The labor market is easing up — and other happenings in the world of work

Welcome back to The Work Shift, a weekly newsletter that keeps you informed about the economy, labor market and evolving world of work through data-driven insights. Click subscribe to be notified of future editions.

Catch up on headlines from the last 7 days.

• Job growth climbed more than expected in February, according to the latest Labor Department data . Other indicators suggest that the labor market could be cooling. Read below to learn more.
• The Federal Reserve is prepared to speed up the pace of interest rate hikes following a flurry of hot economic reports, Fed Chair Jerome Powell told Congress last week.
• Regulators shut down Silicon Valley Bank last week amid liquidity worries and a run on deposits . It’s the biggest bank failure since the 2008 financial crisis. Federal officials said it would bail out all depositors and closed a second bank, Signature Bank of New York, on Sunday. Investors are worried about banks with similar profiles.
• Hospitality can’t hire fast enough. After facing a huge loss in its workforce during the pandemic, the industry is quickly becoming the country’s most prolific employer . Chipotle is hiring 15,000 extra workers right now while Kroger is reaching out to former staff to meet demand, for example.?
• Mortgage rates are dampening buyer demand. Mortgage rates have risen for four consecutive weeks to 6.65% — leading mortgage applications to hit a 28-year low. This is happening ahead of the busy season. About 40% of annual existing home sales typically happen from March to June, but potential homebuyers are expected to take a step back this year.?
• Some C-suite roles are getting harder to keep. The current average tenure for a Chief Financial Officer is around five years — and that’s been steadily declining, according to a recent survey . The tighter job market for this role means better compensation. CFOs received larger salary bumps than CEOs last year.
• The happiest cities in the U.S. are located in California, according to a recent WalletHub analysis that analyzed the largest cities in the country based on 30 metrics including depression rate, divorce rate, median incomes, job satisfaction, probability of unemployment and more. It comes as a surprise as many have been migrating out of the state.

Take a closer look at recent trending topics — and engage with meaningful conversations happening on LinkedIn.

Labor market shifts

• The U.S. economy added 311,000 payrolls in February, suggesting that hiring remains strong despite the Federal Reserve’s attempts to cool the economy. The increase was “quite robust on its own merits, but on top of the gangbusters January increase, confirms a lot of residual strength in the U.S. labor market,” LinkedIn’s Principal Economist Guy Berger said . “Job growth is a lot more moderate than it was a year ago due to falling hiring and rising layoffs, but to analogize, the car has slowed from 100 mph to 40-50 mph,” he continued.
• This means the Fed’s fight to tame inflation is having some success and the tight labor market could be loosening. For example, the same jobs report also showed that wages rose 0.2% from a month earlier, the slowest gain since February 2022. “Since the Fed thinks high wage growth may be fueling inflation, this might make them happy,” Berger said. Meanwhile, the unemployment rate ticked up to 3.6% from 3.4% while jobless claims spiked to their highest level in five months.?
• One more takeaway from recent jobs data? “We hit a new record for the share of people working two or more full-time jobs,” Berger said. “This is paradoxically a sign of labor market strength — people who want to work more to earn more money are able to do so. We saw it in the late 90s, too.”

The leadership gender gap

• Women don’t seem to be climbing the corporate ladder like men. New data from LinkedIn showed that women are still underrepresented in leadership roles in the U.S., even in industries where female representation is comparatively high. Take hospitality for example, an industry where women make up half the workforce but only occupy 39% of leadership positions.
• That’s in line with the national trend. Women hold about 38% of all leadership roles in the U.S. — and there hasn’t been much progress in closing that gap. The share of women in leadership positions has only increased by two percentage points since 2016. One possible explanation? “Women are still the managers of their household and the main parent who nurtures children,” entrepreneur Khila Khani commented .
• In addition to hospitality, the largest gaps between women’s overall representation and their representation in leadership occur in real estate, health care, financial services, arts and recreation, professional services (which includes accounting and consulting firms) and administrative and support services.?

Learning goals

• A majority of U.S. workers plan on learning new skills over the next six months rather than changing jobs, according to LinkedIn’s latest Workforce Confidence survey . That trend is most pronounced among women (59%), ahead of 54% of men who said the same.?
• That’s consistent with wider education trends — women now represent 56% of students at public, four-year universities and well over half the enrollment at private and two-year colleges. Upskilling, however, is possible now without that level of education. There are bite-sized modules online that can often be completed in just a few minutes from the couch.
• As talent professional Aszure Gray commented : Workers would rather have access to learning opportunities on the job than look for a new one. “Talent development is the best retention strategy,” she said. Executive Roy Lemons commented that professional development is a requirement for his team members. “Continuous improvement and a thirst for knowledge are traits that build a winning workforce,” he said.

Get ready for the week by seeing what's coming up.

• Tuesday, March 14: The Bureau of Labor Statistics will release the monthly Consumer Price Index for February, which measures inflation through the price of goods and services.
• Wednesday, March 15: The Bureau of Labor Statistics will release the monthly Producer Price Index . Different from the Consumer Price Index, which lands earlier in the week, the report measures inflation based on costs to those who make products, not those who consume them.
• Wednesday, March 15: The U.S. Census Bureau will release its monthly retail sales report for February. The report is an indicator of consumer spending and general economic activity.
• Wednesday, March 15: LinkedIn Senior Editor at Large George Anders will release his latest edition of Workforce Insights , digging into which workers are leaving full-time jobs to go freelance or self-employed.
• Thursday, March 16: The U.S. Department of Labor will release initial jobless claims for the previous week. The report, a proxy for layoffs, tracks the number of people filing for unemployment benefits.
• Thursday, March 16: The U.S. Census Bureau will release the number of new building permits issued by the government in February, which is a key housing market indicator.
• Friday, March 17: The University of Michigan will release its preliminary reading of March’s Consumer Sentiment Index, which measures how Americans feel about current and future economic conditions.