In this episode of Work in Progress, Matt Sigelman, the CEO of Burning Glass, joins me to discuss which jobs and skills will dominate the post-pandemic economic recovery, one he says will create as many as 18 million jobs over the next five years.

Burning Glass is an analytics company that provides real-time data on job growth, skills in demand, and labor market trends. In its new report, After the Storm: The Jobs and Skills that will Drive the Post-Pandemic Recovery, Burning Glass uses its database of more than one billion current and past job postings to identify societal megatrends it sees at play and shaping the kind of work we’ll be doing in the coming years.

According to Sigelman, each megatrend is creating an identifiable economy:

* The Readiness Economy

* The Logistics Economy

* The Green Economy

* The Automation Economy

* The Remote Economy

In the podcast, Sigelman and I go into details on what forces are driving each of these economies—drilling down on specifics about the jobs that will be most in-demand and the skills you will need to get one of these millions of jobs.

“We see that those five economies are going to grow about twice as fast as the market overall. One in six jobs across the whole job market will wind up being in one of those five economies.”

He says some of the jobs already exist, but are changing, as are skills needed to do them. Some of them don’t exist yet, but are being created out of necessity.

I ask Sigelman to share his thoughts on whether we have enough talent to fill the demand that he and Burning Glass see in the coming years?

“The answer is clearly no. When we think about creating 18 million jobs in five years, that’s a huge challenge,” says Sigelman.

“For us to be able to rise to the level of growth that those economies demand, we’re going to need to really rethink how we bring talent to the market. And that’s a challenge not only for education, not only for government, but it’s a significant challenge for companies who, of course, drive our economy today.”

You can hear more from Sigelman on what he sees as not only a challenge but a huge opportunity for workers and jobseekers in the podcast. Listen here, or download and listen wherever you get your podcasts.

Download the transcript for this podcast here.

Episode 172: Matt Sigelman, CEO, Burning Glass Technologies

Host: Ramona Schindelheim, Editor-in-Chief, WorkingNation

Producer: Larry Buhl

Executive Producers: Joan Lynch, Melissa Panzer, and Ramona Schindelheim

Music: Composed by Lee Rosevere and licensed under CC by 4.0.

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