The Bureau of Labor Statistics released the June employment report on July 2. Employers added 57,000 jobs. Forecasters had expected about twice that. The unemployment rate fell to 4.2 percent, and the reason it fell is the whole story: the labor force participation rate dropped three-tenths of a point to 61.5 percent, its lowest level since March 2021.
The bureau's household survey counted 507,000 fewer Americans at work than in May. Its revisions erased another 74,000 jobs from April and May. People are not losing jobs in large numbers. They are failing to find them and then quitting the search. More than a quarter of the unemployed have now been out of work longer than six months. Economists at Indeed's Hiring Lab called the moment slack water, the pause between tides when the ocean barely moves.
Utah's most recent numbers, released by the Department of Workforce Services on June 19, look better, as Utah's numbers usually do. Unemployment fell to 3.7 percent in May. The state added 16,900 jobs over the year, a 1 percent growth rate against a national rate of 0.3 percent, bringing Utah's job count to a record 1,790,100.
Ben Crabb, the department's chief economist, wrote in the May release that declining participation and rising underemployment mean "not all labor resources are being fully utilized." In December, he was blunter, describing workers stepping away as the market cools. Utah's job growth ran near 3 percent in its normal years. It was 1.5 percent in 2025, by the Gardner Institute's count, and it touched 0.6 percent this April.
The state's own data explains more than any other: the information sector, the closest official category to tech, lost 1,100 jobs over the past year, one of only three Utah industries to shrink.
To understand how the industry that built modern Utah's economy became a drag on the economy, you could study the entire corridor. Or you could study one company.
Pluralsight
Pluralsight was founded on April 1, 2004, in Farmington, by Aaron Skonnard and three partners, as a company that sent instructors into conference rooms to teach programmers. It ran without outside money for nearly a decade, pivoted to online video, took its first venture round from Insight in 2013, and grew into exactly the kind of business Utah was learning to make: software-as-a-service, sold to companies, subscriptions priced by the seat. When it went public on the Nasdaq in May 2018, it was a flagship of a corridor that by then had a name, a nonprofit, an annual summit, and a story the whole state told about itself.
The first crack came early and in public. At an investor conference in January 2019, Pluralsight's chief financial officer, James Budge, told the market the company's sales force had grown to about 250 representatives. The real number, later filings showed, was closer to 200. It sounds like a rounding error. It was not because Pluralsight had taught investors to value it on billings growth and had tied billings growth directly to the size of that sales force. That March, the company raised $456 million in a secondary offering. Investors alleged that during the roughly seven-month class period its three top executives sold $47 million in stock, Skonnard $22.2 million of it. On July 31, the company reported results revealing the shortfall, and the next day, the stock lost $12.13 per share, nearly 40 percent of its value.
Pension funds for Indiana public employees and Chicago schoolteachers sued that August. A federal judge in Utah dismissed the case; the Tenth Circuit revived it, ruling that Budge's sales force statement was materially misleading. The litigation ran for more than five years. In February 2025, the court granted final approval of a $20 million settlement, an estimated average recovery of 36 cents per affected share before fees. The company denied the claims throughout; the settlement admits no wrongdoing, and no regulator has fined Skonnard or Budge.
The top
What happened next happened to nearly everyone. Between 2020 and 2022, with interest rates near zero and software valuations at all-time highs, Utah's founding generation sold. Workfront was acquired by Adobe for $1.5 billion, a deal completed in December 2020. Ancestry went to Blackstone at a $4.7 billion enterprise value the same month. Divvy, the Lehi expense card company, agreed in May 2021 to sell to Bill.com for $2.5 billion in cash and stock; the Divvy name was retired two years later. SimpleNexus was sold to nCino for 12.76 million nCino shares plus about $270 million in cash, a deal completed in January 2022. Qualtrics, already sold once to SAP for $8 billion, went public again in 2021.
In April 2021, Vista Equity Partners closed its acquisition of Pluralsight at $22.50 per share, about $3.5 billion, cashing out every shareholder, including the founders, near the market's exact top.
Vista financed the deal with roughly $1.2 billion borrowed not from banks but from private credit funds, Blue Owl, Ares, Golub, and Oaktree among them, in what was then celebrated as a landmark for lending against recurring software revenue rather than profits. Restructuring analysts would later do the arithmetic: with rates having risen, the debt carried an interest cost estimated at nearly $159 million a year, against earnings estimated at around $123 million. Before Pluralsight paid a single instructor, it was underwater on interest alone.
The unwind
The fuse burned for two years, and the record of it exists because Reuters obtained Vista's fund documents. In early 2023, Vista asked the lenders to loosen covenants and put in $75 million of new equity to calm them. It marked its Pluralsight stake down from $2.3 billion to $1.5 billion over the course of that year. Meanwhile, the customers who bought Pluralsight subscriptions, technology departments, were laying off the very workers the subscriptions trained. In May 2024, Vista told its investors the company had experienced rapid deterioration and marked the equity to zero. A month earlier, after twenty years, Skonnard had stepped down as chief executive.
Then came the maneuver that made Pluralsight a case study far beyond Utah. In the early summer of 2024, the company moved certain intellectual property into a subsidiary beyond its lenders' reach, and Vista put $50 million in against it, using the money to make an interest payment to the same lenders whose collateral had just been moved. The private credit industry, which had marketed itself as immune to this kind of maneuvering, reacted with something close to alarm; the law firm Goodwin called the transaction a possible tip of the iceberg for a $1.5 trillion market, and direct lenders now write protections against the move into their loan documents.
It bought a few months. In August 2024, the lenders took 100 percent ownership in an out-of-court exchange that cut the debt by $1.3 billion. The Financial Times put the loss to Vista and its co-investors at $4 billion, one of the largest private equity wipeouts since the financial crisis, and it happened without a bankruptcy filing. Pluralsight never entered Chapter 11. It simply changed hands, from an Austin buyout firm to a syndicate of lenders, while the sign in Draper stayed up.
Not for long. The replacement chief executive lasted about five months. His successor, Erin Gajdalo, announced in June 2025 that Pluralsight would cut 17 percent of its global workforce and move its headquarters from Draper to Westlake, Texas, calling the new office a right-sized headquarters and pledging that Utah employment would hold steady through remote work. The company's press releases now open with a Texas dateline. Founded in Farmington. Sued in New York. Restructured by lenders. Re-headquartered in Westlake.
The pattern
Pluralsight is the sharpest version of the story, not the only one.
- Qualtrics: taken private by Silver Lake and CPP Investments at a $12.5 billion valuation in 2023, roughly 780 layoffs that fall, and this April, a new chief executive, three months into the job, removed five senior executives in a single day.
- Domo: still public, still in American Fork, and worth about $130 million this spring, down from several billion.
- InsideSales.com: once valued at nearly $2 billion, was sold to Aurea in 2021 for a price sources put in the low tens of millions; employees were terminated in the transaction, and the brand was retired.
- Instructure: private again at a $4.8 billion enterprise value, its second buyout firm.
- Vivint: sold to NRG for $12 a share, $2.8 billion in cash.
- Weave: still public and still growing, 17 percent last quarter by its own report, but worth around $400 million and seating activist investors on its board as of March.
In total, the exits and the era returned more than $20 billion to founders and investors. Almost none of it survives as an independent public company headquartered in this state. The institutions went to Silver Lake, Vista, KKR, Blackstone, SAP, Adobe, Bill.com, NRG, Aurea, and a lender syndicate.
The people caught underneath are the ones the jobs data is starting to describe. The Salt Lake Tribune spent last winter documenting the corridor's hiring freeze: postings drawing 500 to 800 applications in a week, experienced engineers searching for a year, a laid-off product designer in South Jordan arranging paused mortgage payments while he applied. Mary Hall, who directs the Kahlert School of Computing at the University of Utah, told the paper that artificial intelligence is absorbing the work that once trained junior engineers.
Pluralsight's own 2026 forecast reports that entry-level tech jobs have fallen by 50 percent at major firms and by 30 percent at startups since the pandemic, and warns that without deliberate on-ramps, the industry risks losing a generation of talent.
The other column
None of this is the whole account, and honesty requires the other column. According to the state's own deal tracking, 2025 was the best fundraising year for Utah's startup economy. Filevine raised $400 million. Entrata took $200 million from Blackstone at a $4.3 billion valuation and kept control, which almost no one on the list above managed. Torus raised $200 million for modular power. Awardco became a unicorn. DX was sold to Atlassian for $1 billion within five years of its founding. The local funds reloaded: $500 million at Pelion, $290 million at Run Ventures, $200 million at Epic, and $150 million at Sorenson. The partners writing those checks are, to a striking degree, the people who built and sold the last generation.
The money is not going where it used to. Zanskar has raised more than $150 million since January for geothermal exploration. Rodatherm closed the largest first round a geothermal startup has raised; Vector raised $61 million for defense; PassiveLogic raised $74 million for AI infrastructure; Fortem opened a counter-drone manufacturing headquarters in Lindon; and capital across the industry is shifting toward data centers. A few of the old guard show what adaptation looks like. Lucid Software never sold and never listed, took a $500 million secondary at a $3 billion valuation, and now ranks eleventh among the most-used applications at Fortune 500 companies by Okta's count. Podium rebuilt itself around an AI employee who handles customer inquiries without human intervention. Pattern, the Lehi commerce company, went public on the Nasdaq in September 2025, raising $300 million, and it sells physical goods.
Whether this new column produces jobs the way the old one did is the open question, and the early evidence is not reassuring on volume. AI-native companies run leaner by design. Energy and defense are built with capital more than headcount. The subscription software business employed tens of thousands of Utahns and taught a generation to sell, and its entry-level jobs were the rungs a young state climbed.
Where things stand
Which returns us to the numbers. Nationally, hiring has slowed to a crawl, wages are growing 3.5 percent against an inflation reading above 4, and the Federal Reserve under Kevin Warsh has made clear its priority is bringing inflation down, not cushioning the job market. Leisure and hospitality lost 61,000 jobs in June on weaker than usual seasonal hiring, a warning for a state whose rural counties live on visitors; Garfield County, the gateway to Bryce Canyon, already runs the highest unemployment in Utah at 7.6 percent. The Gardner Institute's Natalie Gochnour warned in late April that the indicators point to a near-term slowdown, and Utah consumer sentiment fell sharply that month.
The Department of Workforce Services publishes Utah's June employment report in mid-July. Watch the three lines in it. Whether participation keeps sliding. Whether leisure and hospitality follow the national drop. And whether the information sector's losses deepen. The unemployment rate will almost certainly still look excellent, and it will still be partly an illusion, held down by the quiet subtraction of people who stopped looking.
