Good news out of MIT: labour market expert Paul Osterman does not believe that we are going to become a nation of brain surgeons and hamburger flippers. However, inequality does indeed exist within the labour market, and in this wide-ranging interview he describes how leaders must step forward to address the realities of the changing workforce through better job design. The bottom line, he says, is that low wages and high levels of inequality are corrosive to democracy. Moral outrage doesn't provide a strategy for moving forward, he says, but at the end of the day, the moral case for creating good, fair-wage jobs seems pretty compelling.

Nearly half of new job openings from 2010 through 2020 will be middle-skills positions in fields such as computer technology, nursing, and high-skill manufacturing. They require postsecondary technical education and training, and they're increasingly hard to fill. As federal funding for job training declines, Kochan, Finegold, and Osterman urge companies to take the lead in closing the middle-skills gap. Getting there, they argue, will require local business leaders to work with one another, educational institutions, and in some cases, unions. Available models include apprenticeship programs, such as those spearheaded by the Center for Energy Workforce Development; partnerships like those between Kaiser Permanente and its employee unions; sector-based regional initiatives, such as Boston-based SkillWorks; and collaborations with higher-education consortia that embrace strong ties to industry. Effective collaborative training programs involve employers in designing and funding the initiatives and in finding jobs for graduates. They integrate classroom education with opportunities to apply new skills in actual or simulated work settings. And they start graduates down a clear career path. These best practices, with leadership from the private sector, should be the cornerstones of a national job-training strategy.