Job Quality Newsletter – 2025 Highlights

As we look back on our work from 2025, we were encouraged by continued momentum around improving job quality.

Even in the midst of uncertain and challenging conditions, organizations were making progress in improving working conditions, strengthening worker voice, expanding employee ownership, and building systems that better support shared prosperity. Across our initiatives, we continue to see growing demand from practitioners and business leaders for practical tools, peer learning opportunities, and evidence that can support implementation of job quality practices — particularly as organizations navigate rapid technological change and evolving workforce needs.

Throughout 2025, we focused on creating spaces for leaders to learn from one another. This includes developing and sharing new resources through our Job Quality Center of Excellence and Job Quality in Practice webinar series; advancing a major body of work on small business job quality; convening cross-sector leaders to examine how employee ownership and capital markets affect workers and small businesses; deepening learning across communities through the Workforce Leadership Academies and the Job Quality Fellowship; and concluding a multiyear retrospective series on the future of work.

Below are a few highlights from EOP’s work this year.

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Advancing Resources, Dialogue, and Leadership on Job Quality

This year, we continued to strengthen the Job Quality Center of Excellence as a hub for practical tools, curated resources, and shared learning for leaders across sectors. Through the Job Quality in Practice webinar series, we convened practitioners to explore what implementation looks like on the ground. We were also pleased to announce a new cohort of Job Quality Fellows, leaders from across the US South who are working to expand access to job quality in their communities.

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UpSkill America

UpSkill America focused on deepening understanding of the skills that support long-term success in today’s labor market. In partnership with the Western Governors University, the team released “Durable Skills, Strong Starts: What Employers Really Want from Early-Career Talent,” sharing findings on what early-career workers need to succeed.

Haley Glover, senior director of UpSkill America, also pulled from her own experience on this issue in a blog, connecting the findings to questions about artificial intelligence and the future of work.

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Employee Ownership Ideas Forum

The third annual Employee Ownership Ideas Forum, hosted in partnership with the Rutgers Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing, continued to build upon a national conversation around how employee ownership can strengthen businesses, expand shared prosperity, and improve job quality. The Forum brought together lawmakers, philanthropists, investors, researchers, practitioners, business leaders, and workers from employee-owned companies to deepen understanding of how employee ownership benefits both workers and firms.

The Forum expanded the conversation by platforming worker perspectives and lived experiences alongside research and investment strategies. Click here to view sessions from this event.

As we approach this year’s Forum on June 2-3, happening in Washington DC and online, we look forward to exploring some new themes and building on the excitement of last year. Registration will be open soon. Join our mailing list to be notified when spots are available

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Shared Success

Our Shared Success demonstration continued to advance a multiyear body of work focused on strengthening outcomes for both small businesses and workers by fostering new norms around job quality and developing resources to facilitate implementing job quality improvements. In 2025, in collaboration with our evaluation partners the Financial Access Initiative and EA Consultants, we released evaluation findings showing that improving job quality is both possible and beneficial for small businesses. We marked this milestone by convening practitioners through our event, “How Good Jobs Support Small Business Success,” creating a space to share lessons from the demonstration and highlight what’s working in practice.

To support implementation, we released a guide on how to have conversations with business owners on improving job quality, as well as a Q&A for CDFIs to explore this practice. And we continued soliciting feedback and revising our Guide to Small Business Job Quality Advising, which we will be rereleased with updates this spring.

We also partnered with Northern Initiatives to create a set of small business resources, and we released a toolkit for CDFIs in supporting their clients navigating employment law.

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Business Ownership Initiative

In March, the Business Ownership Initiative and the Responsible Business Lending Coalition co-hosted “Advancing Innovation and Fairness in Small Business Finance,” a discussion at the Aspen Institute to hear perspectives from lenders, investors, policymakers, small business owners, and advocates about how to build a financing market that truly works for small businesses. The convening featured three moderated conversations on key trends, risks and opportunities. Check out the conversations here.

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Back to the Future of Work

The Future of Work Initiative (FOW) concluded its retrospective series, “Back to the Future of Work: Revisiting the Past and Shaping the Future”, which gathered insights from leaders across labor, business, academia, philanthropy, and related fields to take stock of the last decade and consider what lies ahead. The series culminated with a capstone event in December that brought these reflections together and explored what it will take to shape a future of work that supports worker well-being and shared prosperity.

In this final piece, FOW Director Liba Weing Rubenstein reflects on the themes that emerged throughout the series and what they suggest about how we can shape the future of work.

Workforce Leadership Academies

The Workforce Leadership Academies celebrated the completion of a new cohort of communities working to strengthen local workforce ecosystems through leadership and cross-sector collaboration. Leaders in six communities across the country deepened networks, strengthened systems leadership skills, and advanced strategies to better support workers and job seekers in their regions.

This work is reflected in a new brief by Haley Glover and Alison Yost, which highlights how communities in Albuquerque and North Carolina are embedding skills-first practices into broader workforce strategies.

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