We asked our WorkingNation Advisory Board to share their thoughts on the most important issues and challenges facing the workforce and the labor market in the coming year.
John Hope Bryant, the founder, chairman, and CEO of Operation Hope, is a prominent thought leader on economic empowerment and financial dignity.
Here are his thoughts on The Future of Work 2023.
“There’s been a tremendous gap in the skills that today’s workers have and what employers need. We are rapidly becoming a high-tech, high-touch society in which the American worker needs a new set of technical skills that up until now was optional.
As we continue to reset the economy, we simply need more training programs for workers looking to enter the workforce and retraining programs for existing workers so they can keep their jobs going forward.
If we aren’t careful, we could be setting ourselves up for a new type of caste system where those who are trained, prepared, and familiar with the technology are the most valuable and highly compensated whereas the others are left at the bottom.
Those who are currently at an economic disadvantage are already behind for the world to come. Without high-speed internet and time to invest in education, gains in tech preparation are simply an ideal.
We must make the appropriate investments in our future workforce today or risk widening the divide tomorrow.”
