Labor Mobility

Digital delivery of job training programs and career development services allows educational material to meet a worker where they are, matching their availability or need for specific content, to help them explore, navigate, and grow in their career paths.

Domain Statement

Historically, worker training required meeting in a physical space and at a given time, and it was difficult to tailor worker training to individual circumstances. And yet the limited empirical evidence evaluating worker training programs has typically found only modest success.

We are working on a variety of research projects and collaborations to improve the opportunities for workers to smoothly transition between industries and to achieve better economic outcomes. When workers better understand which programs meet their needs, they make more informed decisions, and in turn, effective training programs are incentivized to expand and better tailor their offerings to those workers who most benefit from their services.

Project Abstracts

Read about some of the labor mobility research projects the lab is working on.

Academic Publications

Publication Search
Working Paper

Estimating Wage Disparities Using Foundation Models

Keyon Vafa, Susan Athey, David Blei
September2024
Working Paper

LABOR-LLM: Language-Based Occupational Representations with Large Language Models

Tianyu Du, Ayush Kanodia, Herman Brunborg, Keyon Vafa, Susan Athey
June2024
Working Paper

The Value of Non-traditional Credentials in the Labor Market

Susan Athey, Emil Palikot
April2024
Journal Article

CAREER: A Foundation Model for Labor Sequence Data

Keyon Vafa, Emil Palikot, Tianyu Du, Ayush Kanodia, Susan Athey, David Blei
Transactions on Machine Learning Research January2024

Interviews & Thought Leadership

Learn firsthand from some of the researchers and practitioners associated with the lab.

Palikot, Assistant Professor of Marketing at Northeastern University and research affiliate of the Golub Capital Social Impact Lab at Stanford GSB, helped DareIT create an online program called Challenges. Program participants build portfolios of guided software projects that allow them to signal their technical skills to potential employers to help them break into the tech sector.