#63: Workforce Risk – On Navigating Demographics, AI & the Changing American Dream

Welcome to the changing state of talent acquisition where your hosts, Graham, Thornton and Martin Cret, share their unfiltered takes on what's happening in the world of talent acquisition today. Each week brings new guests who share their stories on the tools, trends and technologies currently impacting the changing state of talent acquisition. Have feedback or want to join the show? Head on over to changestate.io. And now on to this week's episode. And we're back with another episode of the changing state of talent acquisition podcast. Super excited for our next guest, Cole Mapper, VP of Research and Innovation at Lightcast, also the host of Directionally Correct Podcast. Cole, welcome to the show. Yeah, thanks for having me, Graham. Super thrilled to have you. Big fans of Lightcast over here, for anyone's list of the podcasts, you know, you've had some previous guests out here. Before we get started, why don't you tell us a little bit more Cole about your career journey? What led you to your current role to VP of Innovation and Research over at Lightcast? Yeah. So, I would say I'm a people analytics guy through and through. So I spent most of my career as a practitioner doing people analytics, starting out at some like large multinationals. So Texas Instruments, PepsiCo, Toyota, Granger and a few others. And then kind of got it in the startup world. And so eventually culminating at a people analytics startup called Orgastic, which got acquired by Culture Amp not that long ago. And most recently, I led the people analytics and workforce planning teams at FedEx. It's about 50 people on my team there and got the chance. Been a Lightcast customer, been a bit MZ and Burning Glass customer in the past. And he's been spoken at Lightcast conference, I think two or three years ago. And got a chance to join the company. And I was like, this is, I mean, I've been such a fan of the company for so long. I feel like this is like a once in a lifetime opportunity. And so getting to be a VP here, really getting to put the work I've done in people analytics that has been internal for organizations. And getting to apply it to all of industry is just fascinating. And so we've done some really cool research since I've been here so far. I can't take credit for all of it because we have such a great team here that's doing just world-class research. And we've got so much more cool stuff coming down the pike as well. Wow. Well, I can say, speaking for everyone that's listening to the podcast, I think there's going to be a lot of jealous minds when you hear you say you had a team of 50 people working on the team, pale analytics over at FedEx. So, I think most often it's a team of a third of a person working on people analytics. So, you're not on. The FedEx is like a monster of a company. Most people don't realize that they have like 600,000 employees. And so, 50 people is just a drop in the bucket there. Wow. Wow. That's awesome. Well, it put in a process background and I know that that shaped a lot of your perspectives on talent analytics. So, super excited to dive in a little bit deeper. You alluded to it though already, cool. So, like Cass puts out a lot of research, a lot of great data. One of the things we're excited to talk about is, like Cass, you really recently made some ways with its workforce risk outlook report. So, you know, we've heard the phrase rising storm quite a bit, you know, and it really finds that, hey, boy, a lot of these labor shortages are putting many companies in the Fortune 1000 at risk. So, you know, before we really dive into it, maybe you could share a high level, you know, genesis of like Cass new workforce risk outlook. Yeah. Well, there's kind of a pre-story to the risk report that I think really shapes why this is relevant. So, and it starts with a colleague of mine, his name is Ron Hedrick. I think a few years ago had written a research report called the demographic drought. And it started for one of the first times, one of the few firms that started talking about, you know, what's going to happen to the labor force when baby boomers start retiring? And then a few years after that, they published the rising storm. So, this was last year. And the rising storm just blew up. And so, it was a continuation of the demographic drought research, but it's almost, it's really difficult to summarize the rising storm because there was so much really good information there, but talking about rising trends like AI, the baby boomer retirements, the population of college educated versus non college educated and how that's changing over time, immigration impacts, just a variety of impacts on the workforce. And it got such a positive reception last year when they published that. And then they kept asking the question, what does that mean for my organization? And so, that was the genesis of the workforce risk report where we went through and we scored all of the Fortune 1000 companies on exactly how is this going to impact your organization over the next five to 10 years? And so, it was broken down into four different categories of how their risk was qualified. The first category was the industry risk. So, what's going on in your particular industry and because everyone in industry kind of suffers from the same problems. And so, some industries are more risky than others in terms of what they're going to lose. So think of the top three most risky industries are hospitality, their construction, and I believe it's healthcare as well. And then you go into the market supply. So, where does your company actually operate? So just because your industry is risky doesn't mean where you operate necessarily is or is not risky. And so, we analyze every organization where their top five locations that people were employed at their organization. And then the next was looking at the occupations within that organization. So looking at the top 10 occupations that a company employs. And so, again, if you're a big healthcare organization, obviously we're looking at nurses and doctors and nurses' aids and all the top 10 occupations that a particular employer in saying, "What is the risk associated with them for their ability to staff over the next five to 10 years?" And then the last, and this is kind of a flip in terms of what you see in most organizations is the AI skills gap. And in this case, a lot of people are like, "Oh, is AI going to take my job? Is it going to automate what I do?" But we actually see this in terms of optionality for employers. Because if you have a shortage of people who are doing a particular job, an AI can help augment those people to one person doing the job of two people, that's actually a positive thing. If you know you have workforce shortages, so the AI skills gap, some jobs are more akin to be, have automation impacts than others. And frankly, if your organization AI is not going to impact you at all, that actually probably really increases your risk. And so that's a little bit of the background about the workforce risk report, but it has been a fascinating piece of research and many, many organizations have had their eyes opened to what's coming in the next few years. Because I think if you had to kind of distill down what the findings of the report are, is the future is not going to be like the past. We've never seen anything like this in the history of the workforce in the world. And so birth rates are decreasing, the bigger generations in the past like the baby boomers are retiring, they're being replaced by smaller generations. And there might just not be enough people to do all the jobs like there always has been. Another example is think about college education. And so in the 2008 crisis, many people had less children. Well, guess what? Those folks are turning 18 in the next two to three years. Right? Well, that means college enrollments are about to plummet. What is that going to do to the future of higher education? And how many people are going to graduate from programs or going through the skill trades over the next few years? There's just going to be less human beings that are able to come in and replace people who are retiring. Not to mention all the impacts that are going on right now with immigration and all of that, but I'll pause there because I've been talking for a while, but I'm really fascinating research. Wow. Yeah. Well, they're the unpack. All of the simplicity of the risk index and the four major categories that you outline on assuming, as is the case with most simple, but powerful frameworks, it took a while to kind of distill it into those four, but it's kind of like peeling an onion. I think there's, you know, if you're doing great and have low risk in all four of those things, it's an easy answer. And if you're doing horribly in all four of them, it's an easy answer. But you probably see some pretty interesting combinations where saying industry is in particularly high risk. Maybe it's actually very low risk, but due to the pragmatics of where the business is located, it's actually a high risk business. Or conversely, you could have a company that hires occupations that aren't particularly competitive and they have a good position in the marketplace, but maybe the opportunity for AI to disrupt that industry is lower than any other industry. So I think there's probably a lot of permutations that you see and it allows for a lot of fascinating conversations. I'm assuming you looked at a lot more than just those four before you landed on those four big buckets. Cool. Yeah, we looked at a variety of different characteristics. Some of this is just limited to the amount of data that's available. What I'll say, one of the things that we've seen is you'll see different publications and they will focus on just one component of this. So they'll say, here are the following industries with the following risk. Or here are the following companies that are going to be impacted by AI. And everybody's coming to the same kind of conclusions, but they're not looking at this data holistically. So we thought we're really the only company on earth that can combine all four of these characteristics and it will call like hyper trends into one and then give every organization say, your organization, here's where you have to worry. And because we publish it out there for everyone to see, you can also worry in comparison to your competitors too. And so one of the things that we put out there is a graph of every company in a particular industry by the risk score and the revenue. And so you can see not only where you stack up, but where do all your competitors stack up as well? And who's potentially going to come eat your lunch over the next few years because they may be at less risk than you. And another component is, and I think even the companies that have a lower relative risk score, that's in relationship to what they are today. So basically, even if if you're score, which every company score is above one, if you're score, the scores are on one to five, one being less risky and five being more risky. If you're above one, which everyone is, that means you're at more risk than you are today. Right? So literally, every organization is at more risk over the next years. That means that every organization is going to have to do something. And some organizations are at more risks than others. And that can create competitive situations where some organizations can see when companies lost as another company's gain. But I would say the most important thing is for organizations to look deeply into their score, try to understand it and to take proactive steps to mitigate this because the people who act quicker will be the winners. The other thing, and I'll say here too, is we scored the Fortune 1000, but we have this data on virtually every large organization, much beyond the Fortune 1000. So there's a link you can actually click in the report that can say, hey, I don't see my organization here. And Lightcast will actually reach out to you and show you your organization's data as well. Wow. Okay. Every time you respond, it's like a spider level. I have like six more questions I want to ask. We'll try to keep it focused here. I really want to ask you some more about the sausage making that goes into that score, but maybe we'll do that offline and keep it a little higher level for our audience. And maybe on that point, we could unpack some of these big risk factors or trends that you kind of called out. So AI, obviously, that's a huge one. I do think it's interesting what you said about it being sort of the converse of what we typically think about when we think about AI. AI is replacing jobs that's bad for employees, obviously, arguably anyway, or at least it's a risk on indicator for people. Well, I'll ask you this question. Have you seen any single job that has been replaced by AI yet? I know that somewhat of a rhetorical question, but the answer is it hasn't. What it has done, and this is, we actually had a separate piece of research called the speed of skill change. And this is kind of AI agnostic. One of the things that we found is one in four jobs has seen 75% of their skills change in the last three years. Right? And so if we're trying to create kind of a skills-based future or skills-based hiring, you have to realize that. And that's not just because of AI. Every job is changing, but likely they're being augmented by AI or AI is becoming a part of the job rather than AI replacing a job. Because I'm actually working on some research right now to find, is there any mythical job that has been replaced by AI so that's far? And I'll let you know just from what I've found so far, I can't find any. I've seen these major companies that have published things that have said, "Oh, we're laying off people because of AI." But it's not because they said the AI has automated their job. I think it's just they wanted to give a boogeyman excused for why they're doing layoffs. Yeah, I guess my gentle pushback would be, I'm not sure it works like that. I mean, you would be closer to than I am, but you could imagine AI slowly replacing certain skill sets in a job. And then as the company has its normal labor cycles where they lay off people and hire new people, you could argue that the person whose job got replaced when they got laid off and they didn't hire somebody, that would be an example of that. But sure, it's not exactly like, "Oh, we brought in chat GPD and then we fired 10 people." So I think you're getting it, Marty. Yeah. So maybe we could, there's plenty to talk about with AI, but maybe we could put a pin in that for a minute and focus on demographics and immigration, which I think are close to related, but you could tell me if you disagree. You covered the boomer thing. That always struck me as like the most obvious cliff that our economy, not just labor markets, but the housing market, education, all the things you point out. I mean, we could have seen this cliff coming 30 years ago. You know, the baby boomers as the name indicates the biggest generation we've seen. Perhaps number, I think everyone in the history of the country. And then the millennials that after them, their children, sometimes called the echo boom generation. So yeah, a size of a generation, but much smaller, maybe even half the size you'd have to tell me. So we're just placing some harsh realities that seems, what do you say to a TA executive or a C-suite person who's seeing this trend in panicking? Like what can we do about these demographic shifts? And then maybe if you have thoughts and immigration, we'd love to hear that as well. There are industries that have more like trades workers that aren't using knowledge worker skills. And then the average shortage is occurring. And so you have to think about it in terms of, I love the concept of demographics or destiny. And like you said, we could have known 30 years ago about this looming problem of baby boomer retirements. Actually, just as a point of fact, the millennial generation is just as bigger, slightly bigger than the baby boomer generation in terms of the workforce availability. However, they're actually not the ones entering the workforce anymore. Gen Z. Gen Z is much, much smaller than the baby boomer generation that is retiring right now over the next few years. And every time a baby boomer retirees, let's say they had a 30% chance of, and again, I don't have these exact numbers in front of me, but let's say this is directionally correct, ha, ha, ha, since that's my podcast name. So I would say they have a 30% chance of being a college educated knowledge worker and a 70% chance of being some kind of worker that is, you know, in a doing physical labor or in a trade profession or maybe a business, a small business owner could be, could be a variety of things, right? But they were placed by a Gen Z or who's going into the workforce. And that Gen Z or has like, let's say, a 70% chance of being a college educated person who's looking for a knowledge work job, right? And so you see, immediately there's an imbalance between the types of people that are available for jobs and the types of jobs that are available. And this is where the skill shortages come into play. Now what has happened, and this is where immigration comes into the picture. And given, you know, from a politics standpoint, I have no idea where things are going to go over the next few years in terms of immigration policy. But let's just say for over the last few years, the number of immigrants, those are the ones that are more likely to fill those low skill, medium skill, trade skill jobs that gap because, but the gaps only going to get worse over the next few years. If we felt like there has been pain in the labor market for there being a divergence between, you know, people with a college degree and people without a college degree, that problem is only going to get exacerbated as more baby boomers retire and more Gen Z, inner of the workforce. Interesting. Let me just restate a few of those points just to go and make sure I'm understanding but also the audience gets it. You introduced this concept of workforce availability, and you made the point that baby boomers, while they're much bigger in terms of raw numbers than millennials, millennials are actually the same side in terms of the percentage or the number of millennials who are workforce ready or available for the workforce. Is this just another way of saying, I mean, there's a lot of forces that probably went into that, but obviously one of the big moments that happened during the boomers generation was that women entered the workforce in a big way. So that's one factor, but when they started, much fewer women in general worked than probably millennial women. Is that one way of understanding it? Oh, yeah. You've definitely read through the Rising Storm report because that is in one of the later chapters so well done, Marty. That is absolutely at play. So, there's a difference between the amount of like human beings that are alive in a particular generation and the amount of workers that are still working in that generation. And so that's where the gap that even if I'd exist. And there's a variety of reasons for that. The percentage of females working is definitely one of them. Immigration is another one. The amount of college educated versus non college educated is another. But yeah, there's a variety of impacts there. But the largest workforce that is working right now is actually the millennial generation because of their labor force participation rate. Got it. Okay. That's helpful. I guess the big lesson on the other point not to simplify it too much is if you've got kids, you should encourage them to go into the trades. Maybe not become knowledge workers. Is that a fair top line? Yeah. I mean, one of my running jokes is if you are worried about being AI automating your job, become a plumber. That's the last thing that AI is going to automate. And again, I say that sort of tongue in cheek, but there's a seat of truth within it, which is if you are an enter, you know, enterprising, you know, younger person today, and you're looking as I want to go, I want to skate where the puck is not going. Right. Everybody's going this direction and I want to kind of, you know, go against the grain, but also be successful. If you go into a trade profession right now, my colleague, I mentioned him earlier, Ron Hatcher, because he gives a few kind of anecdotal stories on this that are based in the research that, you know, something like, you know, when somebody goes, they turn 18 and if they had decided to go into a trade profession versus going to a four year college degree and becoming an accountant. And so they go into a four year degree, they take out $200,000 in debt and then they get a $50,000 a year job as an accountant. Or they can go and become a trade professional, which usually takes less than two years, may not even have to take out student loans. And if they do, it's a very manageable amount of money. They graduate and they start in an $80,000 a year profession at 20 years old. Right. And so they have a head start on their, their peer, they have less debt and they're making more money and they're also more likely if you go fast forward a few more years into the future to actually own their business and then contract out other people who are doing that type of trade skill. Right. So it can actually be a quite lucrative opportunity if you choose to go into the right fields. Yeah, I think that's great. So let's try and unpack that a little bit more or maybe just dive a bit deeper into the skills piece. First, let's say we love Ron. We've had him on the podcast too. And I tell you, maybe it was two years ago when we had him on and it was pretty scary because he said, hey, it's about the cost $50 for you to go out and buy a cheeseburger because we're not going to be able to find people that you're going to be able to do the work. And like, I would say over the last two years, you know, read the news. I think the cost of going out of the eat has probably gone up quite a bit. And so, you know, we love Ron and he always warned us. He's not going to be pretty. And so, but they're like, they're like, truffle, they're on this cheeseburger or something like that. I'm thinking about it. Yeah, Ron is fantastic. And he has this expression. He says he likes to bludgeon people with data. And so, he is just so, I mean, everything he said is fact, he says is factual. It's just he's much more, you know, he tries to kind of gin people up when he's talking about it. So I try to be a little bit more measured, but yeah, absolutely. Everything he says is factual in nature. Oh, yeah, very much on the nose. Well, you know, on that, I guess. So, all right, well, you know, talk about knowledge workers, you know, but I want to unpack a little bit more about the skills, mismatch, you know, concept because I think there's, you know, a bit more nuance to it. So, you know, in lightcast report, you know, I think one of the more eye-popping stats was that is that 85 million is the number of jobs that is probably going to go unfilled, you know, over the next five years. So by 2030, you know, just do the skills matches. I think I'm stating that, you know, I'm remembering that stat, right, but maybe can we unpack that a little bit more than, right? It's worth it. On one hand, we're saying, hey, like, knowledge workers, like, hey, that's a dead. We don't have to worry about it. I'm, you know, par, I'm taking a leap there. It's like, let's unpack that a little bit more because then five years, hey, 85 million, that's a lot of job. It is a lot of job. Well, and one thing you have to be aware of is, so that's over a five year period. So if you divided it by five, that's about 17 million jobs a year. And, and given that it's only going to get worse. So I would actually say if you looked at it on a trend, it's probably less jobs next year in terms of the gap, but getting more and more and more over the next five years per year, right? And so if you think about, there's already a huge skills gap as it is. Like, you'll see these, you know, when the, the, the Joltz report comes out and you'll see the number of jobs that have been created and every month. And you'll see that there's this huge gap between the number of jobs that are available and the number of people that have, have gotten a job in the last month. And you'll say, how is that possible? And everybody I talked to, you know, who's unemployed can't find a job right now. And one of the reasons why that occurs is because of this skills gap that we keep mentioning. Those jobs that are available out there, their tradespeople, their nurses, their hospitality, their waiters and waitresses, there are a lot of the service industry people that, you know, Ron talks about all of the time. And the jobs that are, that people want, you know, maybe they want a, you know, they want a coding job or an accounting job or any other kind of knowledge worker job that they're looking to land back on their feet in the reality over the last few years, those type of roles have been contracting. And so that is the tale of two labor markets that we talked about in our speed of skill change report. The 85 million dollar, I mean, 85 million number, it's a huge number. And again, I mentioned earlier in the conversation, we've never seen anything like this. This has never happened before in history. We're not prepared for it. Now, it's not to say that the future is exactly going to be linear like the past. So there could be a chance that, you know, if AI comes in and it does more automation and augmentation than I mentioned earlier, maybe that 85 million goes down to 65 million or something like that over the next few years. That is entirely possible. And again, I mentioned earlier why the workforce risk is so relevant is for organizations to be proactive. If they are more proactive, perhaps the eye popping stat of 85 million jobs, maybe that number will be lower because they've done a good job of combining skills, combining roles, creating the right pipelines of talent for the organization, recruiting people proactively and doing all the right things that can help mitigate these risks. So the 85 is not necessarily a foregone conclusion. But if you project the current trends that we see right now with the gaps that are coming in the future, that's what you can expect. So that's great. So I'm going to push on this one a little bit. So, you know, I'm going to ask two questions, Cole. So where do you see or where are we seeing the biggest skills mismatches? And then maybe, you know, the right follow-up is like, you know, how can companies start addressing these skills gaps on a maybe a more practical level? Like, let's dive into some examples of, you know, where smarter CEOs are really, you know, cultivating their workforce to the future or where they're, you know, trying to help close that gap. Yeah. So I'll use an example from the retail industry. If you, again, I know you guys don't have an in front of you, but if you look at the retail, we plotted all of the organizations again by the risk and by the revenue in the top right hand corner. So this would be very high revenue, but also very high risk is Walmart. All right. And if you look in the top left hand corner, which is very high revenue, but lower relative risk is Amazon. Why is that the case? You could look at it in a variety of ways, but largely Amazon has structured, they're virtually in the exact same business as Walmart. They're trying to get people, you know, whether it be groceries or, you know, grills or, you know, workout equipment or whatever it may be. They're just trying to be the universal kind of commerce and e-commerce providers. But Walmart has a lot more brick and mortar stores, which means from, if you remember, the four different components of the risk score, one of them is market risk. They are very much geographically beholden to the markets in which they operate because they have brick and mortar stores. There's a reason why, you know, when Amazon was experimenting with creating stores a few years ago, they literally had no workers in those stores. And it was, it was self checkout and you could, you could find an item, you could scan it, and then you would leave the store without ever interacting with the human being. Everything else that they do for the most part outside of their distribution footprint is e-commerce, which means that they can locate those workers in the tech hubs where there is an abundance of talent. So from a market risk standpoint, that's really the huge difference between a Walmart and an Amazon. They have virtually the same revenue, virtually the same number of employees. But because of the market risk, Walmart is at a much higher risk even though they're in the same industry as Amazon. Does that make sense? Yeah, no, I mean, it definitely makes sense. And I guess I'd say, so, you know, let's say if you're a Walmart then what are we doing in the next five years to combat that? Because I think Walmart certainly built its brand on brick and mortar stores and it's a very different model than Amazon. So if you're a Walmart, you know, sure they're listening to, what's next? What do you do to fix that? Well, I think you're actually, again, a lot of these trends are already underway and you're seeing this. And so I'm just going off the things I've seen in the news. What has Walmart done recently? They've increased their pay for all of their store workers, right? Because Walmart realizes in a particular market geography, it's a zero-sum game for talent. So if you are paying, you know, I don't know their exact numbers, but let's say it's $17 an hour and your competitors and fast food are paying $12 an hour, you can take their talent. Right? The same thing is, and I think I saw this, if they're paying something like store managers, like $600,000 a year now, I can imagine only a few years ago. That was not the number that they were paying because they know they need to be proactive when it comes to getting the talent of the future. Another thing that, again, I've just seen publicized is Walmart has been closing down a lot of underperforming stores and really, really investing in the Walmart.com, or I think that's what they call it, Walmart.com platform. Right? It's because they know that one of the ways of de-risking their future is becoming more e-commerce centric and less brick and mortar centric. So those would be, again, just, I mean, I don't have any inside knowledge on Walmart versus Amazon, but those would be some things that I've just seen from the sidelines that Walmart is doing proactive. And they're probably one of the things that you'll see that we've noted in our report is, and this is why we included revenue in addition to risk, is the more revenue you have, is also the more potential you have to lose, but you also have somewhat of a moat for the ability to invest proactively compared to your peers who maybe have less revenue than you. And so Walmart and Amazon have somewhat of the luxury is that they can make those proactive investments because they have a little bit more cushioned deal with these situations. It's when you're in the lower right-hand quadrant, which is a low-revenue company, but high-risk, those companies are at a real competitive disadvantage because they may not be able afford to be proactive, even if it's existential to them. Yeah. Fascinating. Well, certainly with deep pockets, you can sort of plug the holes in the boat a lot better, in terms of long-term, I guess, we'll see what the real strategy is for mitigating risk, because I mean, finding a wage war only goes so far, I would say. Okay, so maybe we could just zoom out because I think you said something earlier that was interesting to me. You call sort of the historical precedent of the labor market linear, and that we can't necessarily look to the past anymore as a model for the future. I think that probably makes intuitive sense to folks, but I think we should just spend a moment on that, because I think we see this. I mean, I'm not an avid consumer of labor market statistics, but certainly most people who check on CNN or whatever their favorite news outlet will see numbers get reported. And oftentimes there's a mismatch, I think, between, it's like, wow, the economy did better than we thought, but why is it so hard to find a job if you're a knowledge worker? You know, I think those are early indicators of that change, or maybe that shift that you're talking about. It used to be that we could get a very high-level top-wide number that said, great, the economy's good. It should be easy to find a job. The current moment seems a much more complex than that. And so if you take someone that is maybe a software developer who just graduated thinking, I'm going to easily get a job. And they find out that actually competition is quite stiff in knowledge work. They have a choice, perhaps. You could go back to the drawing board and invest in a trade. That might be a good idea. But I don't know how many people will do that, which brings us to how do we take the knowledge workers we have currently and give them the skills of the future. And I know that's a big question, but I think it's a big question that's on the mind of pretty much all CEOs. Your report is telling them, you guys are in trouble. All the top companies have high risk. How do you even begin to address that issue? Yeah. Well, I'll say is one of the ways that we try to address it at lightcast is we want to give people the information to make the decisions for themselves because there is no universal prescription. Every company, every human being, every junior career person, or maybe somebody who is at the tail end of their career who maybe just got laid off, has to address the situation differently. So it's really hard to give a one-size-fits-all answer that question. And frankly, I don't have all the answers because again, we've never been here before. And so I would say again, the rewards are going to come to the people who experiment, who are proactive, who act early. And so as I look at this, and I say, you know, for the software engineer example that you mentioned, who is graduating, and maybe there's not as many jobs out there, is, you know, I'm not an economist, but I took economics 101. And what they talked about in there was supply versus demand. Right? And what's happened is there has increasingly been more and more supply of software engineering graduates over the last few years. And what's also going on is kind of a mega trend in the tech industry of less and less demand for those same software engineers. And at a certain point, you see an inflection point. We haven't ever seen that inflection point before in the last, you know, a few decades. And so people just aren't accustomed to it. Right? And so they, because this is just pure supply and demand at play. And you could fast forward into the future and let's say if everybody started going into skilled and trade and service sector professional jobs and stopped getting, you know, software engineering degrees, you would see the supply and demand swinging the other direction. And so again, I always just say, I would always just say, skate to where the puck is going or where the puck isn't going, depending on what is more advantageous for your career. You know, I'll say as an aside note, I'm looking into some research right now. And it's very hard to triangulate some of these things, but I'm actually trying to find if we can see, are there people who've gotten college degrees that are currently pivoting into roles like trades, professions, and how are they faring in that process? Is this even happening? And if so, how are the people faring that are doing that? I guess I'll report back to you in like a year once I figure out what's going on there. But the key is, I mean, we're trying just as much as the next group to figure out how to navigate this. I might even put the question on to you, what do you think we should do, Marty, or what do you think we should do, Graham? I mean, I think that's probably a loaded question. I think we've always said it. We probably talked about this for Ron. Like, you know, there's probably a bit of a stigma attached to trades in the US, right? And like, you know, I think for the longest time, like, you know, so many of us were growing up and it was, hey, it wasn't about, are you going to go to college? It's where you're going to go to college. And, hey, like, you know, computers are bigger, you're going to do something with computers. And I think, you know, because of that, that's probably been a bit of a stigma to investing or taking that, you know, path of trades. And so I think, you know, part of the, you know, part of the challenge, you know, one of the exciting things that we're, you know, probably see with, you know, people like Lightcast and some of the reporting is, you know, what you're saying is, boy, you know, we're, you know, we're past a tipping point where you want to go to become a software engineer because, you know, the throwing jobs out, like, it's, you know, like they're free. We're now at a point where, boy, like, you know, your toilet gets clogged or like a pipe burst. Like, you know, that's the most lucrative job that you can have because there's no one else within, you know, 15-hour radius is it's going to be able to come in and, you know, fix your plumbing or rewire electricity on your house when, you know, fuses blow, right? Yeah. And so you better get on YouTube. It's interesting. Yeah. Right? Like, you know, the foundation is kind of, you know, we've been building, you know, to use a horrible, horrible metaphor. I'm sure like, you know, we're kind of neglecting the foundation of the house where like, you know, we're putting windows in up top and like, you know, we don't need a hundred different windows. We still need a strong foundation and like, that's the piece that is, you know, kind of, you know, the tipping point seems to be, or the pendulum is swinging the other way. Is that, you know, that makes sense? I love that metaphor and, and, and let me build on it for a second. Something you said a second ago, because we were doing some research for some investors the other day. And we were talking about how a lot of the narrative around like what is a good job? And, you know, and the stigma that you mentioned about some of the trades being, being negative jobs, that was based on a post industrial revolution, baby boomer narrative that goes on in this workforce. And what we are needing right now is a new forward looking narrative for the current generations to go forward. I'm saying, here's what the future of work is. Here's what your opportunities look like. And here's a compelling vision about how you can have a good career and a good life in that world. And as a society, I think the research that like has us trying to do is to help drive the ability to formulate that narrative. Because frankly, a lot of what the narrative that exists right now is just malware that's still hanging around long after it served its purpose. It was it meant it did a great job at the time it was formulated. It is just outlived its use. And we need a new one. And so I think this research is our ability and attempt at trying to formulate what's that narrative of the future. Well, I think that's super interesting, right? And so like, let's tie this back to this Walmart versus Amazon example. You know, I'm curious we can unpack that a little bit more, right? Like, there's also been this narrative about the war for talent, right? And I think, you know, what we're also saying is like, hey, Walmart and Amazon is the two big competitors that go on a very different path. But at the end of the day, like, you know, moving forward, like, you know, there's going to be have to be a bit more collaboration across all organizations to address a pretty large growing problem about what jobs are going to be available and what, you know, where people are going to go work. So, you know, I think it's not just about changing, you know, the narrative on trades, but I think there's going to need to be a lot more collaboration between organizations, you know, not just, you know, change the narrative about trades. Does that make sense, Cole? That makes perfect sense. And I would say this is why we focus so much on creating a skills-based future and skills based hiring and even enabling through our products the ability to upskill and re-skill employees. And I love this concept of competition versus kind of how can we all be in this together as I would not be surprised if you start to see the types of joint ventures in the future between entire industries about how are we going to re-skill our current workers or upskill our current workers for the skills that are needed in the future. And so that, you know, the rising tide lifts all boats in that industry. I think that that would be one mechanism for creating kind of a joint future where everybody benefits and thrives together. I'll say on the more of the competitive component, you know, I put this out to my colleagues the other day internally as somewhat of a provocative statement. But I think you could also see it happen as a, you know, imagine in the next few years, if automation doesn't automate enough of like fast food, for instance, that I could see restaurants giving people signing bonuses and putting them under like three-year contract deals, like an NFL player, but for somebody who works in fast food. It's from a competitive dynamic. If like a certain point, you literally just have a human being problem and there's not enough human beings. And so if you have a human being that works for you, you better lock them down, right? And one of the ways that we have is a vehicle for doing that United States is through contracts. We have never seen in the history of fast food putting people under contracts, right? And I think you're going to start to see more experimental employment arrangements because of what's come in the future. And again, so it's a fascinating time to be alive, but you're right hitting the nail in the head in terms of there's collective options for how we do this together, but there's also competitive options for how organizations navigate this in the future. I think it's fascinating, Cole, what you're saying about this idea of needing a new narrative. Because we all see trends reports and we can come up with cool names like a risk index or whatever it may be and people can kind of lose sight of what's driving it and what's important. But you're calling out, if I'm understanding you, you're calling out that I'm not sure this is overstanding it to say that the American dream is fundamentally broken from the dream that was put forth when the baby boomers were coming of age. That was a time where we had a well established path. And if you worked hard and had some talent and a little bit of luck perhaps and you went to college, you were guaranteed to have a very solid upper middle class life. It's not a better one. And it's no coincidence that I think millennials and Gen Z are the first generations in a long time where the standard of living and earning potential, however you want to look at it, is probably going to be lower than the previous generation. And I think that's probably just another way of pointing out that, yes, this dream that we've had and that we've sold to the extent that it was true previously is certainly not true anymore for most people and we're in desperate need of a bigger narrative. And the narrative transcends individual businesses, which is why you're calling for collective action, I think. So I did not say the American dream was dead and it depends on how you define the American dream, right? The version that I outlined, yeah, the version that I thought you would have thought I think there's a part of the part, the one qualifier would make in terms of the narrative you put forward on what the American dream is, is the part about going to college because for a long, long time, even right now, a majority of people don't go to college or don't have a college degree or haven't completed a four year degree or something like that. They may still have two years in a community college. Like if you add all the different types of college together, it is a majority. But if you just use, let's say a traditional four year college degree, when you turn to 18 years old, that is not a majority of the population. And so you could never have said at any point in time that the American dream was only dependent on going to college and having a better life. I think the qualifier would make is there's lots of good lives to be had out there. You just have to be willing to go for the skills that it's going to take to be successful in the future. And I can't comment on whether or not people are going to make more or less than their parents. I think that's on a person by person basis. And frankly, that's outside of the scope of the research that we've done. And so I would just be giving my own opinions and conjecture at that point. But to say the American dream is dead, I would just say the American dream is being modified before our eyes. And it's important to have the facts about that and then be able to be proactive so that you can choose the career and the skills that you need to be successful in the future. I mean, there is a stark message that's being communicated. And this data is, again, things that we've never faced in the history of, you know, since the Industrial Revolution, right? But it doesn't mean that there's not positive futures out there to be had for, you know, the individuals who understand what's going on and take the right steps and next actions. Yeah, I think that's a much softer landing for us, Cole, than the American dream is dead. So I think that's a great place for us to put a pin in today's episode. So I'll leave it with a, probably, hopefully the easiest question of all. And, you know, I'd say, you know, where can people learn a little bit more about you and lightcast? Yeah, this isn't going to be a little bit more intensive a conversation than I was expecting, but I've enjoyed it. So, yeah, you can find me, Cole Napper on LinkedIn and, you know, obviously looking to lightcast, looking to the workforce risk, looking to the demographic drought, the rising storm, the speed of skill change, all of those are out there and free and available to anyone, you know, look into these things. Because this, again, this information is notable. And also, you know, check out Directionally Correct. It's a lot more funny than this conversation we've just been having. Yeah, let's do it. And the American dream is not dead on Directionally Correct. Well, thanks, Cole. It's been a great, great episode, great conversation. And, yeah, hey, like, you know, sometimes we like asking hard questions, like, but like, hey, we're super excited about the future too. And we'll link everything from lightcast and the show notes for you to all. So, thanks for joining. Thank you for having me. All right. Thanks for tuning in. As always, head on over to changestate.io or shoot us a note on all the social media. We'd love to hear from you and we'll check you guys next week. [BLANK_AUDIO]