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Last week was quite a week! I was thrilled to host this year’s Forbes Future of Work Summit on Thursday—perhaps our best one yet. Did you miss joining us online or in person? Forbes’ Maria Gracia Santillana Linares was onsite with a live blog, capturing everything from Lattice’s Sarah Franklin opening up about leading the human resources platform to an in-depth and thought-provoking discussion with IBM’s Nickle LaMoreaux, LinkedIn’s Aneesh Raman and Deloitte’s Anthony Stephan about AI—and what it all means for humans, soft skills and work.
I’ll have more to recap soon, and we’ll post video from the event that will be available for Forbes members as soon as it’s available. One thing that was clear from this year’s summit: The two issues chief human resources officers are most focused on right now are the impact of AI on individual jobs, workforces and even humans at large—and how to become more of a skills-based organization. On the latter issue, we spoke exclusively with Walmart’s chief people officer, Donna Morris, about a new project they’re working on with other large companies about creating a common skills “taxonomy”—see more details below. Hope it’s a great week.
HUMAN CAPITAL
Thousands of Boeing’s unionized factory workers voted to go on strike Thursday night, a major blow to the plane maker, which is already facing scrutiny over the safety of its aircraft. The workers rejected a tentative deal that included 25% raises over four years and lower healthcare costs, Siladitya Ray reported. After announcing the result of the vote, District 751 IAM President Jon Holden said: “This is about respect, this is about the past, and this is about fighting for our future.”
Former President Donald Trump said Thursday he intends to remove federal taxes from overtime pay, marking his latest proposal this presidential campaign to significantly alter federal tax policy. Trump did not provide further details on the proposal, Antonio Pequeño IV reported. The Republican candidate made the new proposal after repeating plans he announced earlier this summer to exempt tip and Social Security income from federal taxes. Missed the debate last Tuesday? Forbes’ Derek Saul laid out the facts after Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris sparred about jobs.
AI + JOBS
The Associated Press took a deep dive into what AI’s impact on jobs could really be, exploring the shifting assessment that the more likely outcome will be changing and reshaping many jobs, but not mass unemployment. The story spotlights companies like Alorica, which is using AI to help customer service agents interpret more languages, and IKEA, which is using a customer-service chatbot to handle simple inquiries and retrained 8,500 customer-service workers to advise on interior design and field more complicated calls.
EQUITY + CULTURE
At the Forbes Power Women’s Summit, I had the opportunity to talk with Handshake chief talent engagement officer Valerie Capers Workman and Kenvue chief people officer Luani Alvarado about culture, the future of work, and well-being. My favorite quotes of the session came from Workman, who also spoke at 2023’s Future of Work Summit: “Flexibility is about productivity. If you want to get more out of your workforce, if you want them to work harder, take things off the table,” she said. I also loved this insight about Gen Z: “This is a post-pandemic generation. They have seen layoffs. They have seen parents at challenging times,” Workman told the crowd. “Contrary to what everyone believes about Gen Z, they want stability.”
Meanwhile, Forbes’ Maggie McGrath had a big week, from helping host the Power Women’s Summit—her conversation with Lumen CEO Kate Johnson was a highlight—to this daily cover story about venture capitalists Jenny Abramson and Heidi Patel, who have signed up investors such as Melinda French Gates and UBS for their third Rethink Impact fund dedicated to female CEOs. The buildout comes at a time when targeted funds have come under scrutiny—in June, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit issued a preliminary injunction blocking the Fearless Fund from awarding grants exclusively to Black women entrepreneurs.
WHAT’S NEXT
Walmart Chief People Officer Donna Morris
Photo: Walmart
There’s been a lot of talk from business leaders about skills-based organizations. Now, some of them want to find a common language.
Walmart chief people officer Donna Morris shared Monday that not only do more than 75% of its U.S. roles no longer require a degree—the retailer announced a year ago it would remove degrees from most job requirements—but the company has also started a project with about a dozen other large corporations to describe skills in a common fashion. By creating what she calls a “shared skills taxonomy,” the goal is to make those skills more transferable for workers without degrees, help training providers better understand what’s needed and assist employers with recognizing qualified candidates.
The group of companies, Morris told Forbes in an exclusive interview ahead of the Blackstone Career Pathways Summit in New York Monday, includes names such as Bank of America, Verizon, Accenture and Microsoft—in addition to Walmart and Blackstone—that were present at an event in April that Walmart convened.
“Our desire over time is to develop a skills vocabulary that can be leveraged across industries, across companies,” Morris told Forbes. The classification system would be open source and available to other employers, Morris says, and they hope to build it out over the next year.
When someone goes to college, the degree they receive validates their course of study, Morris says. But as more organizations eliminate degrees from job descriptions—only about 40,000 of Walmart’s 1.6 million U.S. employees are in jobs that now require diplomas, Morris says—there need to be more ways to validate those skills. “We’re going to accredit these skills by a third party to say these are really the skills that are required,” she told Forbes. “Eventually what we want to do is build a way to assess individuals against those skills.”
Currently, for instance, one company might say that to be a store manager, a worker needs skills such as inventory management, leadership, merchandising and teaching. But a different company might say store managers need skills such as stock management, people management, display setup and coaching, even if they are referring to the same skills.
Matt Sigelman, president of the nonprofit research organization Burning Glass Institute, which is working with the companies to pull data both from job descriptions and resumes to help create the taxonomy, says “I would think about this project as potentially trying to create a Rosetta Stone.” He continued the analogy saying “we’re not going to get everyone to speak Esperanto [an artificial, constructed language designed to be universal], but what we can do is create a translation mechanism on the back end.”
Sigelman says the move is important because similar jobs can be described differently, impeding applicants from getting the necessary keywords on their resumes, but also because skills are quickly evolving. He gives the example of a job like purchasing managers, which have traditionally been a cross between clerical work and negotiating prowess. After the pandemic’s disruption, it’s fast becoming a job that’s more about forecasting and supply chain management, and companies that want the newer skills may not find them without the right terminology. “There’s a huge problem that both sides have, of being able to distinguish between the signal and noise.”
STRATEGIES + ADVICE
As summer comes to an end, kick-start your productivity with these time management essentials.
Want your employees to soar? Try these five professional development practices.
Why U.S. corporations need to promote greater workplace diversity.
FACTS + COMMENT
Marketplace recently reported that the gender pay gap widened last year for the first time in 20 years, according to new data from the Census Bureau.
3%: The amount that men’s median earnings rose last year, compared to 1.5% for women.
40: The number of years that the gender pay gap has been narrowing, according to Marketplace, albeit slowly. The new data shows the first time it’s widened in a statistically significant way since 2003.
“This growth hasn’t been equally shared across demographic groups—especially for women, especially for women of color, who tend to work in lower-paying jobs,” Sara Estep at the Center for American Progress told Marketplace.
VIDEO
2024 Power Women’s Summit: The Multi-Hyphenate Mogul
QUIZ
Despite the device’s steep $3,499 price tag, a recent Forbes report found that professionals in which line of work are looking to integrate Apple’s Vision Pro mixed-reality headset into an important aspect of their jobs?
- Law enforcement
- K-12 education
- Agriculture
- Healthcare