Technology and Economic Mobility

As it automates its supply chain, Walmart retrains workers for new roles, tapping an employee education program that has shifted to short-term learning. Also, JFF works with community colleges to help more Black students prepare for good jobs, and a ranking of companies on economic mobility finds slow progress.

Automation, AI, and Everyday Low Prices

As Walmart automates its supply chain, the world’s largest private employer is retraining many workers for other roles across the company, including as truck drivers. A big part of that reskilling effort is Live Better U, Walmart’s employee education program, which now focuses on short-term credentials rather than college degrees.

Almost half (45%) of the volume of freight that flows through the company’s e-commerce fulfillment centers has been automated, Walmart executives said during a recent call with investors. Roughly 3K of Walmart’s 4,600 U.S. stores by the end of the year will receive deliveries from automated distribution centers.

Efficiency gains from automation are passed on to Walmart’s customers, said John Furner, president and CEO of Walmart U.S.

“I remember working in stores years ago, and it was a bit of a treasure hunt to try to find the items you needed, the cases you needed,” he said on the call. Automation and in-store technology make it “much easier for our associates to access inventory and get those things in front of people.”

Walmart also increasingly is tapping generative AI for various business functions, including improvements to its product catalog, which features 850M data points. Executives said that project would’ve taken 100 times the employees if it was done manually in the same amount of time.

“This is just the next layer of disruption,” Donna Morris, Walmart’s executive vice president and chief people officer, said at a recent event. 

Morris, who oversees 1.6M U.S. employees, said many of the skills held by Walmart associates are transferable and can port across jobs, from tech roles to management jobs. For example, the company is substantially expanding its truck fleet. And Morris said the biggest source of truck drivers is workers from the company’s increasingly automated distribution centers.

Identifying and developing the skills of workers for different roles is a priority for the company as it moves forward with the technological transformation. It’s a “skills-based world,” Morris said, adding that Walmart is interested in a “shared language on skills.”

In explaining the retail giant’s move to short-term learning with Live Better U, Morris said that for many single mothers and other time-pressed workers, a degree program “was the last thing they had time to do.”

Walmart will continue to experiment and deploy artificial intelligence and generative AI applications across its global footprint, Doug McMillon, president and CEO of Walmart Inc., told investors.

The Kicker: “The use cases for this technology are wide-ranging and affect nearly all parts of our business,” McMillon said. “We’re anchored in the responsible use of AI, while also moving with speed and in an everyday low-cost way.”

Community Colleges and Good Jobs

Black workers are overrepresented across frontline industry jobs, including trucking and warehouse roles.

Occupational segregation steers Black workers into professions like transportation, in part because it pays relatively well for jobs that don’t require degrees, says Michael Collins, vice president of the Center for Racial Economic Equity at Jobs for the Future. But Collins recently wrote about how those jobs often lack sufficient protection from unsafe conditions or disruption because of AI or automation.

“Forty percent of all Black workers are in frontline roles,” he says. “How do they advance?”

Collins is part of a recently launched JFF project to support six community colleges as they seek to increase the success of Black students in accessing and completing programs that lead to high-wage jobs in growing industries. The goal is to take lessons learned from the three-year effort, which is backed by a $2.2M gift from the Truist Foundation, to help other colleges and different groups of students.

“This is bringing a population focus, a population lens,” says Andrea Juncos, a senior director for the JFF center. While the initiative will begin with Black students and workers, she says the “interventions we develop aren’t exclusive to Black learners.”

By partnering with the colleges’ institutional research arms, the project will look for programs that enroll large shares of Black students. It will seek to learn how students picked their field of study and will analyze where graduates are landing high-wage jobs in high-growth industries, such as healthcare, engineering, and advanced manufacturing. That means looking at which roles are really in demand and how far pay goes based on the local cost of living.

“How do we close the disparity, in both the enrollment and the end product?” asks Brianne McDonough, JFF’s director of career and learning pathways.

Strategies participating colleges could use to give a boost to education programs that lead to good careers might include improving student recruitment, embedding career advising and navigation, and creating more work-based learning opportunities.

For example, North Carolina’s Forsyth Technical Community College will focus on addressing the underrepresentation of Black men in nursing programs and Black women in mechatronics, both fields that can lead to high-demand, high-jobs, writes Janet Spriggs, the college’s president.

Spriggs cites the curb-cut effect, where a solution for one group can benefit others, as a guiding principle.

The pushback on DEI across states and industries has complicated the project. 

“That has made this work very tricky,” says Collins. It’s hard to make progress on higher education’s contributions to occupational segregation without looking at race, he says. And the stakes are high.

“It’s creating an environment that in some ways puts our economy at risk, because we don’t want to look at the race variable,” Collins says.

Benchmarking Economic Mobility

Despite economic uncertainties, U.S. companies across multiple sectors are opening their doors to new workers and advancing the careers of their employees, according to the 2024 American Opportunity Index.

However, the third annual edition of the index found that a majority of the 395 companies studied did not increase their hiring of early-career and noncollege workers in 2023. And only 20% of firms on the list increased promotion opportunities.

The index is a joint project of the Burning Glass Institute, the Schultz Family Foundation, and Harvard Business School’s Managing the Future of Work Project. It seeks to provide a benchmark for employers by revealing which companies and industries are providing the best wages, chances for promotions, and job opportunities for first-time jobseekers and those without college degrees.

For example, ServiceNow is No. 5 on this year’s index. The cloud-based software company topped the list for that industry. ServiceNow’s emphasis on collaboration, inclusivity, and growth starts at the top, says Sarah Tilley, the company’s senior vice president of global talent.

“We have a leader who believes that our business strategy is our talent strategy,” Tilley said earlier this month at the Human Potential Summit.

ServiceNow offers personalized learning—that’s available on any device—to its roughly 23K employees. It also provides training on AI fundamentals to workers, who can map their career paths and take AI-recommended courses.

Tilley says the company’s employee turnover rate is far below average for the software industry. She’s also optimistic about AI’s impacts.

“We’re able to now break down jobs into a set of skills,” Tilley says, predicting broad productivity gains from the technology, including in HR. “It’s going to free up space at every level.”

Open Tabs

Workforce Development
The Workforce Futures Initiative and AEI released a set of papers that provides a sweeping view of what’s working in workforce development. The group notes, for example, that sector-based training programs have largely proved successful but remain small. And community colleges, which educate vastly more students, have work to do to achieve their full potential to prepare students for in-demand careers. The papers explore ways to expand promising approaches, including by modernizing labor market data systems, redesigning community college funding formulas, and providing more reliable funding for sector-based training. 

Clean Energy
Deadlock on U.S. climate policy is likely unless policymakers help regions where the economy will be negatively impacted by a transition to clean energy, according to Christopher Knittel, a professor and director of the MIT Climate Policy Center. Vulnerable carbon-intensive jobs are clustered in the central regions of the country, Knittel’s research has found, and involve agriculture and manufacturing as well as energy extraction.

Skills First
Leaders from five states—Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, and Louisiana—will partner with Opportunity@Work on a project that seeks to help state agencies break down barriers for public sector workers without four-year degrees. The group of participants will receive exclusive data and support as they focus on either hiring or advancement. They also will work with the nonprofit group to set specific, measurable goals over a one-year period.

AI Training
Google has launched a course in prompting essentials. The 10-hour program offered through Coursera teaches practical techniques for prompting AI tools across industries. It was developed with input from companies like Rocket Companies and Siemens, which plan to offer it as an upskilling option for their employees. Google’s AI workforce development push includes an AI Essentials course, field-specific AI skills updates to its career certificates, and a $75M AI Opportunity Fund.

Skills Matching
LinkedIn has rolled out its first AI agent, which the Microsoft-owned company says will give a boost to skills-based hiring. The new Hiring Assistant tool is designed to take on time-consuming tasks for job recruiters, including finding job candidates and assisting in applicant review. It will translate job descriptions into role qualifications and help to build a pipeline of qualified candidates, with recommendations based on skills.

Thanks for reading. Let me know what I missed? —PF

Note: Walmart Foundation, which is the philanthropic arm of Walmart, is a funder of Work Shift. You can read our policy on editorial independence here.