The Nashville Chamber of Commerce recently released an extensive study of the area’s labor market written by the Center for Regional Economic Competitiveness (download report materials here; read the press release here). The report covers population, industry, and occupation trends and forecasts for the greater Nashville area, in addition to a labor market supply/demand analysis that compares area college graduates to high-demand occupations.

The report, titled “Labor Market Opportunities in the Nashville Economic Market Area: An Assessment of the Region’s Labor Force Demand and Supply,” states that of the approximately 1.25 million working-age people in the Nashville region, about 853,000 people are participating in the labor force and 34,000 are seeking work (4 percent unemployment rate). The report concludes that the region could face a shortage of about 2,300 or more workers per year during the next decade as job creation outpaces the number of people available to work.

“We are looking at workforce supply and demand from a long-term, regional perspective,” said Tennessee Labor and Workforce Development Commissioner James Neeley. “To effectively support our regional economic development priorities, it is imperative that we align our education and training resources with our workforce development needs.”

The authors of the study chose to use EMSI’s Strategic Advantage web-based regional analysis tool (paired with EMSI’s Complete Employment dataset) because of its ease of use, geographic flexibility, inclusion of all types of jobs (not just those covered by unemployment insurance), and estimation of data points “suppressed” by publicly available sources.