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For decades, the portion of prime-age men (ages 25 to 54) in the US labor force has been in decline. More recently, the labor force participation rate of prime-age women has stagnated and also declined. This paper addresses the consequences of, and reasons for, these declines, especially among men. Explanations for these trends tend to focus either on the demand for workers or the supply of labor. In this paper the authors argue that demand and supply factors do not operate in isolation. For example, many workers lose their jobs because of outsourcing or automation but then are unable to find work again due to their own lack of skills or ambition. Others are unable to find work in the first place because they attempted to enter the labor market without the necessary education, with a criminal background, or during a recession. There are infinite variations and the conclusion is that the three most prominent causes are a general lack of the right education and skills, too many years of slack labor markets, and high rates of incarceration. Understanding how these forces interact with one another provides a more complex, but more complete sense of why many prime-age adults are not working. Based on this knowledge, improving the situation will require a major investment in education and training (or retraining) linked to jobs in growing sectors of the economy, maintaining full employment, and criminal justice reform including re-entry programs for ex-offenders.

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VET (vocational education and training) is a highly complex, multidimensional worldwide phenomenon with diverse structures. Additionally, very different actors define the functions of a national (or even a regional) VET system. The paper contributes to a better understanding of the policy frameworks and current states of such systems. Therefore, we focus on selected VET systems in order to understand their specifics and thus, their market conditions. A qualitative approach is used to answer the research question regarding which conditions create or support market-based opportunities for the provision of commercial vocational training services. We find that the liberalism and deregulation of the VET sectors, as well as the marketisation of VET practices, lead to incentives to internationalise VET offers. Thinking in terms of skills, the kind of education system does not play a role. This is the case in liberal market-driven VET approaches (here, the UK, the USA and Australia) and is mirrored in the micro-analysis categories of curricula, learning location, content, and learning process.

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There is growing concern about the labour force challenges facing the voluntary and non-profit sector. There are more signs that organizations are less and less able to recruit the talent they need in today’s tightening labour market and are also experiencing difficulty retaining employees. This study by the HR Council for the Voluntary & Non-profit Sector takes a comprehensive look at paid employment in the sector in order to create the first-ever labour force strategy for the sector. The intent of this first report is to provide an introduction to the Labour Force Study and to provide a framework for understanding the sector’s labour force as well as the trends and demands that contribute to the sector’s labour force challenges. This report has been organized into four sections: Section 1 defines and classifies the sector; Section 2 describes what is meant by a labour market; Section 3 outlines what is already known about paid employment in the sector; [and] Section 4 looks at the labour market trends affecting the sector, the changing demands placed on organizations and emerging strategies to strengthen the sector and its labour force.

Published National Adult Literacy Database (NALD) abstract reprinted by permission. Show less

The contribution of immigration to the Canadian economy and society has been of continued importance in recent decades, due to being the main driver of population growth and their importance on the labour market. Given that Canada and other countries of the OECD are competing for skilled workers, measuring the socio-economic integration of immigrants into Canada is essential. Immigrants with postsecondary educational qualifications can help fill the labour demand in Canada, especially if their qualifications are readily recognized by the labour market. In this context, exploring the labour market outcomes and Canadian postsecondary educational attainment of immigrants is critical to understanding the various facets of their socio-economic integration.

Since the late 1990s, federal and provincial governments have shifted immigration policies toward immigrants with postsecondary qualifications, as part of the 'economic' category of immigrants. Despite this shift, the potential difficulty of qualified landed immigrants to transfer their educational qualification to the Canadian labour market continues to exist and may represent a barrier to accessing the labour market for some, and thus impact the supply of skilled workers.

This study explores in detail the educational attainment from Canadian public institutions and employment income of immigrants from the 'economic immigrant' programs who were granted permanent residency based on their ability to contribute to the Canadian economy. The analysis compares the skilled immigrants who returned to postsecondary education after admission to Canada to those who did not return to postsecondary education and explores their potential difficulty to transfer their educational qualifications onto the Canadian labour market. The analysis uses the Longitudinal Immigration Database (IMDB) integrated with the Postsecondary Student Information System (PSIS) and the T1 Family File (T1FF) through the Education and Labour Market Longitudinal Platform (ELMLP). The study population is limited to immigrants admitted to Canada as permanent residents in 2010 who were at the core working age of 25 to 54 years old at the time of admission, who had not studied in Canada prior to their 2010 admission and who filed taxes in Canada at least once between 2011 and 2019.

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The number of people in prison beginning an apprenticeship has more than tripled between 2000 and 2016. Apprenticeship programs provide people in prison with a meaningful training experience that is potentially valuable after release. This brief draws on interviews and data analysis to explore how registered apprenticeship programs operate in federal and state correctional institutions. Our findings suggest that prisons can improve their apprenticeship offerings by expanding apprenticeable occupations, raising wages, reducing disruptive transfers, ensuring they are relevant to the labor market, and engaging employers after reentry.

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If recent history serves as an example, the labor market will continue to undergo important and increasingly rapid changes in its demand for particular occupations and skills. Therefore, developing systems that can identify skills required in the market and providing tools for people to successfully navigate a changing work environment is necessary. New technologies provide us with new sources of information via access to big data. They can function as 'radars' to detect, almost in real time, how the demand for skills is changing and pick up new skills as they emerge. These new technologies are also leading to the creation of tools that can support workers looking to change jobs. This study sheds light on the changes that labor markets in Latin America and the Caribbean are undergoing in terms of their demand for particular occupations and skills. It also demonstrates the potential of a tool that, by leveraging new sources of labor market data, can help individuals and policy makers navigate the labor market and provide the region's workers with a means to detect skills that can help them move from declining occupations to emerging ones.

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While [Latin America and the Caribbean] LAC continues its progress towards becoming a middle-class region, in 2013 poverty reduction was slower than in previous years. The bottom 40 per cent of the population has also seen decelerating income growth since the 2008-2009 global financial crisis. Driving the lower gains in shared prosperity and poverty reduction is the region's slowing economic growth. Similarly, after more than a decade of steady decline, inequality has been stagnant since 2010 and remains high. Given the crucial role of labor earnings in poverty and inequality reduction, this report analyzes more deeply LAC's labor markets and its implications for the region's social gains going forward. It shows that the region's push to increase its human capital has yielded dividends; increases in the educational attainment of the labor force are evident across the region. Nonetheless, the substantial growth in wages observed during the last decade was not accompanied by significant changes in the labor market: agriculture and low-productivity, informal service employment continued to be key sources of income for the poor in LAC. Instead, most of the gains were seen in countries that benefitted from the commodity boom of the last decade. As the commodity boom fades and growth wanes, there is a risk that the social gains achieved in the century's first decade will erode.

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In this study we investigate the educational attainment of the labour force in the United States. Our data analysis, based on Bureau of Labour Statistics data in more than 700 occupations, produced two important findings. First, we observed that the Overeducation Ratio (share of employees that are overeducated), which began to rise in the United States as early as 1970, continued its positive trend in many occupations during 2002-2016. Second, our regression analysis revealed a positive correlation between the overeducation ratio and the median earnings of an occupation. Since a larger overeducation ratio implies that a larger share of adequately educated individuals are crowded out, this result suggests that the displacement of adequately educated individuals is more severe in better paying occupations. Third, we analysed the overflow of graduate degree holders into occupations that require a bachelor's degree. We observe that graduate degree holders are crowding out the bachelor's degree holders from better paying bachelor's occupations. The bachelor's degree holders, in turn, are crowding out high school graduates from better paying high school jobs.

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This paper extends the analysis of the relationship between skills proficiency and labor market outcomes well beyond the findings in the OECD report on the United States. Among the questions it examines are the following: (1) How do proficiency levels in literacy, numeracy and problem-solving vary between and within demographic, education and occupational groups? For which subgroups is the lack of basic skills proficiency most pronounced? Do we find skill shortfalls in one of the three areas even for native-born groups with postsecondary credentials or in middle-skill occupations? (2) Do weak skill proficiencies significantly limit the ability of workers from obtaining middle-skill credentials and jobs or do those holding such jobs vary widely in their proficiencies? (3) To what extent are earnings differentials related to differentials in literacy, numeracy, and problem-solving levels, even within occupations that do and do not require some postsecondary credentials? (4) To what extent does skill proficiency correlate with worker perceptions of the skill demands of jobs? How do differentials in skill use on the job differ from measures of proficiency? How do these relationships vary across occupations? The answers to these questions highlight key facts and relationships and suggest subsequent analyses of the U.S. PIAAC micro data.

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This paper analyses the impact of formal training on worker mobility. Using data from the Swiss Labour Force Survey, we find that on-the-job search activities and, to a smaller extent, actual job separations are significantly affected by both employer-provided and general training. Moreover, while the separation probability of searching workers is strongly affected by previous firm-provided training, no such effect shows up for non-searchers. This is consistent with the hypothesis that workers bear most of the cost of specific training.

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