The big picture: Putting the country back to work will require vast amounts of retraining and career shifting, as former bartenders learn to code and former cruise ship workers look for jobs at data centers.
- The U.S. is still unprepared to take that on at scale.
- "We knew artificial intelligence was going to devastate jobs," says Plinio Ayala, CEO of the job training company Per Scholas. "But, frankly, I thought that was five or seven years away."
- "The pandemic accelerated that. The number of jobs that existed before the pandemic will not be the same number after, and most of those jobs were occupied by people of color and women."
- "I’m concerned about a real uneven recovery."
Keep reading.