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Jobs for the Future Is Your Partner for Advancing Job Quality in Your Community
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The Need

Too many workers labor at jobs that don’t offer competitive pay, benefits, stability, opportunities for growth, and a safe, supportive, engaging work environment. People who face barriers to economic advancement are more likely to experience these challenges. If we want to drive economic success for people, businesses, and communities, a focus on connecting people to quality jobs, and not just any job, is a necessity.

What We Know About Job Quality

More than half of the people in the U.S. labor force—92 million workers—don’t have a quality job and face barriers to economic advancement. Nearly half of the occupations projected to see the fastest growth between 2021 and 2031—including frontline positions in health care and the service and transportation industries—don’t meet our quality standards based on compensation levels. And there are far too many jobs, with little opportunity for career or economic advancement, that employers could make into quality jobs but don’t.

 

The data below comes from JFF’s Quality Jobs Survey conducted by Morning Consult.  

Why, As A Community Leader, Should I Take Action?

As a leader in your community you care about:

Creating a vibrant local economy

When people like their jobs, they stay longer and are more productive, helping businesses perform better. 

Diverse group of women are nursing or medical students at local university

Building trust with your community 

Job quality is an issue that can bring many stakeholders to the table to engage, learn from each other, and create lasting change. 

Team building, workshop participants in small group discussion, brainstorming during business workshop class

Attracting financial resources to support your important work 

The federal government, many states, and philanthropy are including requirements and criteria around job quality in their grant opportunities. 

Diverse Male and Female Warehouse Inventory Managers Talking, Using Laptop Computer and Checking Retail Stock. Rows of Shelves Full of Cardboard Box Packages in the Background.

Keeping up with and staying relevant within a quickly changing economy 

Job quality is more important than ever: for workers demanding higher wages and better benefits, employers seeking to retain employees, and in light of new technologies like AI that are changing our relationships with work.

Asian Indian woman in wheelchair trying VR goggle during business conference seminar in convention center

Using powerful data to inform decision-making and influence stakeholders 

Job quality can help us move beyond historical metrics of success, think more deeply, and be more effective at supporting workers and learners. 

Caucasian businesswoman standing in front of a transparent screen in a modern office. Analyzing business data on screen using a smartphone.

Why JFF?

We are committed to achieving our North Star goal: By 2033, 75 million Americans facing barriers to economic advancement will have quality jobs. We can’t do it alone. We need your help to reach this goal together.

Our Approach: Community Co-Design of Quality Jobs

As workforce leaders ourselves, we are learning how to identify and confront the challenges baked into our policies, procedures, and practices. As part of this shift, we recognize that the transformed labor market has left our current models of training workers and connecting them to employment inadequate for the communities we serve. JFF is collaborating with communities to deploy approaches grounded in human-centered design and worker voice. 


WhyJFF-Icons-01   Community-Informed Research

We believe it’s imperative to partner with workers on what job quality means to them. In the same way that worker voice encourages practitioners to involve people most impacted by decisions to be involved in the research and development process, JFF is committed to engaging our community—those closest to the problem—to define job quality in a clear and impactful way and identify concrete, tangible approaches for improving it within your communities. 

 

WhyJFF-Icons-02   Community-Wide Strategic Alignment 

Advancing job quality in your community can’t be an isolated effort. We believe that an engaged, empowered, broad coalition is best positioned to advance job quality in any region. By uniting partners around a shared definition, common goals, and a preliminary strategy, we can gain community-wide traction, convene more effective partnerships, advance policy, and secure funding to move key job quality priorities. 

 

WhyJFF-Icons-03   Iteration and Prototyping  

We know that there is no one-size-fits-all model for implementing job quality initiatives. Iteration is a critical principle in this work. Rapid prototyping helps reduce those costs and allows leaders to fail fast and pivot to test better solutions quickly. 

The Double Diamond Model:

Double-Diamond-Model-SS_3

Adapted from the Nielsen Norman Group

How to Define a Quality Job

In 2023, JFF developed a framework providing a comprehensive definition of a quality job that highlights what all workers deserve in addition to good pay and benefits—the flexibility, autonomy, stability, and advancement opportunities that are essential for people to thrive. 

One thing is clear: Employers must provide for their employees’ most basic needs, and that starts with offering fair and equitable compensation, which means paying all workers a living wage that enables them to comfortably support themselves and their dependents at the local cost of living in their communities.

In addition to compensation, the JFF Quality Jobs Framework identifies three other elements that are essential components of a quality job and a quality workplace: advancement, structure, and agency and culture.

Quality Jobs Framework Overview - Square

The framework provides a comprehensive definition of quality jobs that goes beyond the foundational elements of pay and benefits to offer a more comprehensive picture of what every worker needs: flexibility, belonging, autonomy, stability, and pathways to advancement.

Our Impact

Job Quality Champions: Communities Leading the Way

EmplyIndy Logo

 EmployIndy’s initial efforts in entering the Job Quality Academy focused on expanding career pathways in Marion County's construction industry. The program prioritized increasing access, skills acquisition, and career advancement opportunities for 18-to-30-year-olds who have been underrepresented in this sector.

Through collaboration with team members and partners, it emerged that four critical sub-sectors—HVAC, carpentry, plumbing, and electrical—presented their own unique challenges and approaches. Their consensus was that they needed regional alignment to effectively address these sector-specific disparities.

For their next steps, the EmployIndy team will undertake a thorough review of existing adult education models to assess the necessity for local enhancements, the potential requirement for additional resources to expand programs, and to identify which new partners should be involved to advance these objectives.

This ongoing evaluation and iterative alignment is crucial for addressing future educational demand and catalyzing the regional development of quality jobs.
Kentucky Workforce Innovation Board_Logo

 

The Kentucky Workforce Innovation Board invested in actively engaging stakeholders through participatory research efforts. They orchestrated a statewide listening tour, gathering insights from a wide range of partners, including employers, public officials, and employees.

This collaborative approach helped to distill essential themes for strategic state planning. Additionally, they’ve effectively incorporated a variety of perspectives into their teaming model. Their signature “Job Quality Champions” meetings, designed to broaden community engagement beyond their core team, included vibrant dialogues on recognizing employer credentials.

By thoroughly preparing and welcoming many contributions, they’ve made significant strides in job quality efforts and fostered a collective sense of ownership over job quality principles.

Ultimately, the Kentucky Workforce Innovation Board identified small and medium manufacturers as their primary market to focus on and will explore developing tools to help educate employers about job quality.
Commonwealth of PA_Logo

 

The Pennsylvania State Workforce Board integrated principles from the JFF Quality Jobs Framework into its state-level request for proposals (RFP) for industry partnership grants.

Many team members from the Job Quality Academy, who also influence state policy, contributed to incorporating the framework’s four core tenets: Compensation, Advancement, Agency and Culture, and Structure. Proposals that incorporated these elements received additional points, reinforcing the state’s commitment to embedding the tenets of quality jobs within their procurement process.
Workforce Snohomish_Logo

 

Higher Education Coordinating Commission_Logo

 

Workforce Snohomish and the Oregon Higher Education Coordinating Commission, representing separate Washington and Oregon teams, had identified many of the same industries to focus their job quality work on: construction, manufacturing, information technology, and health care.  

Seeing that Workforce Snohomish and the Oregon Higher Education Coordinating Commission shared not only industries but also many of the same stakeholders, given their geographic proximity, they joined forces mid-academy.

A pivotal leader in Workforce Southwest Washington, located on the state border and serving stakeholders in both states, emerged as a crucial connector between the two states, effectively uniting organizations from across the state line with similar goals and ecosystems. 

This key organization’s central role and broad network of cross-state partners helped foster a more collaborative and impactful coalition of organizations and agencies. What’s more, this cross-state workforce system alignment is now a key focus of their job quality work, which aims to use the levers of policy and empowerment to achieve their aims.

Take Action

JFF and our collaborators are piloting and scaling implementation models that improve job quality around the country. Wherever you are in your job quality journey, we can help you and your community advance your vision.

Seed ideas and connect with peers in the Job Quality Solutions Lab:
The Job Quality Solutions Lab is a half-day co-design experience that uses real-world challenges to crowdsource and share potential solutions. We do this by:

  • Designing (slightly) fictionalized scenarios for different personas (state workforce agency admin, regional nonprofit director, small business owner, etc.). 
  • Running a facilitated design-thinking exercise with like-minded leaders to assess challenges and generate new solutions. 
  • Hosting the universe of co-created solutions in a virtual library (coming soon).
  • Hosting “train-the-trainer" sessions for leaders to facilitate Solution Labs in their communities. 
  • Customizing Solution Labs experiences for your unique community. 

Accelerate your solutions with the Job Quality Action Lab: 
Based on the Job Quality Academy experience JFF hosted in 2023, the Job Quality Action Lab is a two-and-a-half-day team-based intensive meant to take job quality ideas from concept to reality.  We do this by:

  • Facilitating a series of design-thinking exercises around assembling a core team of committed stakeholders, identifying customer and community needs, identifying points of leverage and impact, and how to measure success.
  • Learning from innovators in workforce development and education who’ve made significant progress in advancing job quality in their work. 
  • Supporting teams with tailored tools and 1:1 coaching.
  • Rapidly testing, receiving peer feedback, and iterating on potential strategies unique to your needs.

Contact us to learn more about how JFF can customize a Job Quality Action Lab experience for your community, region, or state. 

Join Us

Through projects like those, JFF and collaborators are piloting and scaling implementation models that improve job quality around the country. In the spirit of co-design, connect with us to provide feedback on tools, help us iterate our approach to advancing quality jobs, or just learn more about this ongoing work.