The future of skills, knowledge, work, and labor
A 10,000 foot view of themes and potential opportunities
Introduction
For over a decade, I’ve been fascinated by labor markets - the entire cycle of how we develop skills, find work to use those skills, and work more productively. I saw firsthand how much better we could connect job seekers and employers while working for the CEO of Assured Labor, a mobile-first job marketplace in Mexico and Brazil. Then, while building Mobilize, I became obsessed with how teams could become more productive. After our successful acquisition, I’m now returning to my roots, digging back into the rapidly changing world of work, labor and knowledge.
This piece outlines a 10,000-foot overview of innovations underway, and opportunities across the spectrum of human capital development to how we work. It has been refined with a lot of input from experts in HR tech, founders, great investors, and lots of primary research and reading reports by Bain and others. It also builds on fantastic writing by people like Mercedes Bent and Pietro Invernizzi.
I started this first as a messy working doc to structure my own thinking. I decided to publish it to get wider feedback on it, and because I hope it is a helpful reference to other investors and founders who are interested in this space. I plan to follow it up with insights from an ongoing series of user interviews I am doing to refine these theses.
This is an incredibly large surface area: we are talking about dozens of individual categories of software and services that add up to tens of billions of dollars of technology and recruiting spend; as well as efforts to maximize the investment in $8.9 trillion dollars paid in wages annually in the US, and trillions more globally. What’s exciting about this scale - and overwhelming - is that even just 1% shifts in behavior can cause massive dislocation, disruption, and opportunity.
So, why try to wrap all of this together? Underpinning the shift around work are a related set of trends: the skills needed in the labor market are changing as knowledge work becomes more pervasive and automation increases; COVID accelerated a shift to virtual and remote work; a tight labor market has increased costs to employers (and drove up the value of increased productivity, the ability to cultivate talent internally, etc.); and employee preferences and demands are shifting as narratives around work change.
And many opportunities result at the intersection of these trends. For example, the acceleration of hiring global distributed teams is accelerated by the accumulation of talent in frontier markets, the increased willingness to work remotely, and tight labor markets causing people to look for alternatives.
I break trends into 5 themes across the full lifecycle of the workforce:
Change how we build skills before and in the labor market
The search for new sources of talent
HR to People: changes in the stack that powers recruiting, employee experience, & workforce planning
Make workers more productive, especially in a remote world
New labor relations
For each of these themes, I highlight key trends, key companies and venture-backed startups, and some preliminary areas of potential opportunity.
Hope you enjoy! Please share any companies I have missed, and anything you think I’ve gotten wrong. And please reach out if you’re also investing or building in this space - I’d love to talk!
Contents
Change how we build skills before and in the labor market
Improve K-12 and higher education outcomes and tailor to the modern economy
In between job “level-ups” and “career changes”
On-the-job upskilling
The search for new sources of talent
Go global
Connect to, manage, and serve contractors
Experiments with new talent structures
Tapping into expertise inside and outside the enterprise
HR to People: changes in the stack that powers recruiting, employee experience, & workforce planning
Changing face of recruitment: marketplace proliferation, assessment, and automation
Imperatives to manage the employee lifecycle towards retention
Sprawling benefits options create employee wins, new challenges
New tech stacks: unlocked HCM data, people analytics, and horizontal platforms
Make workers more productive, especially in a remote world
Horizontal productivity tools to reduce work about work
Vertical productivity tools
New labor relations
DEI Imperatives
Pro labor structures
1. Change how we build skills before and in the labor market
The skills that workers need are changing rapidly, increasing the premium placed on being able to efficiently cultivate new capabilities - both niche skills that will command highest returns, as well as generalizable and automation-resistant social-emotional skills.
Improve K-12 and higher education outcomes and tailor to the modern economy.
📖Overview: The US education system is expensive, produces persistent achievement gaps, and does not sufficiently teach skills and capabilities (like creativity, empathy) that will be needed for the modern economy. Globally, poor educational outcomes are common. At the same time, parents are getting more involved in their children’s education and there is a resurgent interest in competency-based and Montessori-style education that may have a better hope to produce the flexible workers of the future.
Companies are confronting these challenges and trends by: launching products for existing school and educational contexts to improve education outcomes, involve parents, and to improve classroom experiences; providing supplementary educational content - including peer-to-peer learning; or directly replacing existing education systems. However, there is a long and mixed track record for new technologies, which continues to create some headwinds for the sector.
📈Select companies: Udemy; Coursera; Maven; Wayfinder; Subject; Homeroom; Outschool; Juni Learning; Polgence; Riipen; Higher Ground Education; Kritik; Microverse; Noon Academy; Brainly; GetSetUp; Bloom Institute; Campus.org; Prenda; Prisma; ilk; Colearn Club; Caribou; BrainPOP; ClassDojo; Zigazoo; Primer; ABCMouse
✨Opportunities:
Focus on teachers: Education tech spend is large and doesn’t have winner-take-all dynamics, so new solutions to a range of in-class challenges can win with product-led-growth targeting teachers - such as receiving, processing, and providing feedback on homework, and synthesizing where students are falling behind.
Parent engagement: Build more solutions for parents to manage their child’s education, from picking schools, homework management, engaging with teachers, and understanding progress
Education personalization: Enable better education personalization through smart nudges to parents, teachers, and students - especially leveraging data from the myriad of apps and games that students use.
In between job “level-ups” and “career changes”
📖Overview: 400 to 800m people globally will have their jobs lost to automation by 2030, and of these 75m will need to switch career tracks entirely. Beyond automation as a driver, in a tight labor market, people are finding ways to build new skills between jobs to “level up” (e.g. teaching an existing engineer a new coding language); as well as “career changes” - building a new set of skills entirely. There are some career paths where the skills gap is small enough to be filled quickly (e.g. sales, getting a commercial driver’s license); or others, like engineering, where the payoff is high enough to incent individuals to invest for longer. Funding this with new innovative mechanisms like Income Sharing Agreements may not be fruitful.
📈Select companies: CareerKarma; Ramped; Climb Hire; Platzi; FutureFitAI; Placement; What’s Next; On Deck; UpSmith; Lambda (Bloom Institute)
✨Opportunities:
Verticalized training: There will be many new vertical solutions that require domain expertise, often combining both training, coaching, community and placement (as UpSmith is for technical careers like electricians, or Career Karma is for tech-sector jobs).
Destination for career switchers: There will be a winning horizontal offering to be the go-to destination for career switchers between any two careers, integrating assessment, labor market data, skills building, and placement, likely leveraging 3rd party content and/or a marketplace of trainers.
On-the-job upskilling
📖Overview: The corporate Learning & Development market will reach an astounding $400B by 2025, and is comprised of a very varied landscape of software and training offerings. As the pace of automation changes, employees demand more upward mobility, and labor markets tighten, companies are increasingly looking to cultivate their existing workers with new skills - as well as creating “talent marketplaces”, whereby existing employees can uncover ways to leverage their skills internally.
Innovative start-ups in this space are generally a mix of: content platforms/marketplaces; coaching marketplaces; communities, or some combination of all of these. The challenge for these new players is proving ROI, and having companies invest in skills-building that has long payback periods of 18-36 months (especially as unanticipated churn also increases).
📈Select companies: EduMe; Coursera; Udemy; Centrical; LinkedIn Learning; Bravely; BetterUp; Degreed; Reforge; FlockJay; Techwolf.ai; Eightfold.ai
✨Opportunities:
Go after employee’s flexible L&D budgets: Leverage individual employee L&D budgets with ROI-proven learning solutions, especially that combine community, great content, and new delivery mechanisms (e.g. gamification, bite-sized content).
2. The search for new sources of talent
With an incredibly tight labor market, an increasing ability to hire anywhere, and a focus on creating greater workplace diversity and inclusion, companies are looking to talent sources that they may have previously overlooked. On both sides of the equation - the employer and employee - there is an increased focus on flexibility.
Go global
📖Overview: While offshore Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) and outsourcing have always been a big markets, offshoring is moving up-market into more skilled roles - and globally-hired talent is being more fully integrated into teams. Companies are being built from the ground up as globally distributed companies; as well as established companies looking to complement HQ teams with globally remote employees, taking advantage of cost differences. Innovative startups are helping with sourcing talent in select verticals, and managing the remote hiring process. This is still held back by a lack of signal to identify top-tier talent, and complexities around managing and building culture for globally integrated teams.
📈Select companies: Deel; Remote.com; Turing; Andela; Decagon; Jobbatical; Omnipresent; Papaya
✨Opportunities:
Build more global engineering talent networks: Engineering outsourcing likely won’t be winner-takes-all, leaving significant room to complement and compete with players like Andela & Turing in engineering
Community & talent networks for non-engineering roles: Apply the Andela/Turing playbook to sourcing, screening and placing non-engineering roles with global talent, such as marketing, design, success and support, and some sales roles (e.g. SDRs). Building mentorship and community around this talent could provide significant leverage.
Create the starting point for hiring globally: There is no clear starting point today if I am open to hiring roles globally: where do I allocate certain roles based on talent density, cost and time zone, and how do I connect with local talent? Solutions here might combine workforce planning tools, labor market data, and a marketplace for finding recruiters in target geographies.
Connect to, manage, and serve contractors
📖Overview: 36% of the US workforce completed some sort of freelance or gig work in 2021, with significant growth among the most educated (51% of post-grad workers have freelanced), and non-temporary freelancing. This trend is projected to continue throughout the decade as people desire flexibility and earnings growth.
Freelancers and gig workers have unique needs around benefits and administrative support (e.g. taxes), income smoothing, in addition to managing their projects effectively. From the perspective of enterprises engaging them, platforms like Upwork have made it easier to find contractors that have good reputations and have completed similar projects. Platforms like Upwork have tried to integrate marketplaces with communication and workflow management to help enterprises manage contractors, although it’s unclear how successful they’ve been.
📈Select companies: Fiverr; Upwork; BrainTrust; Work Market; Payable; Pilot; Connecteam; Argyle; Catch; Freelancer’s Union; Azal.io; TopTal; Freelancer’s Union; Opolis.co; Lili; A.Team
✨Opportunities:
Freelance project management: The delivery of high-end freelance work is highly bespoke, and causes a lot of reinvention; creating better workflow tools that incorporate different project documents, manage timelines, would help reduce the cost of delivery and increase the total market size. A platform could also potentially include a repository of previously utilized templates for scope and project timelines, and even deliverables (scrubbed of confidential information).
Benefits for freelancers: Continuing to innovate on benefits, administrative and financial services for freelancers will be essential and a major opportunity, including potentially creating a fully integrated “financial and insurance hub” for freelancers, with banking, tax, and benefits in one destination.
Experiments with new talent structures
📖Overview: Employers are looking to create new talent pipelines - especially tapping into historically overlooked populations and those without college degrees. Employers are turning to apprenticeships and role sharing, to cultivate talent internally and create more flexibility for workers.
📈Select companies: Multiverse; RoleShare; Handoff; Fractional Leadership; A.Team
✨Opportunities:
Internships: Expand the market for paid and unpaid internships and education-connected learning opportunities by making it easier for students to discover opportunities, enterprises to discover and vet students; some set of standardized mentorship and work-ready training would also reduce the cost of bringing on interns.
Tapping into expertise inside and outside the enterprise
📖Overview: Knowledge work and know-how is at the center of the economy and firm productivity - increasing the returns to an individual’s knowledge, and consequently, making it more expensive for firms to bring expertise in-house full time. This has been a boon for consulting, market research, and expert networks.
Making specialized knowledge accessible to firms and their employees, sits at the nexus of two trends included here: firms looking to build skills and knowledge internally, and the shift to freelance and contractor work, where individuals look to monetize their expertise in new ways. Many enterprises are deploying talent marketplaces and skills taxonomies to measure the skills and knowledge present in their organizations. Strategies here overlap with companies’ L&D approaches.
New solutions that further aggregate and systematize human knowledge, and make it cheaper to access, will not only produce outsized opportunities, but accelerate human progress.
📈Select companies: GLG; Alphasights; Office Hours; Tegus; Maven; Reforge; Polywork; Numetrix; FlockJay; Techwolf.ai; Eightfold.ai; Degreed
✨Opportunities:
Improve enterprise search: Enterprises still struggle to identify who knows what (and who) internally - and end up building iterations of their own bespoke knowledge bases. Winning solutions will intake the highest value data (knowledge graph of employees, knowledge base, all key files, calendar, email), and develop killer use cases. It is possible that inevitable solutions here will be very segmented by industry, or start at the level of very narrow use cases (e.g. identifying in-house experts on a given topic).
“Enterprise Quora”: Strengthen expertise across enterprises by building a professional community + high quality user-generated and company-generated content. This would likely have to be built vertically (e.g. start with sales managers). It could also be possible to build out a marketplace of consultants and solutions, that use the marketplace and content platform as lead gen.
3. HR to People: changes in the stack that powers recruiting, employee experience, and workforce planning
“People” teams are becoming increasingly professionalized, well resourced, and strategic. All steps of the talent lifecycle are being driven by increasing sophistication: from planning the organization, to sourcing, assessment and hiring, to managing and analyzing the employee experience and skillset.
Changing face of recruitment: marketplace proliferation, assessment, and automation
📖Overview: The changes in recruitment technology mirror the evolution of the marketing and sales technology stack, with greater degrees of process and sophisticated candidate marketing automation.
Top pure play online job boards like Recruit’s Indeed, and SEEK’s global properties, continue to have an outsized traffic footprint, causing others to innovate. Job marketplaces are increasingly shifting into cost-per-acquisition, as well as integrating screening, assessment and applicant tracking systems - and in some cases, even training. Additionally, many new vertical marketplaces have been launched, focused on certain industries, or job categories (e.g. hourly). The natural gravity of recruitment marketplaces is either towards low rates of monetization on low quality traffic/applications - or towards becoming a staffing firm, with the associated high cost structure in a people-business. Winning requires being able to integrate other tools (e.g. ATS, assessment), or building truly differentiated worker supply at low cost (e.g. through verticalization, organic candidate growth through word of mouth).
Job boards are also complemented with broader candidate advertising and contingency recruiters - who still play an outsized role in the market and command significant premiums in this market (anecdotally, now up to 25-30% of first-year salary for mid-level placements from 15-20% 12-24 months ago). Once candidates are in a company’s recruitment funnel, they are assessed with more sophisticated and job-specific tools (e.g. engineering-specific assessments) and having their experiences managed carefully, including tools to monitor interviewing quality.
📈Select companies: Fetcher.ai; Gem; Greenhouse; Lever; Fountain; Vangst; Shiftsmart; Adeptid; Hired; Muse; Handshake; Ripplematch; Forage; Instant Teams; Talent.com; Indeed; LinkedIn; Workrise; Workstream; Bite Ninja; Seasoned; Landed; Steady; Triplebyte; Dover; LeetCode; Byteboard; BrightHire; Ashby
✨Opportunities:
Improve the search for contingency firms: There is an opportunity to create a marketplace of recruiting firms that maximizes recruiter utilization and pricing. It’s hard to discover and manage relationships, and budget with contingency recruiters at all levels. There is limited visibility into the talent pools they have access to, real-time availability, and pricing; and challenges around communication and project management (e.g. profile definition). Many recruiting firms have tried to build their own solutions.
Help recruiters optimize their time: Build a best-in-class workflow tool that helps recruiters optimize their spend and effort across channels, and their time managing candidates. Product led growth starting with recruiters, and moving up to win enterprise-wide contracts could be particularly advantageous here.
Integrate upskilling: Continue innovating on integration of training and upskilling into marketplaces, creating differentiated supply of new labor. This could be done by launching new verticalized marketplaces, or building a platform-level offering for recruitment marketplaces to offer assessment and training as a service.
Imperatives to manage the employee lifecycle towards retention
📖Overview: Companies are investing more and more in retaining employees - building more robust processes and deploying tools to help monitor what employees are feeling. In addition to building the “listening” function, managers also play a critical role in this process, as one of the biggest drivers of employee learning and development - and their experience at work.
📈Select companies: Lattice; CultureAmp; Microsoft Viva; Mystery; OnLoop; Range.io; Knack; Humu; inFeedo; Staffbase; Erudit.ai; PeopleLogic
✨Opportunities:
Manager-facing tools to track the employee experience: Equipping managers with a range of easy-to-use tools and predictive analytics on who is at risk of burn-out, and planning a range of interventions (e.g. coordinating comp adjustments, proposed vacation, etc.), would provide a strong way to drive retention. Given existing solutions up-market, a winning approach here would focus on smaller companies, and develop new sources of signal (e.g. Slack engagement, calendar and email detecting working late hours).
Sprawling benefits options create employee wins, new challenges
📖Overview: The benefits that employers are offering has proliferated in response to employee demand. This has the potential to translate into positive outcomes for employees - e.g. better mental health access - while the trend has also overwhelmed People teams managing these benefits, and overwhelmed employees trying to navigate the offerings. These benefits are also purchased in large enterprise contracts on the basis of the total number of employees, irrespective of how many employees end up ultimately using the benefit. As a result, many go unused or underutilized - and leave employers overpaying.
📈Select companies: Collective Health; Lyra; Fond Perks; BrightFunds; Forma; Joon; Nava; Compt
✨Opportunities:
Usage-based benefits: Help HR teams rationalize benefits by measuring usage - and then, on top of those tools, pushing more purchasing into usage-based licensing through a centralized marketplace for benefits.
New tech stacks: unlocked HCM data, people analytics, and horizontal platforms
📖Overview: As enterprises focus more on managing their people, the tech stacks tracking and interacting with employee data have gotten more complicated - and the value in moving, unifying, and analyzing that data has grown.
The early backbone of this has been the shift of core HCM (human capital management) to the cloud with Workday and off Oracle, SAP. Around this cloud ecosystem, a set of point solutions emerged competing for slices of the pie, such as payroll.
New platforms are now focused on “unlocking” HCM data, allowing its usage in new applications, and building rule-based workflows to manage an enterprise, as well as having greater levels of organizational visibility and predictive power. Now, a new set of opportunities is emerging to take advantage of the unlocked data, and help companies drive workforce planning decisions.
📈Select companies: Workday; Rippling; Gusto; Finch; Sage; People; Merge; Visier; TalentNeuron; Burning Glass; inFeedo; Pave; Knoetic; LinkedIn Talent Insights; Lucca; Techwolf; Payhive.ai; The Org
✨Opportunities:
Skills graph: Help enterprises map the skills and knowledge they have internally, through a skills taxonomy, combination of great/sticky UX and automated tracking of skills, integrations into other HCM platforms; this could be just B2B, but the biggest opportunity may be B2B2C, where individual employees can build a public profile. While there are some companies going after this opportunity, there is not yet a category-level winner.
Performance data portability: Performance data is locked up in each company - but should be an asset that individual employees can bring with them across companies, just like their verified skills. Unlocking this data through integrations and an employee- or job-seeker-facing product would be powerful.
Org planning workflow tools: Companies still struggle to coordinate across departments around org design planning - especially when inputs are needed across finance, strategy, HR, and business units. Building a next generation workflow management tool for organization design - combined with analytics around organizational efficiency, or a marketplace of organizational staffing benchmarks - could create outsized value.
Extend predictive people analytics to more companies: While there are a number of people analytics-focused BI tools, robust predictive analytics are out of the reach of most companies to predict things like performance, churn, etc. A platform that allowed organizations to connect their human capital data sources, and tap into a marketplace of models and analytics vendors - trained on the aggregate set of data across all users - would be incredibly powerful.
Quantify productivity: Quantifying productivity of knowledge workers is still an unsolved problem within and across companies - which could allow for the automation of performance management. Unlocking this opportunity will likely require further advances in AI/ML - and may be too far out on the horizon to win in yet.
4. Make workers more productive, especially in a remote world
A lot has been written since the beginning of the pandemic about the shift to remote work since the pandemic - and the consequent massive opportunities and challenges this brings. Unlike in-person work that has had decades (or centuries) of innovation, we are in the first inning or two of remote work - which will create a massive boon to innovation and numerous cycles of creative destruction.
These changes in how enterprises aimed to make workers more productive did not start with the pandemic, though. The increase in knowledge work, deployment of AI/ML in the enterprise led to the first generation of SaaS applications to make enterprises more effective at managing increasingly complex workstreams.
Horizontal productivity & collaboration tools to reduce work about work
📖Overview: "Work about work” (meetings, emails, context switching costs), has proliferated to be 60% of worker’s time, costing employers a massive amount and making work less fun.
Productivity-focused enterprise SaaS aiming to reduce this work-about-work is split across a modern stack of point solutions for communication, project management, document collaboration, conferencing; and Microsoft (and to a lesser extent, Google), going after owning the full enterprise in a unified platform. There are also a range of point solutions for specific workflows (e.g. calendar management, meeting transcription).
This landscape has shifted dramatically due to the need to adapt to virtual and asynchronous work. While chat/email/video conferencing form the core of the “virtual office space” today, there will likely emerge a range of tools that facilitate some type of presence and greater live collaboration to replicate the physical office. More communication will also be asynchronous, especially as teams are more globalized across time zones - leading to new needed workflows around work management.
📈Select companies: MSFT Teams; GSuite; Slack; Asana; Trello; Slack; Zoom; Dropbox & Dropbox Paper; Notion; Guru; Miro; Play.Space; Spokn; Covalent; Roam Research; Figma; GatherRound; Loom; Fireflies.ai; Clockwise; Superhuman
✨Opportunities:
New hybrid forms of asynchronous collaboration: Slack is highly interruptive, documents can be hard to digest, email a poor place to make decisions, and voiceovers are often necessary to create context. In some markets, people turn to WhatsApp as a way to integrate some of these formats. A new platform should build hybrid spaces for project management and collaboration that combine written word, visuals, and audio; creating a seamless way to highlight unresolved issues or open questions, and memorialize decisions.
Improve meetings: Considering how much time we spend in meetings, meetings are still catastrophically bad. A winning solution would improve workflows around preparation and agenda setting, note taking and distribution, ensuring share of voice is representative, tone monitoring, prompting and determining action items, making decisions. A community could potentially also be built around templates for types of meeting.
Vertical productivity tools
📖Overview: Many productivity improvements come through solutions tailored to very specific workflows or use cases - helping structure work to become more repeatable, and surface relevant data and insights.
AI and machine learning has become more accessible and cheap to deploy. Alongside that, increased salaries in sales and engineering, justify increased spending on any technology that improves efficiency.
The most successful vertical productivity tools blend a mix of AI/ML/data analytics, workflow optimization, and recommendations - targeted at specific teams, or industries. The limits of AI and the lack of generalized artificial intelligence for the foreseeable future has meant that building deep data sets around particular types of interactions - such as client conversations - is critical.
📈Select companies: Gong; Clari; Balto.ai; ForethoughtAI; Pendo; Github; Copilot; Cube; Gtmhub; Perdoo; Ally.io
✨Opportunities:
Contextualized decision-making: Asynchronous work (for example, collaborating on decision-making) requires significant investments in ensuring the context is explicit and clear - relevant data, customer and team perspectives, who else is involved in the decision. Massive value could be created by tools that restructure asynchronous work and discussion, allowing for context to be pulled in easily (e.g. metrics, customer conversations). A winning approach here would also likely build out templates of workflows per type of decision - such as a product feature go/no-go, an acquisition - and then add on feedback loops on decision outcomes, predictive analytics based on other similar decisions taken at other organizations. Product approaches here may overlap with more general attempts at improving asynchronous communication.
5. New labor relations
A multi-decade run-up in inequality and stagnant real-dollar salaries, persistent racial and gender bias in labor markets, COVID, and a response to dominant hustle culture, have changed many people’s relationship to work. This has led to a pursuit of more flexibility, high quit rates, a more prevalent narrative of #antiwork, and attempts to exert influence to change employers’ labor practices to be more equitable and employee-friendly.
DEI Imperatives
📖Overview: The murder of George Floyd and the #BlackLivesMatter protests of 2020 have put DEI at the top of the corporate agenda and dramatically increased the spend on efforts to hire and retain diverse talent (for example, new talent structures like role sharing discussed above) - and adopt practices that promote equitable outcomes, especially around interview practices, compensation and performance management. Many existing HR and employee engagement platforms have increased their focus on equity.
However, when it comes to driving results and behavior change, companies are still often shooting in the dark, with limited metrics or transparency - and limited focus on technology that could help drive behavior change.
📈Select companies: Pave; Diversely; Get Optimal; Textio; Broadbean; Unpacking
✨Opportunities:
Build the home for DEI initiatives: A lot of DEI spend goes to expensive training, which lack the longitudinal support to drive behavior change. A home for DEI initiatives would combine employee data from HCM to set goals and report on key diversity metrics, analyze engagement data, facilitate ERGs, could allow for anonymous discussion and issue reporting, and allow employees to tap into curated content on how to handle certain issues. This could also integrate tooling on detecting bias in communication.
DEI practitioner marketplace: The DEI training and consulting industry is notoriously opaque. Building a marketplace to discover the best DEI practitioners could help reduce this opacity. This could also create a vector for DEI practitioners to monetize content.
Pro labor structures
📖Overview: There has been a startingly limited amount of innovation in technology that supports workers and allows them to organize around their priorities. The confluence of a resurgent interest in labor unions - especially independent unions - and a very tight labor market makes for a perfect storm to reverse that.
Themes to unlock include: information transparency - especially as it comes to salary data; aggregating workers into self-directed networks and independent unions; and employee ownership. There are some companies and other initiatives that have started to push in these directions.
DAOs and web3 may also create some additional opportunities to innovate on models of ownership for workers; at a minimum, the interest in DAOs is consistent with the desire of many to be part of collective structures that they have more of a say in.
📈Select companies: Unit; BrainTrust; Glassdoor; OpenCollective; 81cents; coworker.org
✨Opportunities:
Build the AARP for workers: The AARP (a nonprofit) is also one of the biggest organizations in the country, with an annual budget of ~$1.7bn a year, and 38 million members - and provides extensive resources on everything from content and education, to bulk discounts for seniors. A worker-focused membership organization could provide legal support, supplementary health-care benefits, discounts on a range of services, training or retraining, and more.
Employee-led advocacy platform: Current employee engagement is highly top-down, with things like pulse surveys dictating the terms of engagement. Employees should have an easier time surfacing their concerns organically. A successful platform here might allow employees a mechanism to benchmark practices against other companies (to determine where their company’s practices are off-market), organize coworkers and communicate (potentially anonymously or pseudonymously) around workplace issues, vote and register complaints, communicate with company leaders, and build community across other workplaces.
Agents representing workers: Job seekers often struggle to find the best opportunity for them that leverages their skills (or know what skills they could easily acquire), how to position themselves for interviews, and negotiate their salaries. A marketplace of “worker-agents”, would allow workers to easily discover agents who could represent them in their job search process. Agents could take a percentage of the increased salary, or fee for service.