ActionBrief

Finding and Using Labor Market Information for Economic and Workforce Development


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What can the WIB and Labor Representatives do to Address this Issue?

A. Step One: Getting a Basic Lay of the Land

Before a local WIB can begin to shape service delivery strategies, it needs to have a fairly sophisticated picture of its own economic geography, looking at both the demand and the supply sides of the labor market.
 
A Very Useful Resource

The data section of this Action Brief was largely drawn from an excellent guidebook, Socioeconomic Data for Understanding Your Regional Economy: A User's Guide, developed by Joseph Cortright and Andrew Reamer under a contract with the Economic Development Administration, U.S. Department of Commerce.

There is an accompanying web site that links many, many data sources. It can be reached at: www.econdata.net.
1. What are the questions?

On the supply side, a WIB would want to know answers to the following kinds of questions:

Supply Side Questions

  • What are the current and projected demographic characteristics of the workforce? Is the workforce becoming older or younger? What are the educational levels of the workforce? Are educational levels growing or declining (or both simultaneously)? What is the traditional skill base of the workforce and how is this changing? What is the racial mix? Has it changed over time? Have there been new waves of immigrant populations? Is greater immigration projected? Is the labor market participation rate of different segments of the population changing (for example, are more women working? fewer men?)
  • Which populations are having trouble finding or keeping jobs that pay family-sustaining wages? Are there many such groups in the local area? Do they have shared characteristics or very different kinds of characteristics (as for example, new immigrants and older white collar workers)? Is the at-risk population a minority or majority of the area's citizens?
  • Given the local cost-of-living, what wage levels are required to sustain a family? Does this vary by kind and size of family?
  • How are workers geographically distributed across the region? Are there pockets of at-risk populations and other pockets of high skill populations? Are some labor market problems concentrated and others dispersed? Is there a mis-match between where the jobs are and where the workers are? Do some workers have serious transportation problems?
On the demand side of the labor market, WIBs would have a similar set of questions they would want answers to such as:
 

Demand Side Questions

  • What are the major industries in the area (emerging, growing, stable, and declining)? Are they service or manufacturing? Are there connections among them (i.e. are there industry "clusters")? What is the relative balance between growth and decline?
 

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