The American Opportunity Index: A Corporate Scorecard of Worker Advancement is an effort to give companies and other stakeholders a set of robust tools that measure how well major employers are doing in fostering economic mobility for workers and how they could do better. The Index is a joint project of the Burning Glass Institute, Harvard Business School’s Project on Managing the Future of Work, and the Schultz Family Foundation.
KEY FINDINGS
• Employees at the 100-best firms on the Index’s pay metric earn, on average, 130%
more for the same job than those who work for bottom-100 pay firms.
• Those at top-100 firms for the internal promotion metric are 150% more likely to be
promoted than their counterparts at bottom-100 firms.
• Top 100 employers in hiring are 180% more likely to hire workers without a college
degree, creating greater opportunity for entry level workers.
• Companies in the energy and resource-related sectors—oil and gas, utilities, and
metals and materials—had the largest average gains in the Index this year, proving
resilience even as more prominent sectors like technology and retail struggled.
• Wages across sectors are growing, but workers in the consumer goods and
industrial distribution sectors saw the greatest increases.
• A new measure that assesses how well firms did compared to their own prior-year
performance finds that only 80 of 395 firms increased promotion opportunities,
while 240 firms had some level of decrease.
• The same measure finds that a plurality of companies–174–decreased their hiring of
people who either lack college degrees or meaningful previous work experience.
Learn more: https://www.americanopportunityindex.org/