While change has always driven our economy, today it feels as if, more than ever before, business and workers are navigating multiple economic shifts at once with less time to adjust before the next one arrives. And instead of one big economic shift – like the 2008 recession or impacts of Covid-19 – these shifts are happening incrementally. Technology is changing how work gets done task by task. AI is reshaping jobs and the skills they require. Business models and markets are shifting. Skills demands are evolving as new roles expand to respond to this change. Demographic and economic forces are reshaping who works, where, and in what jobs. That means workers and businesses are in a constant state of preparing for what happens. But not every worker or business has the same resources or capacity to do that.
Too often, workers and businesses don’t get the support they need until a problem is already a crisis: a worker loses a job, a family loses income, a business can’t find the skills it needs and loses a revenue source, or a company is struggling with costs associated with adding new technology and chooses not to move forward with investments.
By then, choices have narrowed.
Research suggests acting earlier matters. Recent Swedish research on advance notice before layoffs found that workers who received more notice spent less time out of work and were hired into higher paid roles, when compared to workers without that advanced notice. From a business perspective, Federal Reserve Governor Barr opened a recent small business focused event summarizing findings from several different reports – small and mid-size companies’ restricted access to capital and forward-facing predictions, when compared with large companies, holds back workers’ access to good jobs and is directly related to communities and U.S. economic growth.
We can’t prevent every job loss or every economic disruption. But early action gives workers and businesses more choices about what comes next.
A worker who is still employed can learn while earning, build on the skills and experience they already have, explore an adjacent role, or prepare financially for a transition. Those options narrow considerably once someone loses their job. It becomes harder to explore a new role or make arrangements – like asking family or friends to help with childcare – so a parent can take an evening course at a local community college.
Training isn’t much of an option if someone can’t afford to take time away from work, can’t find affordable childcare, or if it means risking losing income.
Businesses also need time and resources to prepare for change. A healthy business can invest in technology, redesign jobs, develop workers, or pursue a new market. Once a business is struggling or in crisis, its choices look very different.
That challenge is particularly acute for small or midsized businesses, which can’t be expected to maintain the same level of strategic, training, and workforce planning capacity – or the same ability to adopt new technology – as a large corporation. Federal Reserve Governor Barr discussed this in his recent comments, explaining that smaller firms face greater challenges than larger firms in accessing and retaining skilled workers, in part because of less access to capital, more specialized skill needs and less institutional capacity to address these challenges in-house.
Public policy has a role to play here because workers, businesses, and institutions can’t prepare for change on their own. Individual workers can’t be expected know on their own how their regional economy is changing, which occupations are growing or shrinking, and what skills will be in demand and what training program will yield the best return on their investment of time and money. Small businesses can’t efficiently build every kind of expertise it may need to anticipate change. One firm may not have visibility in to how technology is changing the work of other upstream companies. And education and training providers don’t have the business insight about where local industries are heading.
These are shared challenges that require some shared capacity. Public policy can build that capacity by bringing together the information, expertise, and resources that businesses, workers, and education and training providers need to prepare for change.
Sometimes adaptation will mean helping a business change while developing the people already working there. Sometimes it will mean helping a worker carry years of skills and experience to move into a different company or occupation.
Adaptation should not mean asking workers to absorb the bulk of the risk of economic change. Adaptation should give them more agency over what comes next.
This is part of the vision we’re building through our New Promise of Work campaign: workforce policy that helps people and businesses prepare and adapt for coming change, rather than waiting for a disruption to force their hand.
What would that kind of adaptation infrastructure look like?
Anticipate. Give businesses, workers, and communities better information about what is changing – and help them translate broad economic trends into what those changes really mean for jobs, skills, and business decisions where they live.
Prepare. Give workers the time, resources, and stability to build on the skills they already have. Give small and midsized businesses access to the expertise and resources they need to change their businesses and develop their people before they are in crisis.
Navigate. Make it easier for businesses and workers to move toward what comes next without having to figure out each of the bureaucratic boundaries between workforce development, economic development, education, and human services. They should be able to get the information, training, resources, and support they need without having to figure out which system or program handles it.
Doing this doesn’t require government to predict which technologies take hold or how they will reshape people’s jobs, or which jobs will grow or decline. And it doesn’t necessarily require another agency or program. Communities can build on the institutions, partnerships, and resources they already have, so the approach may look different from one place to another.
It does require changing when we act and what we expect workforce policy to accomplish.
Workers have experience to build on, families and financial obligations to consider, and lives built around work. Businesses, especially small businesses, have investments, employees, and communities depending on them. Neither of them should have to wait for a crisis before they have the support to prepare for what’s next. If change is constant, preparing for it must become constant too.
