The Department of Labor’s Employment and Training Administration has released a 90+ page document detailing the various public and private workforce information sources available to researchers. Subtitled “Decision Making Assistance for Regional Economic Development,” the catalogue provides brief introductions to dozens of sources, along with comparison tables to help users identify the right source for their needs.

EMSI’s Strategic Advantage is highlighted on page 90 of the report, in the category “Data Integration and Analysis Tools and Services.”

Read the press release or download the catalogue in PDF.

WorkingVentures Publications: This arm of Public/Private Ventures publishes books and other resources to strengthen the field of workforce development.

This document explains the regional analysis technique of “shift share,” particularly in the context of EMSI’s tools, which provide built-in shift share analysis for any industry or occupation in any customized region.

Shift share is a standard regional analysis method that attempts to determine how much of regional job growth can be attributed to national trends and how much is due to unique regional factors. The shift share section of various reports in EMSI’s Strategic Advantage helps to answer the question “Why is employment growing or declining in this regional industry, cluster, or occupation?”

Download the full document (PDF): Understanding Shift Share

This document explains the concept of Location Quotient, particularly in the context of EMSI’s tools.

Location quotient (LQ) is basically a way of quantifying how concentrated a particular industry, cluster, occupation, or demographic group is in a region as compared to the nation. It can reveal what makes a particular region “unique” in comparison to the national average.

Download the full document (PDF): Understanding Location Quotient

Pennsylvania is doing great things with a demand-driven workforce system that connects economic development and industry-led initiatives with workforce training programs. Part of their planning strategy is to allocate more funding to occupations they have identified as “high-priority” using a sophisticated data-driven methodology.

Workforce3One has posted an overview of the state’s methodology (free registration required).

The basic steps are to start with industry clusters that important to the state and its local areas, identify occupations within those clusters, and then filter the resulting occupations for strong growth potential and high wages (must be “family-sustaining”). Finally, local knowledge and regional factors are taken into account to ensure that the high-level data and projections have not overlooked anything (for example, the impending arrival of a new, large employer, which would not yet show up in the state’s labor market data.)

This rigorous process is not only industry-oriented but also increases the likelihood that state and federal money spent on training will see a return on investment. Training workers for high-demand, high-wage occupations will result of higher worker incomes and subsequently fewer demands on public services.

Today’s innovative companies are just as concerned with local workforce availability as they are with building sites and incentive packages, which is why development professionals need to be prepared to answer detailed questions about their region’s labor force: size, unemployment, industry/occupation profile, workers in similar/transferable occupations, post-secondary program capacity, and so on.

Chris Manheim, President of McHenry County EDC in northern Illinois, emphasizes that regional partnerships and collaborations, along with a having a diversified data toolkit, are critical to showing site selection consultants that his area is ready for business.

EMSI’s Strategic Advantage is one key part of this toolkit, providing MCEDC with the ability to instantly access up-to-date demographic, industry, and occupation data for its area. In a recent article in the Economic Development Administration’s Economic Development America magazine, Manheim highlighted the ability of Strategic Advantage to provide detailed employment data for local industry clusters:

Figure 2 is taken from data compiled by Economic Modeling Specialists, Inc. from a product called Strategic Advantage. This example examines local employment over the same period, but is much more in-depth than the employment data shown on the previous page. A site selector now has a snapshot of the key business clusters in your area.

EMSI has put together a short video walkthrough of the new features in Strategic Advantage, including instant region switching, economic indicators, smart tables, and much more.

Click here to view the video in Flash format.

Purdue University’s Center for Regional Development (CRD) and the Indiana Business Research Center, in partnership with Economic Modeling Specialists Inc., have been awarded a $350,000 grant from the Economic Development Administration to study and improve rural economic development strategies.

Results of this study will help business and government leaders throughout the nation measure innovation capacity, analyze occupational and industry clusters, and prioritize public investments based on competitive advantages in their regions. The research team also plans to test new assessment and strategic planning methods in four diverse regions of the United States. Two of the test regions will be located in Indiana. A region in southwest Wisconsin and a region spanning parts of Mississippi and Alabama also are being considered.

. . . .

U.S. Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Economic Development Sandy K. Baruah said his agency looks forward to working with Purdue, IU and Indiana officials on this project.

“Rural America is home to nearly a quarter of the nation’s people and more than half of its commercial banks. Yet, with its wide-ranging geography, the ebb and flow of its industries, and its ever-changing technological and global challenges, America’s rural economy often performs differently than the rest of the U.S. economy,” Baruah said.

Read the full press release here.

The Oklahoma Department of Career and Technical Education helps both adults and youth get the right skills for tomorrow’s jobs. As part of this effort, the agency has embraced the States’ Career Clusters model in order to

• Give students relevant, valuable, transferable skills for high-demand, high-wage jobs
• Encourage students to follow career pathways that lead them from entry-level to long-term jobs
• Align curricula and student experiences with the demands of real-world careers
• Unite different education and training systems under a single vision

To inform students and educators about the actual job outlook for various career clusters and pathways, Oklahoma CareerTech uses EMSI’s Strategic Advantage, which provides the current jobs, projections, and wage information for career clusters, pathways, and individual occupations — in any local area or the entire state — within minutes.

To read more about Career Clusters in Oklahoma and to see the reports they have generate with EMSI’s tools, click here (for job outlook reports, follow the “Career Cluster State Analysis Report” links on each career cluster’s page).

Starting November 1, EMSI’s Strategic Advantage will provide users with instant access to industry cluster definitions created by Christine Nolan and Purdue University’s Center for Regional Development. The definitions are lists of standard NAICS codes, which categorize hundreds of types of business activity. Purdue’s CRD is nationally recognized for its work on regional clusters, including its recent report Unlocking Rural Competitiveness: The Role of Regional Clusters, prepared for the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Economic Development Administration.

The new Purdue clusters will be much more detailed and comprehensive than the current cluster definitions that are built into the tool. And as always, users will be able to customize the built-in clusters and define industry clusters of their own. EMSI’s Strategic Advantage uses the cluster framework to organize its detailed and comprehensive industry data, employment forecasts, and input-output model scenarios, as well as analyze cluster workforce and skill requirements.

Since the current built-in cluster definitions in Strategic Advantage will be removed in the upgrade, EMSI advises all users who are working with clusters to wrap up their current projects or contact EMSI to keep the old cluster definitions in their individual accounts.

If you have any questions or comments regarding this upgrade, please contact EMSI Customer Solutions at 866.999.3674.