Always be learning: Why U.S. women are focused on boosting job skills

What extra skills can help your career enter the fast lane? Any list of niche skills is endless, covering everything from dentistry to data science. But let's not ignore a handful of universal skills that can pay off almost any line of work.

Among those standouts is public speaking, and lately the speaker-training experts at Toastmasters International have noticed a surprising trend. Women, by a significant margin, are emerging as the most active participants in their programs.?

Turn the clock back to 2019, and the percentages of men and women participating in Toastmasters were nearly identical. Not any more. As of June 2022, women accounted for 55.7% of Toastmasters’ 280,000 members. Men were just 44.3%.????

With the U.S. economy in a choppy state right now, women in many other fields appear ready to take the lead in boosting their job skills. That’s a key finding emerging from the latest edition of LinkedIn’s Workforce Confidence survey, which polled 22,309 professionals from Dec. 3, 2022 to Feb. 24, 2023.?

As the table above shows, a majority of men and women both say they plan to focus on learning new skills over the next six months, rather than changing jobs. But the Workforce Confidence survey finds that the level of interest for women (59%) is five percentage points above men’s response.?

While upskilling on the job has been a much talked-about concept for a long time, earlier cohorts of workers found that adding credentials wasn’t easy. It often meant spending months or even years in formal academic programs, earning an extra degree.

These days, all kinds of simpler, friendlier shortcuts exist. As recruiter Jennifer Mackintosh points out, tech giants such as Salesforce now offer legions of bite-sized training morsels, many of which can be completed online in minutes.?

Work your way through a flurry of these modules at your own tempo and your new mastery of Salesforce tools is easily recognized by the many Trailhead badges that you’ve won.

Smaller companies are creating similar online versions of learning ladders, too. “It all begins with education,” Yoav Zeif , chief executive of Stratasys , recently wrote in Fast Company magazine. His company specializes in additive manufacturing, the technically precise name for what’s often known as 3-D printing — and Stratasys has coined its own certification program, too.

If women are especially quick about stepping forward to make the most of such on-the-job opportunities, that’s consistent with wider education trends. Women now represent 56% of students at public, four-year universities in the United States. They also account for well over half the enrollment at private and two-year colleges, too, according to U.S. Department of Education statistics.

Meanwhile, the gap between men’s (higher) overall confidence levels and women’s (somewhat lower) confidence levels has narrowed significantly in the past few years.

As of February, there’s just a one point difference now between women’s overall confidence (+36) versus men’s (+37) Confidence is measured on a scale that runs from -100 (gloomiest) to +100 (most ebullient). That tightening contrasts with a gap as large as 11 points in the late summer of 2020, when pandemic-related job losses were disproportionately affecting women.?

Women’s confidence about getting or keeping a job is especially strong (+54) in this latest period. That’s two points ahead of men’s (+52). And women’s confidence about their ability to progress in their careers (+31) is just one point below men’s (+32).

There’s still a slightly larger gender gap in respondents’ confidence about their financial situation, with men (+26) three points ahead of women (+23) in the latest survey period. But that’s a considerable narrowing from the 13-point gap of August 2020, when layoffs related to pandemic closures were affecting women in the workforce especially hard.

Methodology

LinkedIn’s Workforce Confidence Index is based on a quantitative online survey distributed to members via email every two weeks. Roughly 3,000 to 5,000 U.S.-based members respond to each wave. Members are randomly sampled and must be opted into research to participate. Students, stay-at-home partners and retirees are excluded from analysis so we can get an accurate representation of those currently active in the workforce. We analyze data in aggregate and will always respect member privacy. Data is weighted by engagement level to ensure fair representation of various activity levels on the platform. The results represent the world as seen through the lens of LinkedIn’s membership; variances between LinkedIn’s membership and the overall market population are not accounted for.

Allison Lewis and Sharon Resheff from LinkedIn Market Research contributed to this article.

What's the best way to get ahead in your career. Two years ago,