Key factors needed for successful workforce development

Workforce development plays a crucial role in shaping the success and well-being of the communities they serve. Preventing layoffs, rapidly re-employing dislocated workers, building apprenticeship programs and proactively engaging employers are the foundations of workforce development and economic vitality.

Key factors for effectiveness include developing a two-party system, having a data visualization platform and addressing all workforce development use cases. A consistent approach across the state or region is needed to develop a workforce development system that addresses both the citizens and the businesses that make up the economy and job market.

Business engagement professionals should be provided with the tools needed to easily identify the businesses in their market that would benefit the most from engagement. Building a new partnership with a local business is one of the utmost important aspects of a successful program.

Data as the Cornerstone

The foundational need for a successful workforce development program is access to data. Many economic centers and cities have data, analytics and research to regularly monitor and report on key economic indicators and current economic trends and conditions important to the local community.

The state’s labor market information teams, combined with other external data sources, provide quantitative and qualitative analyses for business recruitment, retention and expansion activities. Key metrics like a community’s demographics, economic factors, community and environment, education, labor force, income, and residential and commercial developments, are also important sources of data that can be turned into an economic dashboard or data visualization platform.

Successful workforce development is a two-party system and involves both the workforce and the businesses. The creation of a two-party system – where one branch prioritizes the workforce, and another prioritizes the business – is crucial for success. This will ensure that workforce development boards are more effective in their programs for early intervention, employer support and education, rapid response, collaboration with businesses, and using data-driven insights to shape policy and practice.

Having comprehensive business data analytics provides many advantages to workforce agencies and the business engagement professionals who grow networks and partnerships with local businesses. 

Successful economic development efforts based on hard data can contribute to developing long-term strategies and making sound investment decisions. A clear-eyed view allows decisions to be made based on a region’s actual strengths and avoids chasing economic-development fads where there is no basis for competitive advantage.

Leveraging the Power of Data and a Two-Party System

When creating a two-party system, it is important to use a third-party data provider with essential data and insights to make workforce development boards more successful. This access to third-party data can help identify sectors with high-growth potential or those with shortages or high turnover of workers to generate accurate and timely job market analyses.

In addition, third-party data that provides analytics can isolate the businesses that are growing and healthy versus the ones that are contracting and getting financially weak. Understanding where a business is in their life cycle helps communities better understand what programs a business would most benefit from for growth and success.

The first contact with a business can be much more effective when you know what is happening at their business site. For instance, are they a target for a job fair invitation or a workshare opportunity? Understanding their financial health allows a more fruitful conversation from the outset.

A data visualization platform is necessary to address the information needs of workforce development boards. Having a nimble data visualization platform allows for mapping, and advanced search tools giving users the ability to filter businesses by location, sector, size, risk, growth, and diversity in seconds.

Engaging with data providers can provide communities with the data content on all active businesses in a given state. For instance, data can be filtered by providers to encapsulate information on their overall financial health, industry, current lifecycle (growth, stability, contraction), as well as many other factors including Minority- and Women- Owned Businesses status.

To address all workforce development use cases, the right data visualization platform can allow businesses to assess all use cases, from rapid re-employment of dislocated workers or Trade Adjustment Assistance impact support to real-time intervention strategies to mitigate layoffs. In addition, other use cases such as supporting diversity, equity and inclusion, and grant initiatives or proactive business engagement for programs including apprenticeships expansion, job fairs and work-based learning can be implemented and shown through a data visualization platform.

Business outreach programs can benefit through intelligent targeting and data-driven prioritizations. This can allow workforce professionals to determine the "priority sectors" within a region, know every business in the community even those with less than 50 employees, predict the financial health of companies for real-time outreach, pinpoint top business prospects for outreach with greater precision and speed, access detailed business contact information for executives and human resources, and understand historical and current business and industry trends using insight from geographic information systems.

Utilizing these factors can help accelerate business engagement so workforce professionals can impact more job seekers and more businesses in less time. Combining visualization with data can be specifically designed to address the information needs of workforce development boards.

The desired outcome is to have actionable, predictive indicators that can reveal the current and future state of a company’s financial health for real-time, targeted business outreach. Delivering new insights and market intelligence to communities can contribute to a thriving workforce development program.

Chip Rogers is the Director of Workforce Development, State & Local Government and Education at Dun & Bradstreet.