Too Many Well-Paid Middle-Skills Jobs, Not Enough Credentials

Nationwide, colleges and job-training providers aren’t producing enough credentials to meet future workforce needs in high-paying middle-skills careers—remunerative jobs that don’t require a bachelor’s degree, such as sales manager or firefighter. But such credential shortages may offer an opportunity to close racial and gender equity gaps in lucrative fields, according to a new report from Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce.

The report defines high-paying middle-skills jobs as roles that require only an associate degree or certificate and earn early-career workers more than $55,000 per year; midcareer workers in these jobs earn median annual wages of $83,300. The report identifies five types of middle-skills jobs that tend to yield high earnings: blue-collar work, protective services, management and professional office roles, health care, and STEM fields.

The report notes that such careers are relatively rare; only 15 percent of middle-skills occupations qualify as high-paying, but they’re ripe with opportunity because they’re projected to need many workers in the years ahead. Other than health-care jobs, which increasingly require a bachelor’s degree, high-paying middle-skills fields are facing major workforce gaps. The report found annual shortages of almost 712,000 certificates and associate degrees aligned with these fields, an imbalance that is expected to persist through 2032.

Emma Nyhof McLeod, co-author of the report and senior policy analyst at Georgetown CEW, said it’s important to inform students about the potential these fields offer, because they’re “often overlooked”—even though they require low up-front educational costs, yield potentially high payoffs and help meet demand in the job market.

For example, “we’re seeing these massive shortages in blue-collar work”—where there’s an annual credential shortage of 360,800—“and I think historically, that’s been an area that maybe people haven’t paid as much attention to, or people don’t see that as an area for opportunity,” McLeod said.

And women seem to be especially likely to overlook or be denied access to such careers, according to the report.

Disparities and Opportunities

The report found significant racial and gender disparities when it comes to who earns relevant credentials and goes into high-paying middle-skills occupations.

For example, white women and Black men are the least likely to hold credentials aligned with high-paying blue-collar jobs, the report found. White men—and Black women by a small margin—are overrepresented in these jobs relative to what would be expected based on the credentials they hold. Men hold 93 percent of well-paid blue-collar roles, such as mechanic or first-line supervisor for construction, and white men alone hold two-thirds of these jobs.

For management and professional office roles, women are more likely than men to earn middle-skills credentials, which often lead to lower-paying occupations in the field. They’re less likely than men to earn the relevant credentials that align with better-paying careers, like project manager specialists or sales managers. Broken down by gender and race, Asian men and women are the most likely to earn credentials aligned with these high-paying jobs, and Hispanic men and women are the least likely. But the share of white men who occupy such professional roles is 1.7 times higher than what would be expected based on the credentials they earned. Asian women’s share of these roles, by comparison, is only 29 percent of the share expected based on their credentials.

Men also earn the majority of middle-skills credentials for high-paying STEM occupations, like web and software developers, and account for 86 percent of workers in these fields. Black women and men, Latina women and white women are all underrepresented in such jobs relative to the credentials they earn. Latina, Black and white women are also underrepresented in well-paid protective services occupations, like police work and firefighting, as are Latino men and Asian men.

A range of factors account for these disparities, including who’s exposed to and encouraged to consider certain fields and who completes credentials, said McLeod, noting that college completion rates still lag for underrepresented students. But credential distribution isn’t the only factor.

Disparities also crop up in “the transition from getting the credential to the workforce,” McLeod added. “Bias in hiring and promotion or work environments that are not welcoming to underrepresented groups may keep those groups from entering those jobs in the first place or impact retention within those jobs as well.”

Jeffrey Strohl, co-author of the report and director of the Georgetown CEW, said closing gender and racial gaps will be critical for filling future workforce shortages in these fields.

The report estimated that to distribute credentials for high-paying, middle-skills jobs equitably and fill projected workforce shortages, every racial, ethnic and gender group would need to increase the number of credentials they’re earning. That means Black men would need to up the blue-collar credentials they earn by 782 percent annually, for example, and Latina women would need to increase their credentials for management and professional office roles by 146 percent per year.

“This idea of equity is no longer a social nicety, it’s an economic imperative,” Strohl said.

The report argues that projected shortfalls in credentials relative to workforce demand offer an opportunity for a wider range of people to get into such jobs. It offers a slew of policy recommendations for colleges to increase access to high-paying middle-skills occupations, including collecting better labor market data and making it available to students to help inform their career decisions and incorporating career guidance into academic advising.

It also recommends that institutions and employers offer work-based learning opportunities to expose young people to high-paying middle-skills careers and encourages employers to address bias or discrimination in the workplace that could make future employees feel unwelcome. The report suggests strengthening transfer pathways from community colleges as well, given that many middle-skills credentials don’t lead to high-paying jobs, and some fields, like healthcare, increasingly require a bachelor’s degree for better-paying roles.

“Our underinvestment in the community college sector has just got to stop,” Strohl said, so two-year institutions can better align their programs to workforce needs and beef up their transfer pipelines. If students earn certificates or associate degrees that don’t align to jobs, and then they struggle to transfer to earn a bachelor’s, “we’re wasting massive amounts of human talent.”

The report’s national findings might not perfectly map onto every regional economy, said McLeod, but she hopes it’s a “starting point” for institutions and local policymakers to ask themselves which high-paying middle-skills careers are in high demand in their communities and to what extent local credential providers are filling those needs.

The goal is to make sure “that everyone’s communicating with each other, and then giving that data to students so they can make the most informed decision possible,” she said.