Labor/Insight™

Traditional sources of labor market intelligence are informative but inherently limited, as BLS census and survey data take months or longer to collect, compile, and publish – during which time the conditions and trends they describe may already have shifted. Given the dynamic nature of the 21st century labor market, stakeholders can’t afford any lag time in efforts to understand and address the manifold threats and opportunities to reemployment, workforce development, and business growth that exist today.

Labor/Insight™ is an interactive, report-generating application that gives users real-time access to a comprehensive database of demand (jobs) data. It is powered by Burning Glass’s unique technology for jobs data aggregation, parsing, extraction, and analysis, which translates free text job postings into actionable intelligence on the nature and content of employer demand.

Labor/Insight is web-based and provides a variety of reports and easy-to-use filters to track employer hiring activity by industry, occupation, education, and skills, quantifying market demand for specific qualifications as well as changing requirements for targeted occupations. It also enables users to generate a list of employers with the greatest demand for workers and to view actual job postings by relevant category.

Labor/Insight is convenient and easy to use. Users define the specific attributes, parameters, and value ranges of interest to them, as well as the report / presentation format and structure (e.g. comparisons, trends, and synopses). In addition, users are provided with access to and can export the job postings underlying all reports. Labor/Insight is a powerful tool for identifying emerging opportunities, hot occupations, and growing companies, as well as for highlighting declining industries (as a precursor to rapid response efforts).

Importantly, Labor/Insight can also be connected to Burning Glass’s Focus/Career™ job search portal, a public job bank, or to state UI claimant flow in order to provide similar reports on the talent landscape within a region or statewide. The ability to highlight supply/demand disjoints provides a basis for identifying regional strengths, targeting the deployment of training resources, and assisting community colleges and universities in developing relevant curricula.

 

Labor/Insight™ features these tools and reports:

• Job Atlas / What’s In Demand – Using patented spidering technology, Burning Glass aggregates and maintains the world’s most comprehensive database of millions of local and national jobs. From this, Labor/Insight can tell you exactly what you need to know about hiring activity, broken down by O*NET, NAICS, employer, skill code, geography, level of required experience and education, salary, health benefits, and dozens of other criteria. These data can be mapped at the full range of geographic levels, including county, LMA, area code, and region, so that you can understand exactly where the jobs are for any given occupation, skill, educational level, etc. Or you can click through beyond the summary statistics to see actual jobs. Similarly, we report on the specific types of jobs and skills most in demand, presented at whatever level of detail you need – all the way down to displaying actual jobs.
• Occupational Skills & Qualifications Reports – Unlike conventional tools, Labor/Insight reports on the exact skills, qualifications, and certifications employers are asking for in their postings – all broken out by the specific type of job. In addition to knowing which occupations are in demand, Labor/Insight users can access a detailed inventory of the skills required for those jobs. For example, while other applications may find high demand for computer systems analysts in a specific region, only Labor/Insight can tell you that the specific skills required for those positions have more to do with process engineering and usage analysis than with hardcore IT knowledge. This has significant implications for the development and deployment of training resources and other initiatives that seek to improve employment outcomes.
• Regional Skill Gap Analysis & Training Alignment – When connected to supply data via Focus/Career™, a job bank, or State UI claimant information, Labor/Insight overlays employer requirements atop a similarly detailed survey of the current regional skills base. As a result, users can access regional gaps between demand and supply, as broken out by skill, seniority, education-level, O*NET, and NAICS. This includes a series of supply/demand alignment reports, comparing the number of currently open jobs requiring a given skill with the number of available job seekers reporting experience in that skill. In a recent example, we found that while IT jobs within a state had dried up overall, there was in fact heavy unmet demand for workers with specific IT skills – a finding that is highly suggestive of specific opportunities to deploy highly targeted training resources to realign otherwise qualified talent.
• High Growth Reports – Labor/Insight identifies the employers and industries, both nationwide and specific to a targeted state or region, that are most active in job creation. Unlike typical job market demand reports, Labor/Insight provides significant detail about the specific jobs, skills, qualifications, pay rates, benefit types, etc., providing valuable intelligence for economic development as well as competitive purposes. In addition, these additional data points make it easy to differentiate between high- and low-skilled jobs, entry-level and experienced employment, and high- and low-wage positions. Also, sophisticated statistical techniques enable us to infer where demand for people may be going unmet; after all, a large number of jobs in a certain field doesn’t necessarily signal a talent shortage if there is correspondingly even greater number of job seekers waiting to fill them.
• Emerging Industry Needs – Jobs in emerging employment sectors are often missed or under-reported by conventional tools which rely on O*NET codes which have not yet been modified to capture rapidly developing industries. By contrast, for emerging sectors such as green industry, Burning Glass’s coding is robust, in real-time, and enables the identification of the specific skills required for employment in such industries.
• Competitive & Business Intelligence – Labor/Insight help employers stay abreast of the latest developments in their industry and area so that they can remain competitive. Specifically, Labor/Insight gives employers the tools they need to understand and take action with respect to the evolution of technology, skills, and knowledge within their industry; the qualifications (education, experience, skills, certifications, etc.) that are in demand in their industry; and the jobs (including job descriptions and required qualifications, as well as titles) and skill sets their competitors are seeking to acquire.
• Regional Hiring Reports – Competition is not limited to business-to-business; regions also compete to attract and retain employers. Regional Hiring Reports provide ongoing summaries of recent hiring activity in any selected region, including tallies by job, skill, qualification, degree, certification, salary level, experience level, etc. In addition, for any region, users can click through to see the actual jobs local employers in that area are looking to fill.

Labor/Insight is intuitive and easy to use. Data is presented graphically on screen and can also be downloaded to Excel.

Intelligence for Workforce Development

Sitting at the nexus between job seekers and employers, workforce developers play an important role in adapting the local skills base to meet both the current and future needs of business. But where to start? While a few employers may be vocal in articulating their unmet needs, many others do not interact as closely with workforce boards, making it difficult to know exactly which jobs are truly in demand and which skills those jobs require of job seekers. Government data can be months or even years old, and is at a level of aggregation too broad to be meaningful.

Burning Glass fills the intelligence gap. We start out by piecing together a comprehensive picture of national and local hiring activity, achieved by scouring over 17,000 web sources, including job boards, larger employers, and the small businesses that have been driving recent economic recovery. The result is a database, updated daily, of millions of currently available jobs from every region in the nation.

However, on its own, a database of jobs does not provide workforce developers with direct information on the specific types of jobs most in demand nor does it offer any direct insight into skill requirements. To transform raw data into actionable job market intelligence, Burning Glass deploys a highly advanced, patented text mining engine to analyze each job listing in order to identify and catalogue the specific skills, educational qualifications, certifications, experience levels, etc. required. We also capture salaries, infer salaries from industry wage data where they go unstated, and identify whether a job indicates any benefits and/or whether compensation meets localized living wage standards. This is the data that powers Labor/Insight, delivering a level of insight provided goes well beyond that of any other source.

Intelligence for Economic Development

In the current economic climate, with so many companies cutting back operations, the competition among regional development authorities to court the few businesses looking to expand can be especially intense. Developing winning strategies has never been more difficult. Which firms are considering investments in new facilities or in relocating existing operations? How can a region differentiate itself? How to demonstrate a superior workforce?

Labor/Insight offers advanced support for economic development both for targeting new employers and for promoting a region. Our targeting tools are based upon a detailed, real-time awareness of local and nationwide hiring activity. With a database of millions of jobs updated daily, Labor/Insight reports on who is hiring for what kinds of jobs – and can specifically apprise you of those companies hiring extensively for those skill sets in surplus within your area.

Our promotion tools leverage detailed information about the regional skill base in order to highlight strong fit between the requirements of prospective employers and the skills and qualifications of available job seekers. Based on registrations in Focus/Career™ or in a current talent bank, Labor/Insight mines resumes and job seeker profiles to deliver up-to-the-minute reports on the inventory of specific skills, capabilities, degrees, and certifications within your area. This is exactly the information you need in order to attract prospective employers to your region, because having ready access the right kinds of talent can make all the difference to an employer who is selecting a new location.

Intelligence for Education and Career Advancement

Eighty percent of graduating seniors say that finding a good job is their top reason for going to college – and for colleges and their high school partners, the pressure is on to deliver. Generalized academic counseling is no longer enough, but efforts to significantly beef up the college-to-career pipeline have been hampered by the lack of a timely and cost-effective tool for translating labor market information into useful career guidance and program design advice – until now.

Labor/Insight helps post-secondary educational institutions and other training providers to capitalize on real-time labor market information in order to:

• Track the demand for specific occupational certifications, degrees and program majors in local, state, and national labor markets.
• Identify new targets of opportunities within emerging industries and occupations (e.g. green jobs).
• Track the latest skill requirements of any category of jobs and apply the information to develop high-value internships and align course offerings and curricula to the most promising career opportunities.
• Expand internship, career mentoring, and job placement opportunities by generating a list of employers with current demand for the skills taught in your institution’s programs of study.
• Provide personalized career advice from the first day of orientation through graduation by identifying the level of demand for specific occupational certifications, degrees, and program majors in local, state, and national labor markets and the “best bet” employment opportunities within those fields of study.

Business Intelligence

In order to stay one step ahead of the competition, businesses need to where their competitors are going, as well as where they’re at. Good competitive intelligence about future direction is hard to get and expensive, especially information that is detailed enough to be actionable as well as completely up to date. Online job postings have long been used as a source for business intelligence, but with significant limitations: corporate websites are both over- and under-inclusive and can’t be relied on as an accurate gauge of workforce growth and skills in demand. And manual searches of the major job boards are simply too time consuming to conduct, aggregate, and analyze.

Labor/Insight is a rich source of business intelligence. By leveraging our patented parsing and job spidering technologies, Labor/Insight enables you to:

• Know who your competitors are hiring, including the divisions and products that are growing and those that are not
• Know where they advertise their jobs, giving you the choice of directly competing for talent by posting on the same sites or seeking out different sites in the hopes of beating them to the punch
• Know how they advertise their jobs, so that you can match and hopefully surpass them when it comes to attracting the talent

Online job postings have shown promise as a source of real-time advertised demand analysis for more than a decade. But the potential was never fully realized because conventional technologies are significantly limited in the information they can generate. Text-based search systems look only for specified keywords and, as such, generally provide limited or no coding capability. Similarly, code-based technologies are restricted to summarizing employment data based upon O*NET codes and lack the ability to showcase supply or demand at the level of skills or other job/career attributes. In addition, code-based match engines require that each job or job seeker be manually coded, which can significantly restrict their scope of analysis.

Burning Glass is different. Using a branch of artificial intelligence called Statistical Natural Language Processing (SNLP), Burning Glass has developed a patented approach to parsing and data extraction, mining the text of each job posting to extract and code a significantly expanded data record, including:

Job function (O*NET) Employer industry (NAICS) Location (geo-coordinates, MSA, LMA) Educational requirement (degree, level, major) Source Common and Specialized Skills (using a multi-level, hierarchical and fully customizable skills dictionary of over 15,000 skills)

Duration and level of experience Plurality (i.e. does this represent just one job?) Normalized salary Intermediation (i.e. was this posted by a recruiter?) Required certifications or licenses Green? (based upon actual skills or work activities referenced in the job ad)

In total, Burning Glass’s parsing technology can extract, derive, and infer more than 70 data elements from any given free-text job listing. When this technology is applied to a database of more than 7 million online job openings updated daily from over 17,000 job boards, newspapers, and employer sites, the result is the most comprehensive, detailed, and actionable repository of real-time demand data in the industry today.