Changing jobs is hard. How do we get the American worker ready?

By 2030, as many as 375 million workers will change occupation categories. Another 400 to 800 million could be displaced by automation and required to find new jobs entirely.

In today’s political environment, leaders across industries and party lines hardly agree on anything. But when it comes to the future of work, practically everyone thinks one thing will be essential: retraining.

“We almost need to rethink our whole skilling ecosystem to make sure that not only is there closer alignment between what employers need and what the training institutions can provide, but also in a way that keeps up with the rate of evolution in the technologies themselves,” said McKinsey Chairman James Manyika in an October episode of LinkedIn’s Work In Progress podcast.

Manyika, who spearheaded the startling research on job changes in the future, wasn’t the only guest on Work In Progress this season to communicate the importance of job retraining programs. Whether it was TaskRabbit CEO Stacy Brown-Philpot talking to us about the growing gig economy, Walmart COO Judith McKenna discussing the evolution of retail jobs or Box CEO Aaron Levie advocating for changes to our tech education system, nearly every one of our guests this year believes that the constantly learning new skills will be essential.

“We need to have the largest employers in the country be doing more to either provide retraining support for their employees or access to whatever these sort of next set of jobs are that might be likely based on the skillset of an individual,” Levie said on the show in August.

While it’s clear that retraining programs are a solution that most people can get behind, their effectiveness is still very much being refined. Washington Post Staff Writer Amy Goldstein chronicled the five years that passed after the oldest GM plant shutdown in 2008. The plant, in Janesville, Wisc., was a 4.8-million square foot facility that produced cars and trucks for GM since 1923. When the last Chevy Tahoe rolled off the line in the beginning of the Great Recession, workers were making about $28 an hour.

Her latest book, Janesville: An American Story, focuses on many issues impacting the future of the economy. Yet one of her major findings is that retraining programs are inadequate solutions for many factory workers who lost their jobs.

“People who had retrained overall were less likely to have work,” Goldstein shared with us on the latest episode of the show. “The difference between their [wages] before the recession and a few years afterwards was a bigger slide downwards than compared to people who had not gone back to school.”

Goldstein’s finding exposes a large disconnect between the current rhetoric around solutions for the changing workplace and what will actually prepare both blue collar and white collar employees for the jobs of the future. While retraining on paper might seem like a good idea, Goldstein discovered that both losing work and having to start over in a new job are emotionally challenging for most workers. In other words, many workers feel their identity is tied to their job. That means when you ask them to change jobs it's not just as simple as learning a new skill or showing up at a new place for work every day.

In a survey she conducted alongside a couple of University of Wisconsin academics, Goldstein found that about half of respondents had lost sleep over changing jobs. When asked if they felt ashamed or embarrassed to be out of work, more than half said yes.

“Even when you're losing work at a time when thousands of your neighbors are losing the same kind of jobs, at a time when the country's in a very bad shape, and jobs are disappearing of all kinds, in all kinds of communities, the loss of your work still feels very, very personal,” she said.

We want to hear from you. Are changes happening in your industry that are making it challenging for you to get by? Did you recently lose work and are considering a retraining program of some kind? Tell us your story in the comments below using #WorkInProgress and listen to this week’s full episode above.

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