Powerful tool helps job seekers chart a path to higher-paying roles
“[The Occupational Mobility Explorer] has everything you need. I wish I’d known about it sooner.”
– Shymeka Wright, client services coordinator, Veterans Multi-Service Center
Shymeka Wright is a client services coordinator with the Veterans Multi-Service Center in Philadelphia. For the past five years, she has connected veterans with resources they need—from housing and jobs to mental health services and veterans’ benefits—in the Pennsylvania–Delaware–New Jersey tri-state area. In her current role, she focuses on career advising.
In 2024, Wright met with outreach advisors from the Philadelphia Fed who introduced her to the Occupational Mobility Explorer. The tool’s name refers to a person’s ability to move between jobs or career fields. Wright quickly saw its value.
“The jobs posted are detailed and the qualifications [are] very specific,” she said. It took her a day or so to get a feel for the tool. When working with clients, Wright “drives,” using the tool’s geographic feature and information veterans provide to her—including what they’re interested in and the kind of work they’ve done before—to explore their options.
Wright has used the mobility explorer to help navigate veterans into local jobs that leverage their skills and pay wages that exceed what they were earning.
For one Army veteran, the tool identified precisely the kind of job she sought. The veteran, who had worked in logistics in the Army, wanted to make a change. Her work experience included cleaning houses, earning about $12 an hour. She told Wright she wanted to work for a hotel.
Wright used the Occupational Mobility Explorer to identify local job options that requested skills the job seeker had gained in the Army and in other roles. “She now works the front desk at a hotel,” Wright reported, “making $3 to $4 more an hour than what she had made.”
“[The Occupational Mobility Explorer] has everything you need. I wish I’d known about it sooner.”
– Shymeka Wright, client services coordinator, Veterans Multi-Service Center
The Occupational Mobility Explorer also lets users plan backwards. A job seeker or student selects a job they’d most like to hold. The tool displays a series of jobs offering a pathway that would allow the user to successively acquire skills needed for their desired job.
Another veteran expressed a desire to become a plumber. He’d done welding in the military and had experience with electrical. The Veterans Multi-Service Center paid for training to learn about plumbing. The center also facilitated an introduction to the local plumbers’ union, which led to an apprenticeship. This veteran is now employed as a plumber. “He has a company car,” Wright added. “He’s on his way.”
She describes the Occupational Mobility Explorer as better than any other career-advising tool she has used. “It has everything you need. I wish I’d known about it sooner.”
The Fed is interested in occupational mobility and its role in labor markets for a variety of reasons. Chief among them is the Fed’s responsibility to promote maximum employment, part of its dual mandate from Congress (that also includes maintaining price stability). Understanding occupational mobility—and helping to facilitate it by allowing users to explore potential paths to better-paying jobs—is one way the Fed contributes to strengthening economic outcomes.
“Our tool gives you access to a database of the roles and skills employers are seeking.”
– Kyle Fee, policy advisor in Community Development, Cleveland Fed
Developed in 2020 by the Philadelphia and Cleveland Federal Reserve Banks, the tool is built on research conducted on a skills-based approach to occupational mobility. Initially, the tool included data specifically for opportunity occupations, or jobs that don’t require a four-year college degree and pay above the national median wage. Job seekers could use the tool to assess their skills and identify ones they could acquire through certifications, trainings, and other job roles. They could see how those skills overlapped with what employers sought for higher-paying positions. The first Occupational Mobility Explorer was limited to the 33 largest metro areas of the US. Today, the tool includes the latest labor market information available, covering more than 600 job titles across all metropolitan and nonmetropolitan areas nationally.
“Our tool gives you access to a database of the roles and skills employers are seeking,” said Kyle Fee, policy advisor in the Community Development department at the Cleveland Fed and one of the tool’s creators. “Also, importantly, where these roles are and what they’re paying.”
Dave Megenhardt is an early adopter of the Occupational Mobility Explorer. He leads the United Labor Agency, an organization providing services to workers and job seekers across northeast Ohio. Megenhardt, a member of the Cleveland Fed’s board of directors from 2017 to 2021, beta tested the explorer.
Today, following its two releases, the tool is a go-to staple for United Labor Agency’s 12 employment specialists.
“I want to provide staff with cutting-edge tools that can provide better consultation with the job seeker,” Megenhardt said. “Front-line staff don’t have time to do the research.”
The United Labor Agency’s workforce development arm provides employment and training support to thousands of people annually. Some are displaced workers, or people in mid- to late-career roles who unexpectedly lost employment. Others are individuals without a career path in mind who may jump from job to job, or from training to another job.
For more experienced workers, “They might have thought of other careers before, or not,” Megenhardt said. “Sometimes these are realistic ideas, sometimes not.” The tool helps employment specialists have clear, actionable conversations around viable options without subjectivity, “so the person can draw conclusions for themselves.”
Megenhardt finds several features of the Occupational Mobility Explorer useful. For one, it contains extensive information on jobs and careers, including expanded data on industries. “The more data, the better,” he said.
Another is the overlap of skills feature. The tool can identify skills an individual needs to reach a job goal. Sometimes, seeing that information spelled out makes the task less daunting for individuals who are closer skill-wise to a job goal than they might have thought.
Megenhardt’s team is considering ways to incorporate the Occupational Mobility Explorer into training workshops. “We’re always trying to help job seekers find the next growing industry to be self- and family-sustaining.”
At the Philadelphia Fed, the economic education team provides economic and financial education materials and training to K-12 educators in the Third Federal Reserve District, which encompasses Delaware, southern New Jersey, and eastern and central Pennsylvania.
“Teachers always want content around jobs….Not every student is college bound.”
– Rebecca Chambers, economic education advisor, Philadelphia Fed
“Teachers always want content around jobs,” said Rebecca Chambers, economic education advisor. “We’re constantly navigating how best to work with a variety of schools in three states, with differing students, communities, and needs.” The Occupational Mobility Explorer helps students think more broadly about opportunities both post-college and post-secondary school, she said. “Not every student is college bound.”
At a recent event hosted by the Philadelphia Fed, high school students were introduced to the Occupational Mobility Explorer through a physical card-sorting activity. “This was a way to help students and teachers visualize the tool’s potential through showing a range of jobs,” said Meaghan Vitale, economic education specialist.
Vitale, a former educator, sees the Occupational Mobility Explorer as a tool teachers can use to help students view the kinds of skills-related jobs they might want to attain—and then plan how to get them. She finds two features of the tool especially helpful for high school students: O*NET OnLine, a linked database of information about occupations that allows additional exploration of jobs, and the “compare skills” feature.
“Partnered with additional lessons and financial education materials, the OME (Occupational Mobility Explorer) is a great resource for high schools.”
Educators can use the Occupational Mobility Explorer to help students visualize a skills-building pathway to jobs they may want to attain.
– Meaghan Vitale, economic education specialist, Philadelphia Fed
The Cleveland Fed’s financial education team conducts outreach to both secondary and post-secondary educational institutions in the Fourth Federal Reserve District—Ohio, western Pennsylvania, eastern Kentucky, and the northern panhandle of West Virginia.
In 2024, the team expanded its partnership with the University of Kentucky to incorporate the Occupational Mobility Explorer into a required course for freshmen. “Educators were telling us, students coming in post-pandemic had less-developed soft skills and were less aware of job opportunities,” said Khaz Finley, manager of the Cleveland Fed’s financial education team.
More recently, Finley and others from the Cleveland Fed have partnered with the Career Services Center at Cuyahoga Community College. The community college serves hundreds of thousands of students and adult learners across northeast Ohio. Conversations in early 2025 have centered on ways the tool can help inform the career center’s curriculum, Finley said.
“They love the tool,” he said. “They have been able to leverage the information to gauge some of their approaches to a new career innovation center they will be structuring.”
Since the tool’s 2024 update, Fee and Theresa Dunne, community development research analyst at the Philadelphia Fed, have been hearing consistently from groups using the tool in expected and sometimes unexpected ways.
“It’s exciting and gratifying to see wider use of the tool,” Fee said. “The applications are wide-ranging.”
The free tool is accessible to anyone. Recent updates include not only additional and more current data, but also a suite of related resources, including a resume builder.
“Data can be very empowering,” said the Philadelphia Fed’s Dunne. She and other Fed researchers who’ve worked on the tool identified groups that may find it especially useful in their efforts supporting the nation’s labor force:
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