Workforce Development for Economic Developers Part 9: Competitive Skilled Workforce Analysis
Workforce Development for Economic Developers
Part 9: Competitive Skilled Workforce Analysis
How does your workforce stack up against the regions you regularly compete against for an economic development project? When comparing community and regional workforces, Smart Solutions Group conducts a competitive analysis for a cluster based on a variety of workforce factors. To give you an idea of how a competitive analysis is conducted, we will highlight an actual competitive analysis of six Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) for the Finance & Insurance Cluster.
The following competitive analysis was based on ten Finance & Insurance Occupation and Industry factors. Since there is not an occupation category for Finance & Insurance, Smart Solutions Group created an occupation category for this cluster from selected occupations in Management, Business & Financial Operations, Computer & Mathematical, Sales & Related, and Office & Administrative Support occupation categories. There are 58 occupations in this cluster. The following are the ten factors that were used in the competitive analysis:
- Occupation Factors
- Number of jobs in 2013
- % employment growth from 2003 – 2013
- Finance & Insurance as a % of total jobs in the MSA
- Location quotient for all the occupations in Finance & Insurance
- Median earnings in Finance & Insurance
- Overall skill level of the MSA’s workers in Finance & Insurance occupations (based on employment by occupation and National Career Readiness Certificate skills required by occupation)
- Industry Factors
- Number of jobs in 2013
- % employment growth from 2003 – 2013
- Finance & Insurance as a % of total jobs in the MSA
- Location quotient for the Finance & Insurance sector
To keep the identity of the six MSAs confidential, we have coded the names of the MSAs. The rating shows that MSA –1 has a significant advantage over the other competitors. The following shows the final rankings of these six MSA based a methodology that includes 10 sector and occupation factors:
If you have any comments or questions on the Competitive Analysis, send them to Ed Andrews at ed@smartsoluitonsgroup.net. In the 10th and final Part in this series, we will publish questions that were asked during this series and we will provide answers to these questions.
Next Previous