Industry/Workplace Data & Trends

The positions or viewpoints in the resources collected here reflect their authors and source organizations. They do not represent the Resource Center for CareerTech Advancement, the Oklahoma Department of Career and Technology Education, or any employee of the state agency. No endorsement of organizations or viewpoints is implied by inclusion in this collection or on this web page.

Resources in many topics are also available on our Resource Profiles page.

• What’s Trending in Jobs and Skills - Understanding economic trends in the broadest terms—which industries are expanding, which are on the downswing—can be as straightforward as keeping up with the business headlines. But it’s not quite as easy to get a similar grasp of the job market: not merely which jobs are growing and which are disappearing, but which skills are increasingly in demand—and which are becoming obsolete. This September 2019 report examines job market trends as reflected in millions of online job postings in the US.

• Principles for Growing and Sustaining the Nation’s Cybersecurity Workforce - The U.S. currently has a cyber workforce shortage of 300,000 individuals and the trend line predicts an increasing gap. Aspen Cybersecurity Group offers a mix of principles, partnerships, and specific steps employers can take to close the skills gap.

• What’s Really Behind the Employment Skills Gap - This 2018 resource from recruitment platform BountyJobs looks at both sides of the skills gap issue: that a skills gap is a large part of the equation in this tight employment market, and that a skills gap is an excuse for employers to use when they are not successfully making ideal hires.

• Bridging the Skills Gap 2018 - An analysis of job ads and resumes and how they contribute to employer-jobseeker friction, from a study conducted by LiveCareer in conjunction with TIRO Communications.

• The Digital Talent Gap - In this 2017 paper, the authors (1) identify key trends and changes in the digital talent gap arena and pinpoint the digital skills and digital roles in greatest demand; (2) assess the  key challenges that are preventing organizations from bridging the talent gap by exploring employees’ views; (3) outline the best practices we can learn from leaders in the digital talent arena; and (4) recommend strategies to more effectively recruit, develop, and retain digital talent.

• Special Edition Skills Gap Report - How to train the 21st century workforce. A 2017 report from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation.

• Bridging the Skills Gap with Workforce Development Strategies - Strategies that organizations can employ to effectively bridge an identified skills gap.

• 21 More Jobs of the Future - Twenty-one jobs that are both plausible and futuristic – and above all represent important work that humans will continue to need to do.

• The Hybrid Job Economy: How New Skills are Rewriting the DNA of the Job Market - Millions of jobs will be created or destroyed by technological change over the next decade. Yet the most profound — and underappreciated — trend in today’s labor market is how technology is mutating jobs into new, unexpected hybrid jobs. From 2019.

• Creating Entrepreneurship Pathways for Opportunity Youth - Opportunity youth, the 4.6 million young people who are neither in work nor in school, often encounter significant barriers to education and employment, and entrepreneurship programs may offer solutions to the challenges they face. Entrepreneurship programs have the potential to help these youth gain the business skills and experience needed to succeed in the working world – whether as entrepreneurs or employees – while also providing wraparound services that help them thrive in their daily lives. This January 2019 report explores the potential for using entrepreneurship to engage and create pathways for opportunity youth, by examining existing entrepreneurship programs and sharing emerging models for creating and adapting entrepreneurship programming targeted to the specific needs and aspirations of opportunity youth.

• Automation and Artificial Intelligence: How machines are affecting people and places - This report develops both backward and forward-looking analyses of the impacts of automation over the years 1980 to 2016 and 2016 to 2030 to assess past and upcoming trends as they affect both people and communities in the United States. January 2019.

• Opportunity Industries: Exploring the industries that concentrate good and promising jobs in metropolitan America - This December 2018 report shows that the industrial structure and growth of metropolitan economies—in particular, whether they provide sufficient numbers of jobs in opportunity industries—matters greatly for workers’ ability to get ahead economically. It examines the presence of occupations and industries in the nation’s 100 largest metropolitan areas that either currently or over time provide workers access to stable middle-class wages and benefits, particularly for the 38 million prime-age workers without a bachelor’s degree.

• Realizing 2030: A survey of future technologies and digital transformation - In 2017, Dell Technologies surveyed 3,800 business leaders from around the world to uncover their forecasts for the next decade. The research revealed a divided vision of the future but common ground on the need to transform and how.
  

• Swipe Right: Candidate Technology Preferences During the Job Search - Employers use technology to engage candidates, build talent communities, and interview prospects. What is not widely known is how candidate preferences about technology can be leveraged by employers. How can companies use technology to ensure a competitive advantage in today’s war for talent? A 2017 white paper from ManpowerGroup Solutions.

• The Apprenticeship Wage and Participation Gap - The analysis in this July 2018 issue brief examines apprenticeship programs over the past decade—from fiscal year 2008 through 2017—to observe gaps in participation and wages among women and people of color. From the Center for American Progress.

• Is technology missing an X chromosome? - The gender gap is getting wider, and it remains a chasm in the STEM disciplines. Here’s how we can start to shrink that gap. An April 2018 article from Ernst & Young Global Limited.

• Veterans in the Workplace: Understanding the Challenges and Creating Long-term Opportunities for Veteran Employees - Veterans face unique challenges as they transition to their first civilian jobs. For most veterans, their only work experience is the military and that service, unlike a civilian job, is highly structured with a very linear career progression. Many veterans don't know what they don't know about the civilian workforce. Identifying and quantifying these challenges are critical to the long-term success of veterans and the businesses that hire them. Armed with the right information, businesses can better recruit, hire, and retain veterans in their workforce.

• Economic Systems Profiles - 13 ecosystem reports from the Oklahoma Department of Commerce that contain specific data, including: age/sex comparisons, significant minority populations (when necessary), education gap for jobs, educational centers in the ecosystem, commuting patterns, employment numbers, wage data, and significant industry data.

• Oklahoma Employer Data - Oklahoma Department of Commerce data about Fortune 500 companies, new growth and expansions, the state’s largest employers, and foreign-owned companies.

• Labor Market Statistics—Publications - Special reports, state rankings, and other publications of the Oklahoma Employment Security Commission.

• IBM Institute for Business Value - Fact-based strategic insights on critical public and private sector issues. Thought leadership publications to download include Internet of threats, The next industrial revolution in oil and gas, What do Gen Z shoppers really want?, Uniquely Generation Z, and Sharpening your digital edge

• Experiments into Policies that Might Incentivize Employers to Hire Ex-Offenders - This 2018 publication of the RAND Corporation found several potentially successful methods to incentivize employers to hire ex-offenders.

• Blueprint for the 21st Century - The Blueprint for the 21st Century, or Jobs Blueprint, proposes a series of initiatives aimed at addressing serious economic problems that the market has failed to: the insufficient demand for the labor of workers without four-year college degrees, the stagnation of wages and decline of bargaining power of those workers, and the insufficient physical and human capital investments that America needs as a 21st century economy.

• Measuring American gig workers is difficult, but essential - Getting an accurate reading on how rapidly the gig economy is evolving in the U.S. is difficult, but essential. The size of the gig economy reveals a lot about the forces affecting the welfare of American workers. In particular, understanding the difference between who chooses to be a gig worker and who is forced to work multiple jobs with no benefits out of necessity will help labor market experts (and employers) design policies for improving job quality and job security while maintaining flexibility. July 2018.

• Retail’s Next Frontier - A July 2018 whitepaper from Cognizant that discusses strategic imperatives and recommendations to established retailers seeking to convert challenge into opportunity amid growing concern that they should merely concede victory to digitally-native companies.

• Digital Outlook Report: How Enterprises are Steering Through Digital Disruption - This 2018 report from Infosys investigate the use of digital technologies and key trends in nine industries and covers digital technology adoption, the promised land of digital technology use and the hurdles organizations face to get there, and the biggest disruptive digital trends within the next three years and why organizations see them as vital to future success.

• Upskilling the Immigrant Workforce to Meet Employer Demand for Skilled Workers - This July 2018 report examines the size and characteristics of the immigrant workforce and explores key strategies that organizations in three cities are using to support training this population.

• Highly digital jobs are less likely to be automated - This June 2018 report shows that In sum, workers with superior digital skills tend not only to earn higher wages, but they also appear less exposed to automation-driven displacement.

• The Future of Banking - A June, 2018 collection of articles on key topics in the future of banking.

• Don't predict the future of work; prepare for it - Imagine telling a farmer in 1900, that the number of people working in agriculture in the U.S. would decrease from 40 percent to 2 percent in the next 100 years. Professor David Autor posed this hypothetical scenario during a TED talk in 2016. What kind of jobs are those people going to do? Will there be enough food? This April 2018 article says the future of work is preparing people to work under ambiguity, be agile, and use technology to augment rather than replace.

• Smart Home Infographic - How the smart home will develop by 2022, from April 2018.

• Three Decades of Consolidation in U.S. Agriculture - A March 2018 report of the USDA Economic Research Service.

• Hiring As An Experiment: Reframing the Skills Shortage - A February 2018 working paper from the University of Wisconsin-Madison that argues an experimental approach to address skills shortages.

• U.S. Manufacturing in International Perspective - A February 2018 report of the Congressional Research Service.

• Workforce of the future: The competing forces shaping 2030 - We are living through a fundamental transformation in the way we work. Automation and 'thinking machines' are replacing human tasks, changing the skills that organizations are looking for in their people. But what will the future look like? This 2018 study looks at four possible Worlds of Work for 2030 to help you kick-start your thinking.

• Towards a Reskilling Revolution - This January 2018 report from the World Economic Forum “provides a valuable new tool that will help individual workers, companies, and governments to prioritize their actions and investments.”

• Are You Ready to be Digital? - A 2018 infographic from Oracle.

• Will 3D Printing Remodel the Construction Industry? - A report from January, 2018 examines the likely role of 3D printing in the future of the construction industry.

• The Quant Crunch: How the Demand for Data Science Skills is Disrupting the Job Market - In this 2017 report, Burning Glass Technologies made a comprehensive study of the marketplace for data science and analytics skills. They found the data science job market is growing rapidly, and that the demand is having a particularly strong impact in decision-making roles.

• Rebooting Jobs: How Computer Science Skills Spread in the Job Market - This November 2017 report examines how computer science skills are in demand for jobs where a computer science degree is not a requirement.

• America’s Next Manufacturing Workforce - This 2017 report summarizes a sampling of replicable and scalable promising practices being pursued to ensure that America builds an educated, skilled, and ready workforce.

• Digitalization and the American Workforce - A November 2017 report of the Brookings Institution that “presents a detailed analysis of changes in the digital content of 545 occupations covering 90 percent of the U.S. workforce in all industries since 2001. The analysis categorizes U.S. occupations into jobs that require high, medium or low digital skills and tracks the impacts of rapid change.”

• The U.S. Science and Engineering Workforce: Recent, Current, and Projected Employment, Wages, and Unemployment - A November 2017 report of the Congressional Research Service.

• The Narrow Ladder: The Value of Industry Certifications in the Job Market - In this October 2017 report, Burning Glass Technologies uses job posting data to examine the market value of industry certifications. Using its database of more than 700 million historical job postings, they are able to track how often employers explicitly ask for these credentials, and in what context.

• Selected Charts from Ag and Food Statistics - This collection of 34 charts and maps presents examples of key statistics on the farm sector, food spending and prices, food security, rural communities, agricultural production and trade, the interaction of agriculture and natural resources, and more, from October 2017.

• Shifting Times: The Evolution of the American Workplace - From the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, Fourth Quarter 2017: “In this article, we explore…shifts in the American labor force and workplace. We show that the identity, education and occupations of the average American worker have all been changing. We also show that there are big changes in who does what, especially in the higher-skilled and higher-paying occupations.”
  

• The Digital Edge: Middle-Skill Workers and Careers - This September 2017 report from Burning Glass Technologies addresses the digital skills employers demand from workers, and how to close the digital skills gap.

• Innovation in the Rural Nonfarm Economy: Its Effect on Job and Earnings Growth, 2010-2014 - A September 2017 report of the USDA Economic Research Service.

• The Soft Skills Job Seekers Need Now - This research uncovers the specific types of soft skills employers are looking for, how they evaluate these kinds of skills in a potential employee and how your soft skills affect your ability to advance your career. August 2017.

• Aerospace Manufacturing Attractiveness Rankings - A geographic assessment for aerospace manufacturing investment from PricewaterhouseCoopers, September 2018.

• The Next Era of Human|Machine Partnerships - Dell Technologies partnered with Institute for the Future to explore the emerging technologies shaping the future of the human experience over the next decade, and the specific impacts and implications they will have on society and work. July, 2017.

• Strategies for Strengthening the Technical Workforce - In this 2017 report from the Consortium for Policy Research in Education, the authors seek to help policymakers develop strategies to meet workforce challenges. They examine research findings on strengthening skills development through various types of career and technical education, and strategies to increase access to this type of programming.

• Military Spouses in the Workplace - This June 2017 report presents findings from a Hiring Our Heroes survey of spouses of active duty military service members and recent veterans.

• The great re-make: Manufacturing for modern times - What does “great” operational excellence look like and how do we get there? A June 2017 compendium of articles from McKinsey & Company.

• 21st Century U.S. Energy Sources: A Primer - A May 2017 report of the Congressional Research Service.

• Job Creation in the Manufacturing Revival - A May 2017 report of the Congressional Research Service.

• The Rising Economic Power of Quality: How Quality Ensures Growth and Enhances Profitability - Quality may be the essential ingredient that transforms today’s uncertainty into profitability. Entire industries are being disrupted. Rapid time to market is critical to competitiveness, and there is enormous pressure to design, build and ship products at blazing speeds. Thriving in this era of change requires infusing quality thinking into every process across every part of the enterprise. Organizations succeeding in their markets have learned to deliver world-class quality. They harness the enormous economic potential of quality management to attain leadership of their respective markets. May 2017.

• Jobs of the Future: A Guide to Getting - and Staying - Employed Over the Next 10 Years - Work is changing due to automation and AI, but it’s not going away. Based on the major macroeconomic, political, demographic, societal, cultural, business and technology trends observable today, this 2017 report proposes 21 new jobs that will emerge over the next 10 years and will become cornerstones of the future of work.

• Drones Go to Work - Companies have only scratched the surface of what airborne drones can do. Over the next two decades, businesses will put industrial drones to work monitoring facilities, tracking shipments, and, perhaps even delivering groceries to your doorstep. Now is the time for companies to learn about drone capabilities and start building drone strategies.

• Robots and Jobs: Evidence from U.S. Labor Markets - A March 2017 working paper of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

• The AI Paradox: How Robots Will Make Work More Human - Cisco teamed with Oxford Economics to examine the impact technology will have on the labor market as existing job tasks are automated. By modeling the shifts in the nature of work across 800+ jobs, they were able to determine which industries are most vulnerable to automation and where new employment  opportunities will arise. From January 2017.

• Developing a Skilled Workforce for the Oil and Natural Gas Industry - A 2017 report from the RAND Corporation.

• What Are Companies Doing to Retain as Well as Develop People of Color and Women? - In this October 2017 paper from Cornell University, the authors identify key considerations for developing women and minorities as well as possible ways for building more inclusive mindsets.

• Can We Reduce Bias in the Recruiting Process and Diversify Pools of Candidates by Using Different Types of Words in Job Descriptions? - In this 2016 paper from Cornell University, the authors identified the beneficial use of gender fair language and flexible and inclusive wording in job advertisement and postings.

• Engagement in the Age of the Customer - This 2016 paper from Forbes and Pitney Bowes discusses two strategies: building a 360-degree view of the customer (also known as single customer view) and Interactive Personalized Videos.

• Customer Journey Mapping Toolkit - In this toolkit, Hanover Research breaks down the research tools needed to accurately map and measure each stage of the customer journey.

• Lessons from the Frontlines of the Agtech Revolution - Quietly, and to a surprising degree, new technologies are revolutionizing agriculture. This October 2016 report discusses a study of technological advancements and the prospect that they will lead to the next green revolution have promoted a wave of startup activity in agriculture technology (agtech).

• The Art and Science of Shipping: How the Increasingly Complex World of Shipping Is Being Simplified - In this April 2016 report, Forbes Insights outlines a series of common shipping sender and receiver profiles, as identified by Pitney Bowes, along with real-world examples of how both the art and the science of shipping has introduced simplicity into their lives.

• What Does the Gig Economy Mean for Workers? - A February 2016 report of the Congressional Research Service.

• Future Skills: Update + Literature Review - Amid reports of robotic factories and algorithmic assistants replacing humans on the job, what will work or jobs look like in the future? Coupled with the changing landscape where working, learning, and living are merging, what skills will we need to be successful and productive contributors to society? This is the 2016 update of the original 2011 report.

• Blurring Lines: How Business and Technology Skills Are Merging to Create High Opportunity Hybrid Jobs - This 2015 report co-authored by General Assembly and Burning Glass Technologies discusses a new kind of hybrid job blending technology with marketing.

• 3D Printing: Opportunities, Challenges, and Policy Implications of Additive Manufacturing - A June 2015 report of the U.S. Government Accountability Office.

• Industry 4.0: The Future of Productivity and Growth in Manufacturing Industries - Technological advances have driven dramatic increases in industrial productivity since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Now we are in the midst of a fourth wave of technological advancement: the rise of new digital industrial technology known as Industry 4.0. This April 2015 report describes the nine technology trends that are the building blocks of Industry 4.0 and explores their potential technical and economic benefits for manufacturers and production equipment suppliers.

• Contingent Workforce: Size, Characteristics, Earnings, and Benefits - An April 2015 report of the U.S. Government Accountability Office.

• Current and Future Availability of Aviation Engineering and Maintenance Professionals - A February 2014 report of the U.S. Government Accountability Office.

• Seeds of Disruption: How Technology is Remaking the Future of Food - In 2013, IFTF’s food futures research program undertook a yearlong exploration into the ways that emerging technologies and sciences are reshaping the global food web.