Good Jobs An Agenda for Future Study

The goal of this project was to create a common language and framework for a diverse set of stakeholders who share an interest in understanding and improving job quality as well as to consider economic mobility more explicitly (e.g., worker earnings gains or career advancement) as an outcome in the job quality conversation.

The first part of this brief presents the Urban Institute’s framework for defining job quality. The second lays out several open questions and considerations relevant to conducting job quality research. The concluding section of the brief lays out an agenda of research that could advance the identification and definition of good jobs and build the evidence base of how good jobs relate to worker outcomes, including economic mobility.

This brief draws on three workshops held in the summer of 2020 that invited expert stakeholders with the diverse perspectives and experience necessary to map the frontiers of research, practice, and job quality measurement. Stakeholders represented employers, worker advocacy, academia, and nonprofit organizations and were well-versed in the current opportunities and challenges around creating, sustaining, and scaling quality jobs. The goal of the workshops included laying the groundwork for advancing the researchers’ understanding of “good jobs” and assessing how they might promote economic mobility. This brief synthesizes and incorporates what the researchers learned from the workshops and their research.

(This report is 14 pages long.)

(This research took place in the summer of 2020.)

The researchers proposed the following selected recommendations:

Improve the Study of Specific Job Elements and Job Quality Context

• Focus on Measures of Working Conditions, Culture, and Job Design. The researchers’ review of the literature on the impact of job quality elements uncovered few existing studies that explicitly connect jobs’ working conditions, business culture, and job design to economic well-being measures.
• Connect Job Quality and Racial Equity. Additional study is needed about how job quality and specific job elements differ across racial groups, particularly within occupations and sectors. More evidence of these gaps in quality by race can help target solutions for eliminating barriers and increasing access.
• Study Worker Power, Voice, Engagement, and Control. Workers’ ability to influence elements of job quality in the workplace differs from other job elements because it can improve other aspects of job quality.

Create Infrastructure to Support Job Quality Research

• More Job Measures to Longitudinal Data. Economic mobility occurs over time and requires data that track workers and their situations.
• Collect and Create Data with Multiple Job Quality Elements. It is essential to consider multiple job quality elements to understand potential trade-offs or complementarities.
• Build Infrastructure to Use Employer Proprietary Data. An employer collaborative, a group of interested employers with a research partner, could initiate research studies to test strategies to address job quality challenges in ways that are good for workers and businesses.

Analyze Job Quality Impacts

• Examine Job Quality Trade-Offs. Stakeholders need the information to consider the trade-offs in job quality elements—both those facing employers and choices of interest to workers—and how these trade-offs differ across workers by worker characteristics and circumstances.
• Explore the Relationship of Job Quality to Economic Mobility. The researchers’ prior review found little direct empirical research on the connection of job quality to economic mobility. Most existing research literature focuses on how job quality affects worker outcomes such as income, health, or job satisfaction.
• Measure Career Advancement. Although improvement in earnings is the ultimate goal, efforts to improve worker economic mobility through career pathway advancement often focus on attaining additional education, training, or skills combined with gaining work experience.

• Last Updated:
• Created:
• Resource Publication Date: 2021
• Author(s): Loprest, P.; Katz, B.; Shakesprere, J.
• Funding Source: Urban Institute
• Resource Availability: Publicly available
• Posted by: Wesley Peterson
• Posted in: Workforce System Strategies