community college may be the first of its kind for the two-year college sector. Yavapai College’s forthcoming bachelor of applied science in business degree has been approved by the Higher Learning Commission, Yavapai’s accreditor. The total tuition price for the 92-credit program is $9,482.

NSF and Workforce
A briefing on Capitol Hill next week will describe the role of grants from the National Science Foundation in supporting community college workforce development programs across emerging technology sectors. The event will be hosted by the bipartisan Congressional Research and Development Caucus, New America, and the American Association of Community Colleges.

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