Ten years ago, when Dr. Robert “Rab” Thornton became Dean of Outreach Services at Housatonic Community College (HCC), the college had slow enrollment growth, very little interaction with the local business community, and low visibility in the state legislature. His duty was to reverse this trend and effectively “make an invisible college visible.”

Thornton quickly realized that one of the problems behind this was that the college primarily focused on enrollment figures when talking about its community value, and not on what stakeholders were truly interested in—economic revitalization, bottom lines, and return on investment. They were not communicating because they were speaking completely different languages. This discovery spurred Thornton to redirect HCC’s outreach efforts by looking for new ways to communicate the college’s real value to the community and state.

Read the full case study (PDF): Housatonic Community College: An urban renewal success story

The conventional wisdom is dished out to millions of students every year: You “need” a four-year degree in order to get a good job. However, with employers begging for more skilled (but not necessarily university-educated) workers, and with many bachelor’s grads finding themselves with few job prospects and a mountain of student loans, workforce and education professionals have begun to take issue with the common wisdom. Instead, they’re focusing on badly-needed “middle-skill” jobs—that is, jobs requiring some postsecondary education or training, but not a 4-year degree. An excellent overview of the issues can be found in the report “America’s Forgotten Middle-Skill Jobs,” produced by Skills2Compete and the Urban Institute.

(more…)

EMSI is pleased to announce a partnership with EmployOn to provide job postings data to Strategic Advantage users. EmployOn continually monitors thousands of online job boards to create a detailed, up-to-date database of available jobs in any region, searchable by job title, skills, location, company, and more.

EMSI clients who opt for the additional service will be able to access a customized EmployOn job search portal directly from Strategic Advantage. The new capability will enhance Strategic Advantage by allowing users to go from a high-level view of a regional labor market to a detailed view of actual jobs available.

To learn more and order access to the EmployOn job search module with Strategic Advantage, contact EMSI at (866) 999-3674.

UPDATE (7/8/2008): EMSI and EmployOn have added the capability to search job postings by industry  (NAICS system) and standard occupation (O*NET-SOC system). This will dramatically increase the integration of the two companies’ data sets and allow for more advanced analysis.

Representatives from EMSI, Maher & Maher, and the Newton, Iowa region will be presenting a session titled “The Integrated RIG Planning Process: Lessons From the First Regional Innovation Grant” at the U.S. Department of Labor’s Workforce Innovations 2008 conference. For those going to the conference and interested in attending the session, it is scheduled for Thursday, July 17th, at 9:30am—check your conference schedule for details.

Session summary: “Newton, Iowa and the Central Iowa region are a microcosm of the changes in the manufacturing industry. Learn how the region used workforce information intelligence and tools, along with carefully facilitated local intelligence, to form the region and lead a data-driven planning process focused on creating a different kind of economy. Understand the key aspect of ‘selling’ regionalization in an environment that is intensely political and local in its perspective.”

EMSI led the project’s economic and workforce analysis, contributing asset maps, industry focus reports, and a SWOT analysis. A summary of the session will be posted on EMSI’s web site after the conference.

EMSI would like to give advance notice that we will be dropping support for the Internet Explorer 6 browser (IE6) this autumn when we release the next version of Strategic Advantage. For the best experience with Strategic Advantage, EMSI recommends that all clients (but especially those currently running IE6) install and use the free Mozilla Firefox browser. However, EMSI also supports Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) and Apple’s Safari browser, which are also free for anyone to download.

(more…)

The Bureau of Economic Analysis has released advance estimates for 2007 state gross products. Overall, GDP growth slowed or remained unchanged in all U.S. regions, while national GDP grew by 2% in 2007 compared to 3.1% in 2006.

Regions with the most state GDP growth in 2007 were:

• The Pacific Northwest & Rocky Mountain  (WA, OR, ID, + MT and UT)
• South Central (TX, OK, KS)
• Northern Plains (ND, SD, MN)

Low-growth regions included:

• The southern Far West (CA, NV, + AZ)
• The Great Lakes (WI, MI, IL, IN, OH)
• The Southeast (mixed — higher-growth states were NC, LA, KY, GA)
• The Northeast (except NY and DC)

(Note: these “regions” don’t necessarily match region boundaries or names used by the BEA.)

The slowdown was led by Construction and Finance & Insurance industries, consistent with the “credit crunch” widely discussed in the media in past months. CA, NV, AZ, and FL (all states that experienced a significant subprime-related housing bubble) experienced extreme deceleration in growth and in 2007 were in the mid to lower quintiles of all states.