The Relationship Economy

Verizon partners with a nonprofit on a new on-ramp for diverse talent, while the company calls for workforce trainers to focus more on people skills. Also, generative AI’s rapid adoption as a general use technology, and a prediction that AI will lead to the rise of new types of jobs that prioritize social ability.

Everyday Office Skills

As more companies get serious about work-based learning, demand is rising for training that helps jobseekers get ready for the customs and expectations of office work. This is particularly true for employers that are creating on-ramps for jobseekers from lower-income backgrounds, who tend to get less of that preparation at school or home.

Yet teaching these skills—how to write a work email or what to wear to the office—isn’t easy. It takes time and money and can be a challenge even for the most respected training providers.

“For the population that we’re most worried about, that’s where some of the biggest deficits are,” says Brent Orrell, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. “It’s the kind of skill that is embedded in everyday interaction. We don’t actually have a curriculum to teach that.”

Verizon is a good example of an employer that has made a big push in recent years with internships. That growing program, along with apprenticeships, seek to “create a pipeline to full-time talent,” says Tara Orlando, Verizon’s senior director of talent attraction and emerging talent programs.

The telecommunications giant is committed to increasing the diversity of thought and demographics among its roughly 105K employees, Orlando says. And she says internships are one way for the company to “recoup some of our female workforce” after seeing a decline during the pandemic.

Internships at Verizon are incredibly competitive, however—the company got 50K applications for 400 positions this year. 

To help ensure that women have a better shot at those coveted internships, Verizon has partnered with Break Through Tech, a nonprofit that seeks to help a broader range of students land roles in tech, an industry dominated by white men. 

One of the group’s signature programs is its “sprinternship,” a three-week microinternship designed so participants—mostly women from lower-income and diverse backgrounds—can move into highly sought, paid summer internships and eventually full-time jobs in tech. Break Through Tech also recently created a virtual, one-year extracurricular experience focused on data science, AI, and machine learning.

In its work with Verizon, the organization developed a customized cohort-based pipeline into internships.

“Companies are getting a lot of noise in the system,” says Melissa Jones, Break Through Tech’s senior director of program delivery. “We’re really trying to reach students who don’t have these types of opportunities.”

Groups of five microinterns, all recruited from the same university, spend three weeks tackling real-world business problems on-site at Verizon. The pilot program placed 80 students with the company during its initial session. Participants who complete the program are automatically enrolled in Verizon’s 10-week internship. Break Through Tech hopes its work with Verizon can serve as a model for other companies. 

“The best way to learn about being in an office is to put students in an office,” Jones says.

Break Through Tech recently tapped a group of advisors from HR and higher education to identify the professional skills students need in a work environment, and how to help interns develop them.

“We’ve discovered that it’s not enough to simply teach the skills in a traditional pedagogical sense,” says Jones. “We also need to provide opportunities for practice, coaching, and mentorship along the way.”

The need is urgent, says Verizon’s Orlando. She pleaded with readers of this newsletter, including philanthropies and training providers, to put more resources into the development of everyday office skills. The problem extends far beyond internships, she says, to the broader talent pipeline and the workforce at large.

The Kicker: “It’s a generational challenge,” Orlando says. “We need to better set up the success of the talent.”

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Waiting for the Killer App

Roughly 40% of working-age Americans report using generative AI, with 28% of workers using it on the job, more than 10% of whom say they use it daily.

Those are the top-line findings from the first nationally representative U.S. survey on generative AI use at work and home. Conducted in August, the survey was developed in collaboration between researchers at Harvard University, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, and Vanderbilt University. 

Gen AI so far has been adopted at a faster pace than PCs or the internet, write the researchers. The survey also found that gen AI appears to be a general purpose technology, with respondents using it for a wide range of job categories and tasks. 

For example, while nearly half of workers in computer and mathematical and management occupations use gen AI at work, the researchers note with interest that so do 22% of workers in blue-collar jobs, including those in construction, installation and repair, skilled production, and transportation and moving.

Overall, the study estimates that between 0.5% and 3.5% of all work hours in the U.S. are currently assisted by gen AI.

A big area of focus for future surveys is how workers are tapping the technology on the job, says David Deming, an economist, faculty co-chair of Harvard University’s Project on Workforce, and co-author of the study. Are they using it to write emails to clients or to do job-specific tasks, like getting detailed instructions for repair projects?

“Right now I think gen AI is broadly helpful for doing a wide range of things but doesn’t yet have a killer app,” says Deming. “At some point that will change.”

What’s Next? Reliable predictions are hard to find on whether the tech could soon result in something more than modest job productivity gains, like big changes to occupational roles or the elimination of wide swaths of jobs. That sort of disruption obviously would have serious implications for education and job-training programs.

For example, I’ve heard speculation that medical billing and coding may be on the cusp of a large-scale transformation. But the industry’s credentialing organization, the American Academy of Professional Coders, says substantial AI-driven changes have yet to emerge. In fact, Raemarie Jimenez, the group’s chief product officer, told me the problem now is too few humans who are prepared to handle the coding load.

Deming says he tends to believe that projections of job losses due to new technologies, including AI, are often overestimated, although he’s open to having his mind changed by data.

“These things just take a lot longer than people think,” says Deming. “There’s a lot of legacy capital and institutions tied up in old ways of doing things, especially in regulated sectors like healthcare.”

Aneesh Raman, LinkedIn’s chief economic opportunity officer, is well positioned to track technology’s potential impacts on jobs. Raman, a former war correspondent for CNN who was a speechwriter for President Obama, brings a humanist’s lens to his take on how AI can help create a more meritocratic society. He also thinks big shifts driven by the tech are coming soon.

“We’ve gone from the goods economy to the knowledge economy, but we’re going to end up in a relationship economy,” Raman says on a new episode of Work Shift’s podcast, The Cusp. Citing recent data from LinkedIn on the increasing labor market demand for people skills, he predicts the rise of new types of occupations that prioritize social abilities.

“Technology has never led to a net loss of employment,” he says. “So, yes, we’re in the disruption and our jobs are changing, but we know somewhere down the line entirely new categories of jobs are going to emerge.”

Open Tabs

Workforce Bill
Negotiations continue on proposed federal legislation to reauthorize the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA), and Congress could take up the bill after the election next month. Several labor unions, including the AFL-CIO, SEIU, and AFT, wrote to the Senate to argue that certain worker protections should remain in any new WIOA legislation. A recent dispute over language on adherence to federal labor laws contributed to the bill stalling on the Hill.

Tech and Gender
Women hold a declining share of job roles in the booming fields of data and analytics and artificial intelligence, according to a new report from Revelio Labs, KPMG, and WLDA. Just 39% of these roles are held by women, a decline of three percentage points from a decade ago. Representation among women in these jobs gets worse at higher levels of seniority. Industry exit rates also are rising for women, while systemic pay inequity is holding flat.

Skills-Based Hiring
Dropping degree requirements has little effect on hiring, because employers typically prefer job applicants with a bachelor’s degree, Harvard University’s David Deming writes for The Atlantic. The problem lawmakers need to solve is a lack of alternative ways for workers to prove their qualifications. Deming says Congress could create a federal certification program for career pathways in high-demand fields with upward mobility.

Short-Term Credentials
Data is emerging about short-term credential programs in North Carolina, Louisiana, Colorado, and Texas, including how many students are earning them, and in what fields, David Tobenkin reports for Community College Daily. For example, 15K of the 35K annual graduates of Louisiana’s community colleges completed short-term, noncredit workforce training for industries that are economic drivers in the state.

Six in 10 U.S. colleges surveyed by Coursera said they offer microcredentials, and half award credit for them. Still more plan to move that way in the next five years—in particular to better prepare students for careers. Some of the biggest barriers to growth, survey respondents said, were challenges getting faculty buy-in and ensuring the industry relevance of credentials.

Related, in Phil Hill’s On EdTech newsletter, Glenda Morgan wrote about the nitty-gritty of what makes it hard for colleges to bring microcredentials into the fold.

Thanks for reading. If you know about substantial, AI-driven changes to specific occupations, let me know? —PF