A two-sided marketplace helps jobseekers find opportunities with state and local governments. Also, the AI freakout scrambles politics, calls mount to prepare for job displacement, early signals on the strategy from RAISE US, and our take on using AI to write op-eds. (Subscribe here.)

Talent Matching for Local Government Jobs

State and local governments face a workforce shortage, with roughly 700K vacancies across 90K separate employers. The persistent hiring crunch has opened the door to creative solutions for matching experienced workers with open jobs, including people without traditional credentials.

Work for America is quickly becoming a player in this space. The nonprofit two years ago launched a free talent network, dubbed Civic Match, that seeks to help displaced federal workers get jobs with state and local governments. The program later expanded eligibility to laid-off nonprofit workers who were affected by cuts to federal grants.

Hiring in local government takes 130 days on average, says Caitlin Lewis, Work for America’s founding executive director. That’s more than three times slower than hiring in the private sector.

“Recruitment is often ‘post and pray,’ with limited resources behind it,” says Lewis, who previously worked in housing and economic development for NYC’s government. “Cities lose their best candidates while the paperwork moves.”

The challenge won’t get easier, with retirement-age government workers outnumbering their younger colleagues and 36% of governments reporting that they recently plugged workforce gaps by rehiring workers who had retired. The solution could be Gen Z, which is more likely to seek difference-making work. But Lewis cites data showing that these young workers are badly underrepresented in government roles.

“If we wait five years to intervene, the people who could have trained them are gone,” she says.

So far, more than 500 Civic Match jobseekers have landed roles at roughly 150 state and local governments. Most of those people came from the federal government. And 40% of hires through the two-sided marketplace were for jobs in core back-office roles, including procurement, HR, finance and budget, operations, data, and tech/IT.

Lewis says governments are getting creative to tap into different talent pools for hard-to-fill job roles.

She points to the City of Columbus, Ohio, which recently faced significant vacancies across CDL-required equipment operator positions at the city’s service department. Instead of competing with long-haul trucking and construction companies for licensed drivers, the department partnered with the Ohio Reformatory for Women to help prepare and hire workers.

Participants in the program complete six months of training in construction and horticulture, earning industry certifications and interviewing with the city before they’re released. They begin working as laborers while moving through the in-house CDL school. The city has hired 17 women through the program, and promoted 14. 

City governments do almost no recruitment marketing. So Work for America teams up with a few cities each year to help them answer why someone should want to work there.

“Government has a marketing problem more than a talent problem,” says Lewis.

For example, the nonprofit recently visited Chattanooga, Tenn., and helped the city with its revamped recruitment site. It also teamed up with Gary, Ind., running a workshop with 20 city employees. Lewis says Gary’s mayor, Eddie Melton, recruits workers based more on their conviction than the credentials they hold. And love for the city came through in the workshop.

The Kicker: “That pride is Gary’s entire recruiting pitch, and it belongs to people a credential screen would have thrown out,” she says.

Shifting Politics on AI and Jobs

Panic over AI safety is driving politically fluid policy debates, including how to improve workforce systems.

This week, as Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon appeared on the same stage, several new bipartisan pushes emerged on Capitol Hill. And both conservative commentator Oren Cass and former president Barack Obama in recent days called for policy responses to AI-driven job displacement.

The founder and chief economist at American Compass, Cass has clout with Vice President JD Vance and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. As “inevitable” AI-driven labor market disruptions arise, Cass wrote in a NYT essay, employers should help their workers transition into jobs that are created in the process.

When people are laid off, he said, both the public and private sectors should focus on getting them into new positions first, so retraining can occur on the job with a new employer: “AI companies serious about helping workers should establish large endowments to help people who need support during a transition and provide funding for the employers who then hire and train them.”

While the politics around AI remain extraordinarily uncertain and nonpartisan, a growing number of U.S. workers fear technology could make their jobs obsolete. A new Gallup poll found that concern among 25% of college graduates and 29% of workers without college degrees. Tech displacement is now the top job worry for workers under 45.

The U.S. isn’t ready for AI-driven disruption to the labor market, John Arnold writes in an essay for The Wall Street Journal. Few job training programs work, writes the philanthropist and former energy trader. And large-scale, government-funded efforts fail to produce lasting results.

Arnold calls for the sort of performance-funding standards many states now use in higher education—and that the feds require for Workforce Pell grants—to apply to all workforce programs.

“The goal is simple,” he writes. “Create a system that focuses on results and shows the receipts.”

RAISE US has built one the largest funds aimed at helping Americans transition to an AI economy, bringing in more than $500M from Big Tech and other large corporate backers. Gina Raimondo, the group’s co-chair and CEO, talked about the emerging strategy during a new podcast interview with David Deming, an economist and dean of Harvard College.

“We have very old-fashioned systems that support workers through career transitions,” said Raimondo, who was commerce secretary during the Biden administration.

With substantial input from corporate partners, RAISE US will experiment with a wide range of interventions, she said, including wage insurance, job sharing, AI career coaching, and a startup accelerator. Interestingly, Raimondo said, Google is not participating in the effort. OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, and Amazon are backers.

Ultimately, federal legislation will be needed to address AI-driven job displacement, said Raimondo. But in the meantime, RAISE US plans to “plant seeds” through projects with state governments and companies, which Congress could learn from and follow.

The uncertainty over AI’s impacts isn’t a reason for inaction, she argued, pointing to the no-regrets bets strategy we’ve previously covered.

“If AI is the exogenous force that gets our country to get its act together on workforce, terrific,” said Raimondo.

Argument Collapse

The use of AI in opinion writing also has stirred up a debate in recent weeks, most notably over the admission by billionaire investor Stanley Druckenmiller that he tapped the tech to write a high-profile op-ed published by The Wall Street Journal.

We’ve wrestled with these questions at Work Shift, which publishes commentary and has seen a flood of op-ed submissions that were obviously written by the robots. Elyse Ashburn, Work Shift’s editor, writes this week about our rules for contributed pieces.

A big part of the problem is that AI tends to recycle ideas, with defects that snowball as original content fades. Ashburn cites related research on “argument collapse,” which is the idea that essays generated by LLMs have a tendency to converge on a small set of main arguments, subpoints, and paragraph-level structures.

“Polished writing never should have been a substitute for substance,” she writes. Click over to Work Shift to read the full article.

Open Tabs

Technician Shortage
Manufacturing technician employment could grow six times faster than core production roles between 2025 and 2030, contributing to 2.3M U.S. technician job openings, finds a report from the Deloitte Center for Energy & Industrials. Technicians also are among the hardest roles to fill, but workers in adjacent industries represent a potential talent pool across the economy. Citing AI, the report calls for a redesign of training programs and career pathways.

Advanced Manufacturing
Factory employment in the U.S. stopped a long skid in December and has added 58K jobs this year, writes Gad Levanon, chief economist at the Burning Glass Institute, citing federal data. The recovery is modest and narrow and comes entirely from advanced manufacturing. Those jobs are better than the ones manufacturing has been losing, Levanon writes—advanced manufacturing roles on average pay a third more than the rest of the sector.

Apprenticeship Guidance
The U.S. Department of Labor recently issued two new pieces of guidance on apprenticeship—one providing a five-part framework for what qualifies as a pre-apprenticeship and the second detailing the flexibility that registered apprenticeships have in qualifying for Workforce Pell. The second guidance includes allowances for an employer or other noncollege entity to deliver up to 49% of an otherwise eligible apprenticeship program, and for multiyear apprenticeships to break their related instruction into smaller segments to comply with the cap on program length.

Data on Apprenticeship
The new Apprenticeship Outcomes Lab is a public-private data collaborative created jointly by the American Institutes for Research and the U.S. Department of Commerce. Using newly linked administrative records that connect registered apprenticeship data to employment and learning outcomes, the lab will provide evidence on whether apprentices stay employed, how their earnings hold up over time, and what employers gain from hosting apprentices.

AI and STARS
Roughly half of the 152M active workers in the U.S. areSkilled Through Alternative Routes, finds a new report from Opportunity@Work, which also released a policy playbook. These 75M Americans include workers who attended community college, and they comprise nearly two-thirds of rural workers. AI-related job disruption poses a particular challenge for rural STARS, while one in five of all STARS (15.6M) currently work in highly AI-exposed roles.

Job Moves
Kristen Silverberg has been named the next president and CEO of the Business Roundtable. Silverberg, the organization’s current president and COO, will replace Joshua Bolten, who will step down in January. 

Josh Jarrett has been appointed the next CEO of Pledge 1%, a nonprofit that encourages companies to donate to charitable causes. Jarrett previously worked at the Gates Foundation and led Wiley’s Applied Research Intelligence business.

Bledi Taska has been hired by QS Quacquarelli Symonds as the global higher education firm’s chief economist. A former EVP and chief economist at Lightcast, Taska most recently was chief data and analytics officer at TalentNeuron.

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