In 2020, Newark Opportunity Youth Network (NOYN) established the Newark Youth Workforce Collaborative to align programming and resources with other youth-serving organizations in Newark, NJ. While Newark has made great strides in training youth, the city’s youth workforce system is fragmented and operated in silos, especially for in-school youth. …

In 2019, the New Jersey Department of Labor and Workforce Development asked the Heldrich Center to conduct a multi-year study of New Jersey’s Family Leave Insurance program (FLI), Earned Sick Leave law (ESL), and Temporary Disability Insurance program. The study was designed to provide information in two phases: first, about…

The COVID-19 pandemic dramatically affected households across New Jersey, with the unemployment rate rising to 16.6%. As is true in any economic downturn, the effects of these trends are felt more by some groups than others — whether across geographic regions, race, gender, age, or other characteristics and experiences. The…

by Savannah Barnett and Liana Volpe The COVID-19 pandemic fundamentally altered the way most people work, and in more recent months has caused many people to drop out of the labor market entirely, ushering in lower official unemployment numbers and the “Great Resignation.” This phenomenon has increased the attention on…

by Liana Volpe and Savannah Barnett In 2020, the immense upheaval and turmoil in the labor market prompted researchers at the Heldrich Center to rethink what constituted job seeker support and how virtual interaction could foster a sense of community. With these ideas in mind, researchers created the New Jersey…

As the world enters the third year of a worldwide pandemic, Heldrich Center researchers are tracking how Americans, and the labor force specifically, are thinking about work and the economy, and how these opinions have changed in the past decade. As part of the Heldrich Center’s award-winning survey series, Work…

A new Work Trends survey of American workers, conducted by the Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, finds that 6 in 10 are very concerned about the cost of living as 2022 approaches. In contrast, workers’ opinions about the labor market have improved…

Postsecondary Fall Enrollment Net Migration Trends Remain Unchanged During COVID-19, a new Heldrich Center for Workforce Development brief by Sean Simone, Ph.D., Stephanie Holcomb, and Kristine Joy Bacani, details a review of trends over the past 20 years of overall national data on postsecondary student enrollment and net migration, and…

In a new survey of 855 businesses, New Jersey business owners report they are recovering from the downturns they faced as a consequence of operating during the COVID-19 pandemic, but many indicate that they need additional support from the state and federal governments, including financing, technical assistance with business planning…