The Great Mismatch

Women in administrative and office roles may face the biggest AI automation risk, find Brookings researchers armed with data from OpenAI. Also, why Indiana could make the Swiss apprenticeship model work in this country, and how learners get disillusioned when a certificate doesn’t immediately lead to a good job.

The Vulnerable Lower-Middle Class

Labor is having a moment in the U.S. The country’s dockworkers just successfully led a three-day strike for higher pay, and crippling strikes by UPS Teamsters and the nation’s rail workers were narrowly avoided in the past two years after concessions from employers and, in one case, intervention from Congress. Public support for unions is at the highest level since 1965, after reaching its nadir in 2009.

The Biden administration also has made a major push to bring key industries like semiconductor manufacturing back to the country—because of both national security concerns and the prospect of creating more good jobs outside of superstar cities. More broadly, the legacy of globalization for American workers is getting a hard look in the presidential campaign and the broader discourse.

Against that backdrop, we’re watching the potential rise of generative AI as the new disrupter of work.

Yes, most credible experts believe change will happen much more slowly and less sweepingly than techno-utopians would have you believe. But also yes, change is already happening.

A major new analysis from the Brookings Institution, using OpenAI data, found that the most vulnerable workers don’t look like the rail and dockworkers who have recaptured the national spotlight. Nor are they the creatives—like Hollywood’s writers and actors—that many wealthier knowledge workers identify with. Rather, they’re predominantly women in the 19M office support and administrative jobs that make up the first rung of the middle class.

“Unfortunately the technology and automation risks facing women have been overlooked for a long time,” says Molly Kinder, a fellow at Brookings Metro and lead author of the new report. “Most of the popular and political attention to issues of automation and work centers on men in blue-collar roles. There is far less awareness about the (greater) risks to women in lower-middle-class roles.”

The Details: The new Brookings analysis stands out among the many analyses predicting AI’s impact because the researchers had access to OpenAI data. Kinder says this allowed them to do a much more fine-grained analysis of the specific job tasks that can already be done by generative AI. That in turn allowed the researchers to analyze not just exposure to AI—which could mean anything from augmenting a job to eliminating it—but the specific risk of having your role fully automated. (In an interesting turn, the human-led research for the Brookings report was augmented by data analysis performed by ChatGPT.)

The researchers found that:

• More than 30% of all workers could see at least 50% of their occupation’s tasks disrupted by gen AI.

• Higher-paying jobs in fields like computing, business and finance, engineering, and law are highly exposed to the impacts of gen AI, but the technology is most likely to augment or take over discrete tasks rather than entire jobs.

• On the other hand, lower-paying office jobs like insurance claims processors, legal secretaries, bookkeepers, and administrative assistants are now much more likely to see their roles fully automated.

It may already be happening for some job roles. Salesforce last month rolled out new AI-powered agents, dubbed Agentforce, that are capable of working autonomously. The company is billing the service as a way for customers to augment their existing workforces but also says that could mean hiring fewer seasonal employees or gig workers during busy times. 

To help workers keep up, Salesforce is investing $50M in training facilities and making AI courses offered through its Trailhead platform free.

“We firmly believe that AI represents the biggest platform shift we’ve ever seen,” John Somorjai, chief corporate development and investments officer at Salesforce, said on a recent call with reporters. 

Many administrative jobs have already been eaten away by software-based automation and earlier versions of AI—but these roles still employ a large chunk of the labor force. And they represent the lion’s share of “decent-paying, stable jobs” for women without a college degree, the Brookings researchers write.

A Seat at the Table: Kinder and her co-authors go to great lengths to make clear that they can’t predict what’s going to happen. But their report argues that government and industry leaders need to have much more serious conversations about what’s already changing and what they envision going forward—and that the workers whose jobs are most likely to change need to be a part of that conversation. 

U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo has floated going much further. She’s proposed a kind of grand bargain between employers and workers that would provide employees with some sort of industry-wide job guarantee in exchange for an openness to experiment with AI and to retrain when necessary. 

“They have a sense of security, which they deserve,” Raimondo said on the Possible podcast with Reid Hoffman. “They have a job, which they deserve. And then everyone else is a bit more open to pushing forward with the possibilities of AI.”

Thus far, it’s just an idea. But Raimondo is perhaps the most prominent among a rising chorus of voices on both the left and right who are calling for workers to have a bigger seat at the table—one of several key trends we outlined in a recent Work Shift explainer on “AI in Its Play Era.”

Mary Alice McCarthy, senior director of the Center on Education and Labor at New America, says that bringing industry and labor together isn’t just about protecting livelihoods. “A lot of automation is so-so—and workers can help make it better,” she says.

That’s at least part of the theory behind burgeoning partnerships like the one between Microsoft and the AFL-CIO, the nation’s largest federation of labor unions. But the vast majority of workers in the U.S., and especially those in office jobs, aren’t represented by unions. And, Raimondo’s comments aside, state and federal policymakers have been slow to bring industry-worker conversations to the fore.

This creates what Kinder and her colleagues dubbed the “Great Mismatch,” meaning that the workers who most need a seat at the table are the least likely to have a clear mechanism to ask for it. “The vast majority of workers in sectors that will likely experience the most disruption from AI are not represented by formal unions or other forms of worker voice,” Kinder says.

The task now, she says, is for policymakers and other leaders to figure out how to build those mechanisms. And the next two years will be critical. —By Elyse Ashburn

Additional Pathway in Indiana

Many states and countries have tried and failed to copy the apprenticeship playbook of Switzerland, where 70% of students start their careers as apprentices. Yet Indiana may have decent odds of pulling off an apprenticeship push with Swiss-style ambition.

Why the optimism? The state has all the needed players at the table, says Katie Caves, a Zurich-based apprenticeship expert, including reps from government, K-12 schools, colleges, businesses, employer associations, and local leaders. Indiana’s youth apprenticeship project also is backed with real money, thanks in part to the Indianapolis-based Richard M. Fairbanks Foundation.

“Indiana is the only place in the U.S. right now that has managed to put together all of those pieces,” Caves told reporter Colleen Connolly, who wrote a deep dive for Work Shift on the effort.

Manufacturing has long been an important industry in the state. Switzerland offers a powerful example of how apprenticeship can work for manufacturing, says Deborah Kobes, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute. Fully 65% of the Swiss manufacturing workforce had an apprenticeship as their highest credential, she recently wrote, with another 15-20% who continued on to a university after an apprenticeship, and only 15-20% who completed a purely academic university pathway.

“This kind of permeability is different than in other countries, even those that have a robust apprenticeship system,” Kobes says.

‘A Foot in the Door’ Doesn’t Cut It

Even as college enrollment overall has stagnated, certificate programs have been booming. But in many cases, colleges aren’t offering what students think they are.

College leaders tend to see short-term credentials as the first step toward a family-sustaining career—but students want to see those results right away, according to a new report from Education Equity Solutions (EES). And when a certificate doesn’t immediately result in a good job, many learners get disillusioned. 

They are less inclined to pursue more education.

“Program participants whose first job after certificate completion did not meet their quality threshold were unlikely to continue their education in the field,” writes Mina Dadgar, founder and executive director of EES, and her co-authors.

The qualitative study focused on Black and Latino students in manufacturing programs, but its central findings may well apply to other fields. The researchers urged colleges—and state systems—to rethink how they’re structuring certificate programs.

When colleges pegged their certificates to slightly more advanced technical roles, graduates were more likely to see significant wage bumps and to find employers that offered opportunities for advancement. Those kinds of jobs were, in turn, much more likely to meet students’ expectations for quality.

“This research suggests that every rung of the credential ladder must count to create equitable economic mobility,” the report says. —By Elyse Ashburn

Reader Thoughts: Slow Progress

A growing number of sources tell me they’re seeing signs that big business is getting serious about skills-first hiring and promotion. Yet the challenge remains finding ways to connect talent with employers systematically and at scale, as Reuben Ogbonna, executive director and co-founder of the Marcy Lab School, told me:

“It’s really telling of this economy and the magnitude of the challenge: Even the bodies with the greatest access to company senior leadership struggle to make the necessary connections to employment at the speed they want to see it. That said, there is progress happening. It’s just happening slowly.”

Open Tabs

CTE Scholarships
Voters in Arkansas will consider an amendment to the state’s constitution that would allow the use of lottery funds for scholarships aimed at students enrolled in programs at vocational and trade institutions, reports Mary Hennigan for Arkansas Advocate. Current Arkansas law limits state lottery revenue to students who attend community colleges and four-year universities. The Arkansas legislature overwhelmingly passed a joint resolution to create the amendment.

Education Benefits
Guild is acquiring Nomadic Learning and will incorporate the platform’s expert-led, business-specific curriculum into its new Guild Academy. The company said the academy will be a collaborative learning product delivered through Guild’s marketplace. Likewise, the new Guild Talent Advantage will pair education, skilling, and academy experiences with AI insights to help empower HR leaders. Guild currently partners with Chipotle, Hilton, and Target, among other large corporations.

ROI in California
The vast majority of college programs in California (88%) enable their graduates to recoup their educational costs within five years, according to a new report commissioned by the College Futures Foundation. The program-level ROI analysis from Michael Itzkowitz of the HEA Group covers undergraduate certificate and degree programs at 324 institutions. It found that while some certificates pay off quickly, nearly a quarter leave graduates with no economic ROI.

College and Work Visas
A few dozen lesser-known U.S. colleges and universities are offering specialized graduate programs that act essentially as a two-year work visa in disguise, reports Bloomberg. A record 24K foreign graduate students were enrolled in these programs, completing most classes online while showing up in person only a few times a year. For many of these students, the so-called Day 1 CPT programs are the only way to keep a job and remain in the U.S. legally. 

Job Moves
American University has launched the Postsecondary Equity and Economics Research Center, which will seek to contribute to higher education and workforce policies. The center’s research work will be led by Stephanie Cellini, a George Washington University professor, and Jordan Matsudaira, a professor at American who previously was chief economist at the U.S. Department of Education. Directing the center will be Clare McCann, who previously was director of higher education for Arnold Ventures and served multiple stints at the Education Department.

Neil Allison has been hired by the World Economic Forum as the head of its learning, skills, and education mission. Allison previously was the Adecco Group’s vice president of strategy and transformation.

Chelsea Miller has been hired as the associate director of the Aspen Institute’s Upskill America. Miller previously led Walmart’s education benefits program as the company’s director of education and opportunity.

Work Shift handled most of the reporting and writing for this issue, in part because I’m busy with events this month. Say hi if you’re attending the Business–Higher Education Forum’s meeting this week, or the Human Potential Summit next week? —PF