Vanessa Fuhrmans and Kathryn Dill:
As the labor market reorders, more Americans are making the leap from blue-collar jobs and hourly work to “new collar” roles that often involve tech skills and come with better pay and schedules.
More than a tenth of Americans in low-paying roles in warehouses, manufacturing, hospitality and other hourly positions made such a switch during the past two years, according to new research from Oliver Wyman, a management consulting firm that surveyed 80,000 workers world-wide between August 2020 and March 2022. Many of the new jobs are in software and information technology, as well as tech-related roles in logistics, finance and healthcare. New data from the Current Population Survey and LinkedIn also suggest the pandemic has helped catapult more workers into more upwardly mobile careers.
Tech job postings have boomed over the past two years as work, shopping and other aspects of daily life have gone more digital. At the same time, millions of Americans quit their jobs, with some sitting on the sidelines and others finding new ones with higher salaries. Companies have struggled to hire all the talent they need, so many have dropped prequalifications like prior work experience or a four-year college degree.
Those pandemic shifts kicked in as broader macroeconomic forces were already creating new job-market opportunities and pressures. The percentage of retirees in the U.S. population has climbed sharply over the past decade and ticked even higher in the Covid-19 era, with millions of baby boomers leaving the workforce. Declining immigration has added to shortages, particularly in tech, healthcare and other fields that depend heavily on foreign-born employees. Thousands of businesses are in the thick of a digital revolution that is requiring them to fill new roles and adapt existing ones to integrate more data and automation.