Flexibility Is Key To Workforce Recovery
Summary: This post is about how traditional schooling and vocational education can only play a very small role in recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. In order for people to get into new occupations that will arise out of the recession, workers will need job experience, and this will come from a variety of sources including freelancing, temp jobs, or part-time internships. Traditional school-based training paths are incompatible with many people who have family, financial or medical obligations that prevents them from taking regular time out of their lives to re-skill. This post is part of a series from Tech4America on the Future of Work and economic recovery from COVID-19.
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I was talking to a journalist the other day who had reached out to see what lessons city policymakers could learn from our economic pilots on vocational training and upward mobility for low-income groups (story here). I was told that some regional policymakers in Texas are eyeing re-training as a significant part of their workforce recovery plans from the COVID-19 pandemic. I told the journalist to be very skeptical of re-training proposals because the most popular solutions are classroom-based training, despite lack of evidence.
Supporting community colleges and other school-like vocational providers is a really tempting idea to help workers earn more money, but I had learned the hard way that the publically reported statistics around school-based training sweep a lot of problems under the rug.
So, to inform policy discussions around workforce recovery, I wanted to write a more thorough post about the evidence on school-based training, our pilot project, and promising alternatives.
Few Can Attend Full-Time School Or Internships
Before I dig into the evidence, I want to briefly go over how I arrived at my conclusions, which I published with The Brookings Institute.
In 2018, I ran an economic pilot to explore why so many people have difficulty getting into high- skill careers, such as computer programming or information technology repair. We recruited participants from local nonprofits with clients eager to get into a new career. We provided them, free of charge, with coaching resources or funds to go and take classes.
Unfortunately, many could not complete the program. Lower-income and minority individuals suffer from erratic and fragile career paths, which in our experience, are often interrupted by unexpected family obligations, financial costs, mental health issues, or illness. Because they have so little savings, these small interruptions can completely derail the ability to attend a school or an internship.
When I spoke to schools that did have a proven track record of helping disadvantaged groups, I learned that their success was partly based on strict screening criteria. Anyone who missed a few classes or an interview got rejected. The research suggests that this screening can exclude around 90% of applicants. This isn’t a criticism of screening: it’s still possible to help thousands of workers through school. But, it’s important not to misinterpret high placement rates as a solution that could scale to most of the workers who want a new career.
The Evidence On Traditional Education Failures
The evidence is pretty clear that most public vocational programs fail to meet their goals. The White House recently released a report looking at the $18 billion spent on re-training and found that few, if any, programs left participants better off compared to those who did not take part in training. This falls on the backdrop of new headlines like from one for The Atlantic, “Why Is the U.S. So Bad at Worker Retraining?”.
Generally speaking, America has a school-centric approach to re-training. Policymakers tend to favor publicly subsidized classes or free community college tuition as a solution to upward mobility.
Why doesn’t this work? After all, it makes sense that many people can’t afford to take time for school, but what about those who can attend school and eventually graduate?
Schools rarely coordinate with businesses to determine whether the skills they’re teaching will be in-demand by the time students graduate. This is the problem with the so-called “massification” of higher education, where some countries decide to massively expand subsidized school offerings. After these well-intended policies are implemented, graduate wages plummet. Underprepared students flood the market, causing underemployment and putting downward wage pressure on limited job openings.
The same problem happened in the U.S. with private sector “coding bootcamps”, which promised an accelerated path to a high paying job in the tech sector. Bootcamps came on the market with a lot of fanfare, but the job-placement rates have been disappointing (usually below 75% and often much lower); the hope that the average worker could land a developer role with just a few months of school was overhyped.
Flexible Solutions For Job Experience
Generally speaking, there just isn’t a policy workaround for the fact that getting into a new career requires lots of unpaid or low-paid job experience. Often, workers freelance on the side to support these opportunities.
Many graduates are faced with the catch-22 of needing job experience to get a job. In the technology industry, this means many hours of unpaid labor creating an online “portfolio” of coding projects to show prospective employers. A single person in their early 20s might be able to dedicate time to building out their portfolio, but older participants in our pilot struggled to find time in between juggling family demands or dealing with health issues.
This seems to align with a report from McKinsey looking at the challenges African Americans face with automated displacement and job retraining. Among the ideas, the report notes that greater access to skill-building opportunities outside of schools may improve minority resilience to automation and unemployment. Indeed, some large employers have chosen to drop school-based hiring requirements (such as a college degree), but those requirements are likely to be replaced by the need for a portfolio or job experience.
Even for those who have freshly graduated from a good vocational school and land a job, they may earn little more than $20/hour — and that’s after many unpaid hours of applying to jobs and networking. So, I was not surprised when I talked to one student at an established technology school who was doing ridesharing gigs on the side to supplement his income.
That is, behind the statistics of successful school graduates, there are people struggling with lower-pay junior positions. Gig work can be a supplement to boost wages on the path to more full-time work and senior positions.
And, for those who struggle to get a full-time job, freelance opportunities are a common way to get paid job experience. I analyzed a large economic dataset and found that people who held both lower-skill and high-skill jobs in the same period were more likely to show upward mobility.
Freelancing can be especially important for disadvantaged groups who may experience discrimination in the hiring process or do not have personal networks into job opportunities through family and friend connections.
The vast majority of training happens on the job. The more opportunities people have to get job experience, the easier it may be for them to exit the recession at least as well off as they entered it.
