For most junior employees, the culture in which they work is defined by their managers. We previously covered how Toxic Corporate Culture was a main driver of The Great Resignation and how Gen Z is redefining work culture as we know it today. Today, we look at whether excess management has a negative effect on company culture. And if so, what is the business impact of being a top-heavy company?
FTX’s collapse has had a domino effect on the cryptocurrency market, leading to a series of crypto-related bankruptcies. As expected, these events have had negative impacts on workers across the crypto space. However, signs of decline appeared in the crypto workforce well before the 2022 crash. Attrition from crypto companies began to increase as early as July 2021. Meanwhile, employee sentiment in crypto companies started to decrease with the dip in crypto prices in January 2022.
On January 1st, California and Washington were the latest states to introduce pay transparency laws, which require all job postings to include a pay range. In collaboration with The Economist, we look at how employers responded in New York City and Colorado when the laws were introduced, in order to understand what California and Washington can expect. To what extent do job postings now include pay ranges that are actually informative?
Over the past year and until very recently, the US labor market has been extremely tight: We saw record job switches and employers struggling to recruit talent. In such a tight market, we expect formal education requirements in job postings to decrease on average, as companies become more lenient towards the qualifications of their workers. This is indeed what we observe in our job postings data: The share of all US job postings requiring at least a bachelor’s degree reached its peak at the start of the pandemic, when most job postings were for essential workers with higher qualifications. Since then, the share of education requirements has plummeted.
As 2022 comes to a close, this week we’re revisiting the biggest workforce trends of the year. Here is a collection of our most powerful insights. The labor market was strong throughout 2022, but towards the end of the year, layoffs became a major concern especially with high-profile companies such as Amazon, Meta, and Twitter announcing large-scale layoffs. Using individual-level data, we have identified which roles are most at risk of being laid off.
Going into this year’s holiday shopping season, we face an uncertain economic climate. Consumer confidence in the US is at its lowest level since the Great Recession, with high inflation curbing holiday shoppers’ spending appetites. How has the retail sector been faring in this climate, particularly during the holidays? Job postings in retail have dropped in September, October and November relative to their levels in the same months last year. The decline came after years of growth during these months – even during the pandemic.
The rise of tech firms and big data has sparked a shift toward flexible and open source software. In a previous newsletter, we showed which companies have adopted open source software. This week, we take a look at software skill requirements for government jobs. We focus on data related jobs and assess the differences between the government and private sector. While job postings in the private sector are likely to require open source data analysis and visualization software skills, such as SQL, Python, and Tableau, less than 10% of government job postings require these skills.
Business Insider declared Portugal the new California recently, with many people moving there to work remotely at their jobs elsewhere. But Portugal is not the only country opening their borders for “digital nomads”. Many countries are now offering digital nomad visas or investing in initiatives that make them more attractive to international migration.
The bipartisan _Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act_ that went into effect earlier this year allocates $2 billion to improving cybersecurity in critical infrastructure and modernizing systems and software at federal, state, and local government agencies. While this funding has generated more demand for cybersecurity roles in the public sector, the attrition rate of government cybersecurity jobs has also been increasing significantly since 2021.
Last Tuesday, New York City enforced a pay transparency law, requiring companies to include salary ranges in job postings. We wrote a newsletter about the impact of Colorado's pay transparency law back in May, so we had thoughts about what to expect for NYC. You can read our interviews with Bloomberg and Money.com and watch our CNBC coverage.
Recent statistics from the US Government Accountability Office show that only 42% of managers are females, although females represent 48% of the US workforce. Moreover, female managers earn only 71 cents on average for every dollar earned by a male managers. Could the gender gap in management be related to how male and female managers describe their expertise? An analysis of millions of online biographies of managers reveals that men and women use very different vocabulary to describe their expertise.
Employers are still facing one of the tightest labor markets in recent history. Amid labor shortages and the Great Resignation, one question remains key: How does a company attract high quality candidates? By looking into the number of applicants per job posting, we can gain insights into what drives applicants’ interest to apply. Linking the number of applicants with companies’ employee review scores and controlling for company and occupation effects, we can rank drivers of applicants-per-posting. Company culture is the leading driver of more applications to job postings.
With labor markets remaining tight, failing to cultivate a culture of internal hiring could cause companies to miss out on a goldmine of readily available talent. In previous research, we have found that lateral career opportunities are more than twice as important as compensation in predicting employee retention. In our latest article in MIT’s Sloan Management Review, co-authored with BCG Henderson Institute’s Nithya Vaduganathan and Colleen McDonald, we investigate the extent and impact of internal lateral hiring at large US companies.
To reduce Europe’s dependency on Russian oil and gas, the European Commission recently introduced a new joint action plan for more secure and renewable energy. The announcement included policies mandating the installation of solar panels on new buildings and plans to double the deployment rate of heat pumps. But does the European labor market have enough talent to install all these solar panels and heat pumps? Job postings at renewable energy companies more than tripled shortly after the announcement. During the spike, more than 20,000 green jobs were added, before demand normalized again.
In our recent collaboration with RW3 Culture Wizard, we take a look at remote work and its implications. An analysis of employee sentiment data finds that positive reviews mentioning remote work still greatly outnumber negative reviews. Not surprisingly, the number of positive reviews with remote mentions increased dramatically at the beginning of 2020.
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.
