The Indiana Department of Workforce Development reports the state’s unemployment rate held steady at 3.3%. In June 159,676 potential workers were seeking employment.
Karen Priestly, 58, is one of those people. Retired for about two and a half years, she’s been looking for a new job on and off because her pension only covers basic needs.
“I'm pretty much doing what I can with what I have, and whatever little bit of money that I do get, I just manage it,” Priestly said.
Priestly has a bachelor's degree in finance and accounting and around 30 years of experience working at the state’s Department of Revenue.
“After I retired, I said, I still want to do some work because you know I'm still pretty young. So, I reached out to WorkOne Indy to help out with some of the different things to try to figure out exactly what I want to do in life for the remainder,” Priestly said.
WorkOne Indy is a DWD workforce development center. Through it she meets with a career navigator and attends job fairs and workshops.
Priestly is one of the centers more than 17,500 in-person clients since January 1, 2026. It is on track to serve around the same number of in-person clients it helped in 2025. WorkOne Indy staff told WFYI that, while the number of clients is consistent, there is a shift in who is seeking employment opportunities.
Antonia Wilson is a career navigator at WorkOne and works with job seekers to progress their careers. She said she used to see more people starting their careers. This year, she sees more people at different stages in their careers, from all industries, coming through the doors.
She said many of them have put in a lot of job applications with no success.
“They are starting to try to put together these stories in their mind about ‘why is it that I'm not getting a callback? Is it my resume? Do I not have enough experience?’,” Wilson said.
The low employment rate itself can create a barrier. It allows some employers to be more selective about candidates.
Another added challenge for job seekers is artificial intelligence. Many companies use AI systems to review a large volume of resumes, which can result in more automatic rejection.
For many job seekers, that stress of rejection heightens worries about affording rent, child care and other necessities.
“We have a ton of people that maybe want to upskill in their job, like they do have jobs, but they're not making a livable wage,” Wilson said.
Dionne Smith is WorkOne Indy Vice President of Community Career Services. She advises job seekers to develop soft skills. Smith says employers are actively looking for those skills so they can focus instead on training for the specific job duties.
“You know the soft skills, the customer service, being friendly, being coachable, being trainable, accountability, responsibility. Some of those things you [employers] can't teach,” Smith said.
Smith also encourages people to tap into their transferable skills.
“If you've worked in healthcare, you don't think you can go to retail, but you can because you've learned customer service, you've learned accountability, you've learned some type of data system,” Smith said. “You just take those same skills and apply them in a new field.”
As for Priestly, she is using both WorkOne Indy and John Boner Neighborhood Centers, another resource that provides a range of social services, to find a job that suits her. She hopes to find an administrative job that deals with budgeting, and she is learning QuickBooks. Her big goal is to have a job that will allow her to save for a vacation 10 years from now.
Contact WFYI reporting intern Daniel Huber at dhuber@wfyi.org
