This piece provides an overview of job quality challenges affecting LGBTQ+ workers, including economic need, discrimination, and barriers to career advancement. The piece also contextualizes these challenges in the current landscape of anti-LGBTQ+ policies being passed in the United States.

Recent research by UpSkill America and the Institute for Corporate Productivity (i4cp) has found that only 25% of the HR leaders who took part in a December 2023 i4cp survey perceived workforce development as a strength of their organization, and just 9% of more than 100 private and public company board directors surveyed indicated they were very confident in their company’s ability to effectively upskill its employees for the future. Read the brief to learn more about next practices in upskilling, including internal training, apprenticeship, and tuition assistance that will help any organization to be more productive and resilient for the future.

This piece provides a summary of The Case for Good Jobs: How Great Companies Bring Dignity, Pay, and Meaning to Everyone’s Work, a book talk EOP hosted with MIT Professor Zeynep Ton in 2023.

This playbook, developed by A—B Partners, is part ot the Aspen Institute Economic Opportunities Program’s Shared Success project. Shared Success is working with CDFIs across the US to help them integrate job quality into their financing and advising services. This playbook offers findings and recommendations on how best to communicate the importance of job quality to owners of small- and medium-sized businesses.

This piece is a call to action for workforce development, advocating not just for a job quality framework for the sector’s work with clients but also for the need to increase job quality for practitioners themselves.

This op-ed, originally published in the Chronicle of Philanthropy, discusses how philanthropy can help support job quality as the federal government invests in clean energy and infrastructure.

This article discusses EOP’s research and lessons learned on how philanthropy, employers, practitioners and policymakers can support good jobs for young adults.

Apprenticeships and structured work-and-learn programs, once focused primarily on younger people in particular careers, are valid options for adults and those with adult responsibilities who want or need to work while gaining their education. A new generation of these models is emerging, focusing more deeply on expanding talent pipelines, creating pathways into different industries, and offering the benefits of apprenticeship and work-and-learn models to populations that have previously been marginalized from both work and learning. This brief describes several company-led models, reaching new populations and creating meaningful opportunities for both learning workers and businesses to succeed.

Aon’s apprenticeship program has drawn widespread attention for a reason. It works. Since its inception in the US in 2017, the firm has supported nearly 300 apprentices. Within the Chicagoland cohorts, Aon reports an apprenticeship completion rate of more than 80%. Successful completion requires that students meet performance standards for both work-based learning and academic program requirements. The program is intentionally inclusive, supporting apprentices of color, women, and first-generation students as they move into good jobs. Students graduate from their programs debt-free, as Aon covers all costs of attendance at partner colleges. Aon also pays salary and benefits for apprentices, with starting salaries of $42,000-46,000 depending on location. Upon completion of the program, apprentice graduates are offered full-time employment and work in many departments, including insurance, IT, and human resources, and enter those roles as experienced, valued colleagues who earn competitive wages with exceptional benefits packages.

This brief, featuring McDonald’s Archways to Opportunity, Amazon’s Career Choice, and UPS Metropolitan College programs, describes this rare but exciting program design aspect, wherein large employers work to develop talent for opportunities beyond the business.