News Updates

Middle skill job opportunities declined across peer metropolitan areas

A growing body of research sheds light on how the nature of work is changing. The skills that workers need to access and retain quality jobs are changing. Job creation is increasingly concentrated in occupations on the high and low end of the skill distribution. Researchers attribute these changes to a number of national and regional factors. In the Chicago region, technology, demographic shifts, and deindustrialization had large impacts on employment trends. 

Yet, these factors are not unique to metropolitan Chicago. Most metropolitan regions across the U.S. experienced varying degrees of labor market polarization with the rapid influx of technology in the workplace, shifts towards a service-dominated economy, and reshuffling of the population by age, race, and ethnicity. Understanding how employment in other regions have responded to these forces illuminates both the resilience and inclusiveness of the Chicago region’s economy. 

This policy update compares patterns of job polarization in metropolitan Chicago to peer regions including Los Angeles, New York, and Washington, D.C. Findings reveal a shared challenge across all four regions: falling employment share in middle skill jobs. The unique industrial mix of each region helps to explain variations in how job polarization played out across the nation. Advancements in technology, paired with structural shifts, drove many of these employment trends and had significant impacts on production occupations. Regions with a historical concentration of manufacturing employment exhibit pronounced shifts.

This policy update is the third in a series examining occupation and employment patterns in metropolitan Chicago over the past several decades. The first policy update examined labor market trends at the national level and reviewed economic research explaining these trends. The second honed in on how our unique industrial mix and workforce shaped employment trends in the region. This third update compares shifts in peer metropolitan areas.