Low Wage Does Not Mean Low Skill: Pathways to Mobility for 24 Million Workers Skilled Through Alternative Routes

24 million workers in the U.S labor force without a four-year degree are living in or near poverty, despite the fact that almost all work full- or part-time. These workers represent all demographic groups in the U.S. labor force, though they are disproportionately Black, Hispanic, and female. As a group, they support 21 million children as well as 3.6 million elderly or disabled adults. Here we lay out what pathways to mobility can look like for this target population.
One might assume that the poorest workers have the lowest skill levels in our economy, but our analysis shows this is not true. Consider the Nursing and Home Health Aide. This common entry level job pays a median wage of $13 an hour and is performed by 1.8 million people nationally. Approximately 37% or 650,000 Nursing and Home Health Aides are in our target population.

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A Home Health Aide demonstrates basic skills (including active listening, monitoring, and speaking) as well as important social skills (such as service orientation and social perceptiveness) that employers often say they require in customer facing roles.
The Home Health Aide’s skill set is similar to other jobs that pay more. For example, the Home Health Aide’s skill set overlaps significantly with that of a Medical Assistant, a role that pays 19% more (an additional $2/hour) but is not as commonly held by workers in the target population (reflected by its representation in blue).

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In the image, we compare the Home Health Aide’s skills (shaded purple) to the Medical Assistant’s (outlined in blue). We can see significant overlap in critical skills like active listening, learning strategies, monitoring, speaking, complex problem-solving, personnel management, coordination, and decision-making.
Home Health Aides’ skills position them well for additional skills-based transitions into higher wage work. Here are three more common skills-based job transitions that Home Health Aides have made to achieve a wage gain of 10% or more.
These job-to-job transitions can be sequenced to create pathways. Here we see the first transition in a pathway, from Home Health Aide (the “origin job”) to Medical Assistant (the “destination job”). This transition is a relatively frequent one, as evidenced by the thickness of the line between the two jobs. In the past 10 years, 513 thousand Home Health Aides became Medical Assistants, representing 34% of all job transitions made by Home Health Aides.

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The Medical Assistant job opens up job opportunities that offer further wage gain. Here we see five skills-based transitions to higher wage destination jobs that we observed for Medical Assistants. The most common higher-wage destination jobs for Medical Assistants include Dental Assistants and Physical Therapy Assistants.
These pathways offer upward economic mobility to workers in low- and middle-wage jobs, but our analysis shows that there is work to do to make these pathways more accessible to the target population. As shown, our target population is more likely to be overrepresented in low-wage origin jobs (indicated in purple). They are less likely to be working in higher wage jobs (indicated in blue), even when there is significant skill overlap. Over the course of these pathways, we see declining numbers of target population (as evidenced by the shrinking yellow circle). We also often see declining numbers of female and BIPOC workers across the pathways.

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Here we see that while workers transition from Home Health Aide to Medical Assistant and on to higher paying jobs, the proportion of women and BIPOC workers in those jobs steadily declines. While women represent 89% of all Home Health Aides, they are only 70% of Physical Therapy Assistants. The decline is steeper for BIPOC workers, who make up 54% of Home Health Aides and only 26% of Occupational Therapy Assistants.

Our analysis of observed labor market transitions paints a compelling picture of pathways that workers can navigate towards higher wages. They also offer insights into where employers can look for skilled talent to fill middle- and high-wage jobs. To provide greater insight into skills-based transitions that offer workers pathways to higher wages, we created the Job Pathways Exploration Tool.

The tool allows you to choose an origin job of interest, using filters to focus on jobs by wage and demographics, and explore three potential pathways for that job. The “most common” pathway shows the five most commonly observed transitions made from the origin job that yield at least a 10% wage increase. The “next best job” shows up to five jobs that are within reach based on the level of skill similarity. These transitions are often less common but have been observed in the labor market and provide a wage gain of at least 25%. Finally, the “stretch job” shows up to five transitions to jobs that yield at least a 50% wage gain. These jobs may require a skilling intervention to achieve them but have been observed with sufficient frequency over the past 10 years to consider them attainable. For each initial job transition, we also show one commonly observed follow-up transition to demonstrate one possible pathway across three jobs. Below the pathways, we provide an illustration of the skillsets and skill overlaps across these jobs.

Methodology

Our target population of 24 million people is derived from the civilian, non-institutionalized labor force aged 16 or older. These individuals are not currently enrolled in school, have less than a bachelor’s degree, and have family incomes below two times the Federal poverty line. The poverty line for a single individual in 2019 was $13,011.

Information on these workers' employment, demographics, and wages come from the 2019 1-year American Community Survey. Information on the skills needed for a given occupation come from the Occupational Information Network (O*NET) 26.0 Database. The 2011 to 2020 Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplements provide information on observed year-to-year job transitions over the past 10 years. These sources are combined based on harmonized occupation codes developed by the Minnesota Population Center Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS). All wage estimates are in 2019 dollars.

All job transitions shown in this tool offer at least a 10 percent wage increase and have been made by at least 2,000 workers over the past 10 years. We limit transitions to only those where individuals without a bachelor’s degree make up at least 2 percent of workers in both the origin and destination job.

We determine the feasibility of a job transition based on the skill distance across origin and destination jobs. Skills-based transitions are those where the Euclidean distance across the 35 skill dimensions is 2.5 or less, indicating a strong overlap in the importance of skills across jobs. Stretch transitions are defined as transitions that offer higher wage gains (at least 50 percent) but which may require training interventions due to a skill distance of 3.0 or greater.

We identify occupations where our target population is overrepresented if the labor force in that occupation is at least 50 percent higher than in the overall workforce.

We identify Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) workers as those who report being non-White, multi-racial, or Hispanic.