The Future of Good Jobs - White Paper of the Week
Running Series On How to Measure Job Quality
The next several White Papers of the Week will explore various approaches to categorizing and understanding good jobs.
How do we define a good job – to many regular workers, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. To labor market and workforce development analysts, the measures are often more simplified. Occupations are usually categorized en masse by their relative quality on metrics that are gathered by statistical agencies like the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Pay is often a central concern in terms of job quality and it is usually one of the metrics that is most measurable.
The White Paper of the Week this week comes from Georgetown’s Center on Education and the Workforce – “The Future of Good Jobs” – a 2024 report that looks at the future of good jobs utilizing an occupational framework. Their analysis is based on several foundational projections - they utilize occupational projections that Georgetown licensed from Lightcast – which creates longer term projections that are based on proprietary analysis of several government data sources, and these are then grounded in longer term macroeconomic projections from IHS Markit analysis. These projections were published in a 2023 report “After Everything” you can explore a technical discussion of the methodology here.
Georgetown studies good jobs using an occupational lens. They classify occupations as “promising occupations” based on their wages. This makes good sense and helps to define the question of whether someone should pursue a career in one area versus another. It does not necessarily suggest whether someone has a good job themselves.
The headline chart below shows their analysis of the current state of likelihood of ending up in a good job based on educational attainment. And as many would expect, in terms of education, the easiest way to end up in a promising occupation, or a good job, is by earning a bachelor’s degree. This is a balance of information based on the generally expected level of education for each occupation and the demand that Georgetown projected for that occupation.
In some ways though, this may both understate and overstate the number of quality jobs. What does this mean?
Focusing on occupational wage alone, doesn’t suggest whether the job is a good one relative to others within the occupation. Being among the lowest paid medical doctors in the country would not feel like a good job, but is above what is usually considered a livable wage. Intraoccupational comparison matters in considering job quality.
Focusing on wage alone ignores many of the things that drive people to go to work. Occupational wage analysis also disadvantages low paying jobs that require a significant amount of technical expertise – often community and social service jobs that require bachelor’s degrees are seen as of lower quality because of their pay. But many of the people in these fields enter because of a calling to serve people. While harder to measure, non-monetary aspects of roles are critical.
Without getting into a lot more detail, there are so many ways to measure a job’s quality:
What does a worker think of the job?
Does a job set someone up longer term?
Does the job provide power, autonomy, and other forms of control to workers, regardless of its pay level?
Job quality can be in the eye of the beholder, which is hard to capture in an occupational view, or when primarily considering wages. Yet, these broad analyses are essential. Many of these other metrics are very hard to measure. Additionally, we often do not have enough specificity to even analyze characteristics of occupations and their availability at any geographic granularity. BGI just released a paper, “Out of Sight, Out of Data” on this topic too. It is a bonus white paper of the week :)
Thanks everyone for reading. Have a great week. More soon.