iF Quarterly

Working hard, or hardly working?

Three takeaways from today on the labor market of tomorrow

The question “Working hard, or hardly working?” is becoming more than just an ice-breaker: it’s a commentary on the state of our workforce system today. Over the past few months, we’ve had a few clients ask us to think about how COVID-19 is changing work, and, as you may have guessed, the impacts go far beyond spending more hours on Teams, Slack, or Zoom.

Longstanding concerns that people might be less productive working from home have turned out to be wildly overblown — information workers are working harder than ever. Bloomberg and The Washington Post both report that employees are working anywhere from 1–3 hours more per day, while a Bloomberg survey found 45% of respondents reporting burnout.

Meanwhile, pandemic-related job losses have fallen disproportionately on young, poverty-impacted people of color. In one study by Pew Charitable Trusts, over half of low-income respondents of all ages reported that they or someone in their household had experienced job loss or reduced hours as a result of COVID by April. Another Pew study found that in May, unemployment for youth ages 16–24 was over 25% — nearly double the national average. That same month, women of color experienced the highest unemployment of any racial and gender demographic in the immediate fallout: 19.5% for Latinx women, 17.2% for Black women, and 16.7% for Asian women. White men, by comparison were unemployed at a rate of 9.7% that same month.

At iF, we’re lucky to work with clients across the public and private sectors who are tackling education, workforce development, and workplace tech, and we’re seeing a few trends worth noting:

• Career pathways are changing.
  The conventional, linear journey from high school to college and into a good job is proving painfully out of reach for many as technology continues to change the skills youth need to succeed in the labor market. From Microsoft’s Re-Skilling announcement earlier this year to Opportunity Pathways finding that most skills have a half life of 5 years (and decreasing), we need to move beyond the idea of skilling as a one-and-done moment and think about how to sustain learning across a person’s career.
• The ROI on a college degree for both employees and employers is increasingly questionable.
  Americans have been enrolling in college at increasingly higher rates, but graduation rates are stagnating. Inside Higher Ed reported in February that over 40% of students with bachelor’s degrees are working in jobs that don’t require a degree. Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal reported that 89% of employers complained of underskilled applicants, in a pre-COVID market where there were 6 million job openings and 7.1 million unemployed Americans.
• Technology’s real power is only unleashed when interwoven with deep efforts in antiracism and economic mobility.
  We’re proud of the work of iF’s partners at the Every Learner Everywhere network. Their mission — to help institutions use new technology to innovate teaching and learning, with the ultimate goal of improving student outcomes for Black, Latinx, and Indigenous students, low-income students, and first generation students — is so important now, because we’ve seen too many technology-driven attempts to bridge the employment gap without paying sufficient attention to larger inequities in access to education, good jobs, and economic mobility. Many tech products over-focus on job-seekers with a bachelor degree, leaving the needs and potential of millions unaddressed.

Clearly, we’re at an inflection point, that implicates actors and institutions across education, employers, the technology sector, and philanthropy. It will take all of us working together, because what’s at stake is not merely short-term economic recovery: it’s giving everyone in our society the resources and support to realize their potential. The choice shouldn’t be between working hard and hardly working: the choice every worker faces should be between meaningful projects, exciting new skills, and fulfilling roles.

If there is a silver lining to the stress and precariousness we are all experiencing now, it’s that we can no longer ignore the root problems that stand in the way of our collective progress. Together, we’re learning more about how we might address them, so that together we can coordinate, cooperate, and collaborate, to build something better.

Every quarter, Intentional Futures puts out a long-form piece on what we’ve been up to, and what we’re thinking about.

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