Skills – On-the-job training and continuing education have become just as important as post-secondary schooling

Colleges and vocational schools prepare young adults to enter the job market. But the learning process can’t stop there. With rapid-fire advances in technology bearing down on employers and their workers, on-the-job training and continuing education have become just as important as post-secondary schooling, if not more so. Even workers with advanced college degrees might need to bolster their on-the-job skills. But there’s more to this story than building a future-proof labor force. Employers that invest in continued learning and on-the-job development stand to reap bottom-line benefits that go beyond a well-prepared workforce. Between July 23 and August 6, 2024, we collected data from a stratified, random panel sample of nearly 38,000 working adults across 34 markets.

Forty per cent of respondents identified themselves as knowledge workers, 20 per cent as cycle workers, and 40 per cent as skilled task workers. Two-thirds of respondents reported some level of post-secondary education, ranging from vocational training to advanced professional degrees. The rest had a secondary-school diploma or less. Few of these workers – only 24 per cent – were confident that they have the skills they would need to advance to the next job level in the near future. Education made a difference, but only slightly. Among people with some college or vocational training, 27 per cent believed they have the skills needed to advance in their career, compared to only 18 per cent of people with no post-secondary education. In short, most workers feel ill-equipped to get ahead.

Chosen excerpts by Job Market Monitor. Read the whole story @ People at work 2025: skills development