The recent wave of climate action plans, including the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and California’s ban on gas-powered cars, is likely to accelerate the automotive industry’s transition to electric vehicles (EVs). This week, we take a look at current trends in EV engineering jobs to better understand traditional automakers’ green transition. The job postings of traditional car manufacturers for engineers reveal that the demand for positions with specialization in electric vehicles has increased considerably.
The US labor market has changed over the last decade, and so have universities’ curricula and students’ major choices. But exactly how much has the college major landscape changed over the past decade? The indisputable new superstar of college majors is Computer Science. Enrollment in CS has increased by 140% over the past decade! The other majors that increased in popularity were also vocational in nature: Nursing, Business, and Engineering. All other majors have seen decreases in enrollment, with the biggest losses in Sociology, Literature, and History.
The onset of the pandemic led to a huge wave of layoffs. This surge has prompted many businesses and employees to create online spreadsheets with resumes of laid-off colleagues in anticipation of quickly finding them other jobs. As layoffs are becoming widespread again, we have partnered with Business Insider to leverage individual data obtained from such web sources to uncover who gets laid off.
The telehealth industry began to thrive during the pandemic and continues to deliver convenient care to patients. This boosted growth may persist—McKinsey estimates that up to $250 billion of current US healthcare could be done virtually. This week, we look at the post-pandemic telehealth boom and why telehealth positions are becoming more attractive. Telehealth companies have grown significantly faster in size than their traditional peers in recent years.
Digital freelance platforms have been promising to revolutionize labor markets for years by enabling anyone to offer their talent flexibly. The promise seems to finally be coming true: Data from a leading freelancing platform shows that the number of new freelance accounts skyrocketed in the last year, as millions of employees were quitting and changing jobs during the Great Resignation.
Many companies provide their employees with benefits, perks, and flexibility to foster employee satisfaction. In our recent collaboration with USNews, we looked at a combination of less tangible factors like feelings of fulfillment at work and a sense of community, alongside material factors like good compensation, to identify Nvidia, KLA, Zoom, Atlassian, Enphase, and Qualcomm as the companies with the happiest employees. But how about the runner-ups? Here are the full rankings of companies according to these metrics.
Universities play a significant role in shaping the skills of the local workforce. This week, we focus on the largest state universities and uncover their skill specialties. We also assess the role that state universities play in supplying the skills required in the local job market. The map below shows the skill specialty of the largest state university system by enrollment. For a skill to be a university system’s specialty, it has to be overrepresented in the profiles of graduates from the university system, relative to graduates from other universities.
Summer travel is booming this year, but it’s also been extremely chaotic. Constant flight delays, cancellations, and lost luggage are making post-lockdown travel a nightmare. But new data from the Transportation Department show that airlines, not bad weather, are the ones to blame for recent disruptions. So what happened to airlines in recent years that could have caused this chaos? While the industry started to recover in late 2020, the current headcounts in the US are nowhere near the pre-pandemic level.
In October 2021, Facebook announced its rebranding to Meta to reflect its focus on building the “metaverse” – an immersive virtual environment that could redefine social interactions online. Many believe the metaverse is the next big thing in tech. In collaboration with Bloomberg, we took a look at the recent hiring trend in the world of metaverse to see which companies have been riding the recent hype.
Employee morale has taken a significant hit since the onset of the pandemic. In fact, in a previous newsletter, we found that the greatest predictor of employee satisfaction was Workplace Culture, followed by Career Opportunities and Work-Life Balance. But instead of looking at companies, this week we look at what cities have the most satisfied workforces.
When considering a job offer, applicants negotiate perks, work hours, start date, health or retirement benefits. Perhaps most importantly, there is the common practice of negotiating a higher salary. But how much room do people really have when negotiating their salary? Can they get 5% above the offer? Or even 50% more? To explore this question, we examine the differences between offered salaries (proxied by the salaries announced on job postings) and the actual salaries that employees receive (salaries that employees report on job review websites during or after employment).
As companies increasingly rely on social media to engage with customers, they have turned to social media managers to promote their products, design campaigns, and manage branding. This week, we take a look at the rise of the social media manager role and chronicle how the demographics and activities of this profession are evolving. While the title was less common in 2010, the number of individuals whose jobs focus on managing their company’s digital presence has steadily grown – by April 2022, there were over 64,000 social media managers in the United States.
Taking a company public can be a long and arduous process. Yet an increasing number of companies have opted to expedite this by using Special Purpose Acquisition Companies (SPACs). SPACs can take only a few months to execute, instead of the usual 12-18 of an IPO. And they have soared in popularity over the last few years, with their share in the total number of IPOs increasing from almost a quarter in 2019 to over half in 2021. But what effects does this speed have on a company’s workforce, specifically around growth and employee well being?
It’s not every day that a pop star comments on the state of labor markets. But Beyoncé does just that with her new song, Break My Soul, an anthem of the Great Resignation. Due to this remarkable, and timely new piece, we thought it would be appropriate to pay homage to Queen Bee by providing an annotation of her latest hit, to help fans listen to this track the way it was meant to be heard: with supporting data, charts, and analysis.
Big names in tech like Peloton, Netflix, and Coinbase, who benefitted from a rise in demand during the pandemic, have recently announced major layoffs. Is this a mere blip or should we be expecting a wave of layoffs on the horizon? By using the latest data from the WARN Act, which requires companies to provide notice of at least 60 days to the DOL in case of a large layoff (50 employees or more), we can see what lay-offs are coming soon.
As Venture Capitalists’ billions are taking over the City of London, France has followed suit, ramping up its open-border immigration policy for workers at tech start-ups. Competition is fierce for becoming the Silicon Valley of Europe: From large cities like Berlin and Paris to smaller ones like Vilnius and Tel Aviv, who is winning the race to become the center for churning out unicorns?
Choosing the location for a company's headquarters can be critical to a company's success. Amazon spent years deliberating over their coveted new headquarters location. In the end, Amazon landed on the DC and NYC metro areas, where they would be able to “attract world-class talent.” This week, we analyze the geographic distribution of talent in Los Angeles (a highly diverse city) at the zip-code level and use it to showcase why skill concentrations have meaningful implications for businesses.
Fintech companies like Coinbase, Robinhood and Revolut have been snatching talent from Wall Street for years, but recently, this trend has hit a record high. In a collaboration with Bloomberg this week, we look at the talent flows from major banks to fintech companies over the last few years to understand what is driving this trend. Inflows to Fintech from Wall Street accelerated sharply in 2021, after dipping at the onset of the pandemic.
Since work-from-home became more than a short-term pandemic solution, companies have started offering remote positions in an attempt to attract and retain talent. A popular opinion has even emerged that it has become much harder to fill in-person positions. However, when we investigate this claim, we see that while that was previously true, in-person jobs are now increasingly easier to fill.
College graduation season is here. But starting your career can be tricky. There are the coveted big corporate jobs, which can provide structure and stability, and then there are the new dynamic startups, which can provide fast growth. Does starting at a fast-growing startup put you at an advantage for your career? First, when we compare the salary growth of people who started their careers at fast-growing startups with that of slower-growing startups, we find that while they were initially paid less, their salaries overtook their peers after just three years, and continued to grow at a faster pace thereafter.
