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D espite a steady drumbeat of promises about skills-based hiring, a majority of companies did not increase their hiring of early career and non-college workers in 2023, according to a newly released ranking of the best companies for career advancement, which also found that 60% of the studied employers decreased opportunities for promotion last year. The third American Opportunity Index , a project released Monday by the Burning Glass Institute, the Schultz Family Foundation and Harvard Business School's Managing the Future of Work Project, offers workers a ranking of which large U.S.
companies offer the best opportunities to advance their careers. Unlike other company rankings, it does not rely primarily on worker surveys or data submitted by employers, but instead on an independent data analysis of the career trajectories of more than 5 million employees at 395 large companies. The study draws from Burning Glass Institute’s database of career histories of more than 65 million U.
S. workers, representing more than 40% of the U.S.
workforce. “What we can say is that, despite the widening support for skills-based hiring, most firms made no progress—or even took a step backwards” on hiring workers without college degrees, said Matt Sigelman, president of Burning Glass Institute, in an email. What it did find, however, is that employees at companies among the top 100 firms in the ranking earn more and are more likely to be promoted—as well as that those firms are 180% more likely to hire workers without a college degree than firms lower in the ranking.
Leading this year’s ranking are companies from a range of industries, including No. 1 employer W.W.
Grainger, the industrial supply company, followed by Costco Wholesale, Capital One Financial, Meta Platforms and ServiceNow to complete the top five. J.B.
Hunt Transport Services, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, MetLife and Bank of America rounded out the top 10. The analysis found that 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, though companies across 30 sectors are represented among the top 100 firms. (The index only publicly shares an overall ranking of the top 100 firms, as well as identifying which companies were among the top 100 for pay, hiring, culture and promotion.
) In 2024, the index added measures of progress on promotion and hiring year over year, as well as scores on company culture sentiment from Glassdoor. This year’s analysis found that only 80 of 395 firms increased promotion opportunities, and that a plurality of companies—174 out of 395—decreased their hiring of people without college degrees or meaningful previous work experience. “As talent becomes more available, some employers are pulling back on considering applicants without degrees, despite their pledges,” Sigelman said.
“That says that the substantial gains that workers have made over the past few years are fragile.” He added that with more workers staying in their jobs, there are fewer opportunities for workers to enter and advance in their careers. Even if layoff volume remains low, he said, “employers anxious about the economy are scaling back on making new hires.
” As AI drives perceptions that more entry-level work will be automated, that could be having an impact too. Said Sigelman: “That’s driving them to shift their focus to making experienced hires.”.
