Solutions for Economic Developers

No matter which state, county, or city you support, these are difficult times. As you compete with other regions to build your employment base and retain or even add jobs to the local economy, you need every edge you can get. Traditional sources of labor market information, such as BLS, are essential resources but with limitations: it’s months or more before you have access to the data that’s been collected. And even then it’s noticeably generalized – a variety of information about industries and occupations, but little that’s specific to the particular skill and certification requirements that targeted employers are currently demanding – essential information for ensuring that workforce development and training programs are geared toward employers’ needs.

Burning Glass gives you the competitive advantage you need. We provide real-time information on what’s in demand in your region, state, and the entire U.S., delivering intelligence that covers the job market in detail from top to bottom, helping you answer these critical questions and more:

Strategic Support

• Which industries and employers are posting jobs in my region and which are not?
• Which occupations and skills are most in demand in my region and which are not?
• Which training programs do we need in my region in order to retain employers by upskilling workers to meet demand?
• Which training programs do we need in my region if we hope to attract industries or employers from other regions?

Tactical Support

• Which industries or employers from other regions could we attract based on the skills we have in supply?
• Which employers are at risk to leave my region based on their inability to find the skills they need?
• Which employers are at risk to leave my region based on their hiring activity in other regions?
• How can I measure the interim and ultimate success of our initiatives?

It’s easy to identify business retention and expansion as well as industrial and workforce development as critical strategic goals, but it’s much more difficult to develop step-by-step plans on how to achieve them. You can never have enough information on facts, conditions, and trends, but there’s a hitch: relying on conventional sources of labor market information for targeted planning is like performing surgery using an anatomy textbook – the information is helpful but only in a general way. Far better to use an MRI that was taken 24 hours ago and shows you in detail the exact ailment you must address.

In similar fashion, Burning Glass leverages advanced technology to show you what’s happening in the job market in real-time, tracking employer hiring activity by industry, occupation, experience, education, and required skills, quantifying market demand for the specific qualifications that may or may not be in supply in your region.

Our Labor/Insight™ market analytics solution helps you:

Understand your region – Our solutions provide you with a comprehensive view of the job market, highlighting who’s hiring and who isn’t, emerging industries and clusters, and the skills, certifications, and other qualifications most in demand. You can also conduct in-depth research, starting from the top level (an industry or occupation) and drilling all the way down to specific underlying job postings.

Understand the skill needs of resident businesses – A key to retaining business is ensuring that you have a properly skilled labor pool and adequate infrastructure to support future growth. Labor/Insight shows you the skill needs and growth trajectories of entire industries as well as of specific employers. With this intelligence in hand, you can work cooperatively with local or targeted employers to create training programs that are custom tailored for their needs.

Profile strategic sectors – Your economic development plan focuses on the development of key industries. But to make the region attractive to these strategic sectors, you need detailed information on the kinds of skills and technologies they require, the sector’s occupational and industry mix, and both who and where the leading employers are. This is particularly valuable – and often difficult – intelligence to obtain because, in many cases, targeted industries are still in their infancy locally: to understand their needs, you may need to look at activity in other regions where these sectors are more mature. Labor/Insight gives you a detailed portrait of targeted sectors in order to help you translate your strategic plan into actionable measures.

Align training investments with regional priorities – As with any investment, you seek to maximize the ROI of workforce development and community college training programs you sponsor in terms of their alignment with the needs of priority sectors. Labor/Insight gives you the insight you need in order to develop the skills employers are actually hiring for, improving employment outcomes in your region at the same time you retain existing employers and attract new ones with an upskilled workforce.

Economic development is a truly collaborative discipline in many ways, whether it be partnerships between government and business or inter-region alliances. Competition is inevitable, however, because there’s only one first prize when it comes to attracting and retaining business: companies who decide to locate in your region have decided against other regions, and vice versa. But nothing lasts forever – you have to assume that your resident businesses are being wooed by other regions and/or are themselves continually evaluating the benefits of relocating, at the same time that you are reaching out to non-resident businesses in the hopes of bringing them to your region.

Real-time data is valuable in many ways, not least because it gives you the ability to react immediately to realize opportunities and repel threats. Our Labor/Insight™ market analysis solution helps you:

Analyze gaps between supply and demand – By comparing a given company’s hiring activity against the skills currently possessed by your labor pool, Labor/Insight helps you determine which required skills are not well supplied, thus identifying employers who are at risk to relocate to a region with an upskilled workforce. In similar fashion, knowing which skills you possess in surplus gives you the opportunity to play to your strengths by targeting non-resident industries and employers who would be attracted to your region due to your talent pool.

Retain business – Labor/Insight helps you understand employer activity in and outside your region. Learn which employers’ talent needs are going unfilled and see early indications when key employers are at risk. Similarly, by analyzing the hiring patterns of both local employers and their competitors, we help you work with key businesses to build a pipeline of well-suited talent and to upskill incumbent workers.

Target out-of-region employers – Labor/Insight helps you gain as close a knowledge of employers in other regions as you have of your own. Identify businesses to target for outreach by matching the skills they require against the qualifications of your labor pool and approach them already knowing the specific jobs and skills they are hiring for overall or in a specific field or location.

Develop new industries – With so many traditional industries (e.g. manufacturing) shrinking, it’s more important than ever to attract and develop emerging industries. Labor/Insight provides you with a tutorial on any industry of interest – simply find a region in which the industry is healthy and well established and then use our data to learn more about the jobs offered and skills required by that industry.

Measure results – Whether it be your strategic plan or a tactical initiative, our solutions enable you to monitor outcomes as frequently as you wish. Hiring activity (or lack thereof), skills in demand, and gap analysis are all useful tools for demonstrating the efficacy of your efforts.

Write grants – Labor/Insight provides the detailed, up to date information that you need when developing proposals for funding, helping you make your pitch to funders on the basis of accurate data that quantifies and illustrates the conditions and trends you wish to improve.