The August unemployment report showed that jobs are slowly returning. The economy added nearly 1.4 million new jobs last month, bringing the four-month total to 10.7 million, slightly less than half of the jobs lost in the early months of the pandemic. Many of those jobs won’t be coming back and workers know it.

Historically, when the country experiences a downturn, more people turn to higher education and job training opportunities. While coronavirus has made that more complicated, the current economic crisis is no different.

Vickie Schray, executive vice president at the education technology company Zovio, said she has seen a significant increase in demand for services including online degree programs, coding boot camps and certificate programs that can be accessed entirely online.

A handful of industries have experienced continued growth during the crisis, like cybersecurity, technology and health care, Schray noted. In other cases, jobs that were in high demand disappeared virtually overnight.

“I just don’t think we’re ever going to go back to the way we were,” Schray explained. “We need to think differently about how to provide training resources and tools to people and think differently about the jobs of the future.”

For those at the forefront of innovative job training, that means changing how workers access education and training opportunities, how those programs connect students with the skills they need and how employers assess the skills and experience of the people they’re hiring.

Schray continued, “We should not look to the past for ideas and solutions to get us out of this pandemic and out of this economic downturn.”

Even before the pandemic, millions of jobs were considered at risk. Automation and shifting demands were expected to result in tens of millions of lost or displaced jobs over the next decade.

Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the threat of job displacement is more acute. The McKinsey Global Institute estimated as many as 57 million U.S. jobs were at risk in the near term and that many of the workers would need help developing the skills to move into new positions.

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