Matt Sigelman, President of The Burning Glass Institute: Connecting Skills to Opportunity

“One of the things we’ve found is that the average U.S. job has seen 37% of its skills replaced in just the last five years,” says Matt Sigelman, one of the country’s leading labor market experts. That blistering pace of change begs the question of how workers and employers are going to acquire new skills on a such a rapid and continuing basis. That’s exactly the type of challenge Sigelman and his colleagues tackle at The Burning Glass Institute, a nonprofit research center that explores data for fresh insights and tools employers, workers, educators and policymakers can use to build mobility, opportunity and equity. One such tool is a brand-new Skills Compass developed with Coursera which enables multi-dimensional evaluation of the emerging skills that will yield the most value. But Sigelman cautions against focusing just on of-the-moment-skills in favor of a more balanced approach. “You need timely skills to get on the career ladder, but you're going to need timeless skills like critical thinking and collaboration to rise.” Join WorkforceRx host and Futuro Health CEO Van Ton-Quinlivan for a super informative scan of these and other key questions confronting the labor economy such as skills-based hiring, career mobility and the implications of increasingly powerful chat bots.