1. Developing Service Delivery Strategies.
Service delivery strategies should vary as much as regions do. That is to say, services should be designed to address local needs. If the primary labor market problem in a region is severe skills shortages—that is there is a lot of demand for skilled workers but not enough workers with the right skills—it calls for a very different strategy than if the problem is too few employers and jobs. Historically, most WIBs' greatest weakness in designing service delivery strategies has been a failure to understand the demand (or employers') side of the equation. This is true in the case of even relatively simple strategies, such as targeting "high road" employers for placements and services.

Let us take an example to illustrate how WIBs might approach the problem of designing a service delivery strategy using economic data.

Mapping a Career Path: An Example The NOVA Private Industry Council in California's Santa Clara County puts out numbers of booklets describing industries and the jobs within them. One is on the hospitality industry. It outlines numbers of career paths within the various segments of the industry including one in the Food and Beverage segment. Director of Food and Beverage Catering Manager (larger property) Banquet Manager Banquet Captain Banquet Wait Staff Food Server The guide also suggests alternative career ladders in other industries, such as food service management companies and education.

Example: Designing a strategy to help TANF recipients succeed in your local labor market. In this example, the labor market issue to be addressed is on the supply side. There are welfare recipients—women with little labor market experience and serious barriers to employment—who need to find jobs and learn how to achieve self-sufficiency. The recognition of this issue probably may not have emerged from a labor market audit. It is the result of a major public policy of which the WIB would have been aware. However, a very similar kind of problem could have emerged from an economic audit. For example, the WIB could have identified a particular community or set of communities in which there are lots of low skilled, low-income residents who are out of work.

Given this information, what does a WIB need to know to develop a strategy for employing TANF recipients? First, it needs to know a lot about the demographics of the particular group of welfare mothers. Where do they live? What is their educational level? How much labor market experience do they have? What other kinds of barriers to employment do they have? This information is best gotten from the TANF agency itself.

Then the WIB needs to know which industries and individual firms are likely to hire workers with these particular characteristics. Most likely this would mean that the WIB would want to target industries that have relatively large numbers of entry-level jobs, particularly those with family-sustaining wages and career paths. How would it know which industries these are? For starters, the WIB should refer back to the part of the audit that described the occupational structure of industries. The WIB would also want to look for entry level jobs that pay decent wages. These data could also have been obtained from its economic audit.