Pandemic accelerates demand for more skilled workforce
Economists, business leaders and labor experts have warned for years that a coming wave of automation and digital technology would upend the workforce, destroying some jobs while altering how and where work is done for nearly everyone.
In the past four months, the coronavirus pandemic has transformed some of those predictions into reality. By May, half of Americans were working from home, tethered to their employers via laptops and Wi-Fi, up from 15% before the pandemic, according to a recent study.
The rapid change is leading to mounting demands — including from typically opposing groups, like Republicans and Democrats, and business executives and labor leaders — for training programs for millions of workers. On their own, some of the proposals are modest. But combined they could cost tens of billions of dollars, in what would be one of the most ambitious retraining efforts in generations.
“This is the moment when we should make a significant public investment,” said David Autor, a labor economist at MIT, “when we should have a Marshall Plan for ourselves.”
A group of mainly corporate executives and educators advising the Trump administration on workforce policy called for “immediate and unprecedented investments in American workers,” both for training and help in finding jobs. And even before the pandemic, former Vice President Joe Biden had proposed investing $50 billion in workforce training.
In Congress, there is bipartisan support for giving jobless workers a $4,000 training credit.
The Markle Foundation has proposed federally funded “opportunity accounts” of up to $15,000 for workers to spend on training. Union leaders have helped the administration in an effort to expand federal apprenticeship programs to a wide range of industries.
Past downturns have brought increased government aid for workers and training programs. But labor experts say they have tended to be policies that recede once the economy recovers, as happened after the 2008 financial crisis, rather than becoming national priorities.
“The Great Recession was a lost opportunity,” said Lawrence Katz, an economist at Harvard University. “Now, are we going to take this moment to help low-wage workers move into the middle class and give them skills to thrive? Or are they just going to go back to low-wage jobs that are dead ends?”
Researchers at the Markle Foundation, in a report published last year, studied the pace of digital tools moving into occupations during the previous decade. The fastest rates of digitization were in jobs in retail, warehouses and health care. So a training path might be to help a home health worker acquire the skills to become a medical technician.
Job training in America has often been ineffective, with programs shaped by local politics and money spent according to the number of people in courses rather than hiring outcomes.
But there are encouraging pockets of success in America. Some are nonprofit programs like Year Up, Per Scholas and Project Quest, which prepare lowincome adults for higherpaying careers in technology, health care, advanced manufacturing or business.
In addition, online training on learning networks like Coursera and Udacity and at digital-only institutions like the Western Governors University, experts say, can be engines for upgrading the skills of many workers in America.
Nearly 15% of people earning bachelor’s degrees in nursing in the United States last year graduated from Western Governors University, an online nonprofit university focused on working adults who want to learn new skills. Sarah Williams was one of them.
Wrestling with collegelevel statistics and organic chemistry was daunting. But she made it through in eight months, with frequent encouragement and help from her mentor. “No way I could have done it alone,” Williams said.