This recent study by Accenture traced the trajectories of 100,000 U.S. employees and, encouragingly, found that half of them moved up into higher-wage jobs. These “gateway” jobs to the escalated career trajectories included customer service, sales, advertising sales, computer support, vocational nursing, welding, and machining. These are midlevel jobs on a journey to a higher-paid destination.
Through an analysis of the largest public data-sets on U.S. occupational roles, skills, wages, and workers, this report identifies a talent pool of 71 million workers who are Skilled Though Alternative Routes (STARs). Each of these workers is currently active in the workforce, has a high school diploma and does not have a four-year bachelor’s degree. All have suitable skill sets to succeed in work that is more highly valued and therefore better paid than the work they do now. But few realise such upward job mobility today. Our findings challenge conventional wisdom about the skills of workers without bachelor’s degrees, and present some important implications for companies, workforce organisations, analysts, and STARs.
For many people, on-the-job experience itself is what helps them develop new skills. But it turns out that jobs don’t all have equivalent skill development potential. Some are like escalators — the experience of being on them moves you up. But others are cul-de-sacs — dead-end jobs that take you nowhere. The challenge for workers is distinguishing the cul-de-sacs from the escalators.
And while upward mobility may be more widely available or highly visible in certain career paths (such as professional jobs), that’s not always the case in lower-skilled jobs, where escalators can be particularly crucial. This report helps us understand this better.