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Help Wanted: Modernizing the Schedule A Shortage Occupation List - Institute for Progress

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Schedule A is the one way that the federal government officially tracks shortage occupations. It is also a mechanism by which the fixed number of employment-based green cards authorized by Congress can be directed to the areas of the economy most in need. But the Schedule A shortage occupation list has not been updated in over three decades, leaving it totally disconnected from current labor market conditions. As a proof-of-concept, this paper proposes a transparent, objective, and data-driven method by which the Department of Labor (DOL) can regularly update the Schedule A shortage occupation list. Our method relies on a new economic index, which we call the Help Wanted Index, designed to identify and rank occupations by how likely they are to be facing shortage conditions. The Help Wanted Index includes lagged variables and longer data trends to strike a balance between favoring persistent shortages and being responsive to changing labor markets. We apply our method with recent labor

Download PDF Content Executive Summary Introduction Labor shortages Schedule A Methodology to support a modernized Schedule A list Shortage indicators Results Shortage occupation lists around the world United Kingdom New Zealand Australia Malaysia Singapore Conclusion Appendices Appendix A: Timeline of changes to Schedule A Appendix B: More notes on data and methods Appendix C: Comparison of shortage occupation lists around the world Appendix D: Comparison of proposed Schedule A Group I lists for past years Appendix E: Historical comparison to UK-based benchmark Executive Summary Schedule A is

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