Workforce Displacement and Re-Employment During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Implications for Direct Care Workforce Recruitment and Retention

Demand is rising for direct care workers (including personal care aides, home health aides, and nursing assistants), but recruitment and retention challenges are widespread. While the COVID-19 pandemic has greatly exacerbated these challenges, it has also created a new labor pool comprising millions of workers who have been displaced from occupations with similar entry-level requirements and potentially overlapping job characteristics. However, little is known about whether and how these displaced workers could be re-employed in direct care jobs. To fill this knowledge gap, this study addressed three research questions:

1. How many direct care workers and workers from other occupations with similar entry-level requirements became unemployed during the first three months of the COVID-19 pandemic?

2. To what extent do the knowledge, skills, work activities, and work context of displaced workers’ previous occupations align with those of the three direct care occupations?

3. How many displaced workers re-entered the workforce (including into direct care jobs) within the following year, and from which previous occupations?

The findings from this analysis inform a set of policy and practice recommendations for making direct care jobs more attractive to a range of job seekers (including workers who have been displaced from other occupations), creating or strengthening pipelines into direct care jobs, and developing tailored workforce supports for new segments of this workforce.