‘Older workers continue to experience great difficulty in securing positions commensurate with their skills and experience’

Reflections on the big issues shaping our workforce in the coming year from our WorkingNation Advisory Board

December 10, 2023

We asked our WorkingNation Advisory Board to share their thoughts on the most important issues and challenges facing the workforce and the labor market in 2024.

Gary A. Officer is president and CEO at the Center for Workforce Inclusion, advocating for economic opportunity for low-income, older job seekers.

Here are his thoughts on The Future of Work 2024.

“Our nation’s labor market remains in a state of confounding flux. On the one hand, the national unemployment rate of 3.9% suggests we have slowly returned to an environment of near full employment. Yet, on the other hand, the raw unemployment numbers offer an incomplete assessment of the U.S. Labor Market.

“Pre-pandemic, the talk among labor economists, workforce futurists, and workforce development professionals almost exclusively focused on the emergence of the gig economy, automation, and the emergence of a workforce less tied to the established norms of ‘tenure-based’ employment with a single or very few employers.

“Pre-pandemic, the gradual recognition of the importance of our growing – and aging – workforce began to creep into our consciousness. Yet, despite our newfound awareness of the need to fully engage the 55-plus demographic into the workforce, older workers continue to experience great difficulty in securing positions commensurate with their skills and experience.

“The experience of older workers today is captured every month in the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ monthly jobs report. The jobs report with monotonous regularity informs us of the following: The labor force participation for older workers (55-plus) steadily resides around 38%; the long-term unemployment rate for older workers routinely reports around 25%; and the monthly unemployment rate for those fortunate to remain actively employed typically lands at or around 2.7%.

“So here is the story: Older workers continue to experience significant barriers to workforce participation when measured against other age groups. This can be fixed. We also find that many older workers have decided to exit the workforce after experiencing one rejection too many. They simply had enough.

“More tellingly, the share of older Americans in our workforce will grow over the next decade according to the U.S. Special Committee on Aging. We need to equip older workers with the tools to work within a hybrid workforce; we need to increase the digital literacy of our nation’s older workers to maximize their productivity; and we need to ensure that workforce training programs adequately equip our older workers for the inevitability of new occupations that will emerge because of generative artificial intelligence.

“Our older workers must be treated with dignity. They must be afforded the opportunity to engage in occupations informed by their experiences and skills. We must increase access to workforce training programs to best prepare older workers for a workforce future we have yet to see. It can be done.”

Read more from our WorkingNation Advisory Board members on The Future of Work 2024.

Work in Progress podcast with Taylor McLemore of Human Potential Summit and Ryan Stowers of Stand Together discuss fixing the disconnect between work and learning

Addressing the disconnect between work and learning is crucial for economic mobility

Climate-resilient workers and entrepreneurs are finding purpose in a greening economy

Chike Aguh, senior advisor, Harvard's Project of Workforce and WorkingNation Advisory Board member

Strategies to lessen the further marginalization of midcareer and older workers

AmeriCorps climate-resilient jobs through the American Climate Corps

National service: Developing skills and finding purpose while helping communities thrive

Get the latest from WorkingNation

Our Mission

Dana Beth Ardi

Executive Committee

Dana Beth Ardi, PhD, Executive Committee, is a thought leader and expert in the fields of executive search, talent management, organizational design, assessment, leadership and coaching. As an innovator in the human capital movement, Ardi creates enhanced value in companies by matching the most sought after talent with the best opportunities. Ardi coaches boards and investors on the art and science of building high caliber management teams. She provides them with the necessary skills to seek out and attract top-level management, to design the ideal organizational architectures and to deploy people against strategy. Ardi unearths the way a business works and the most effective way for people to work in them.

Ardi is an experienced business executive and senior consultant who leverages business organizational transformation through talent strategies. She uses her knowledge and experience to develop talent strategies to enhance revenue and profit contributions. She has a deep expertise in change management and organizational effectiveness and has designed and built high performance cultures. Ardi has significant experience in mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, IPO’s and turnarounds.

Ardi is an expert on the multi-generational workforce. She understands the four intersecting generations of workers coming together in contemporary companies, each with their own mindsets, leadership and communications styles, values and motivations. Ardi is sought after to assist companies manage and thrive by bringing the generations together. Her book, Fall of the Alphas: How Beta Leaders Win Through Connection, Collaboration and Influence, will be published by St. Martin’s Press. The book reflects Ardi’s deep expertise in understanding organizations and our changing society. It focuses on building a winning culture, how companies must grow and evolve, and how talent influences and shapes communities of work. This is what she has coined “Corporate Anthropology.” It is a playbook on how modern companies must meet challenges – culturally, globally, digitally, across genders and generations.

Ardi is currently the Managing Director and Founder of Corporate Anthropology Advisors, LLC, a consulting company that provides human capital advisory and innovative solutions to companies building value through people. Corporate Anthropology works with organizations, their cultures, the way they grow and develop, and the people who are responsible for forming their communities of work.

Prior to her position at Corporate Anthropology Advisors, Ardi served as a Partner/Managing Director at the private equity firms CCMP Capital and JPMorgan Partners. She was a partner at Flatiron Partners, a venture capital firm working with early state companies where she pioneered the human capital role within an investment portfolio.

Ardi holds a BS from the State University of New York at Buffalo as well as a Masters degree and PhD from Boston College. She started her career as professor at the Graduate Center at Fordham University in New York.