- July 18, 2017
- Posted by: matt
- Category: Blog
I’m a member of my local workforce development board, the Alexandria-Arlington Regional Workforce Council. Â I’m biased, but I think we do a pretty good job. Â We’ve recently “upped our game” when it comes to publishing labor market data on our region. Â We sponsored a good study on the regional labor market, and are also currently involved in developing our regional Comprehensive Economic Development Strategy. Â I’m especially excited about the new data dashboards that Council staff are developing in cooperation with the workforce development team at Northern Virginia Community College. Â The latest dashboard, for Q2 2017, examines recent trends with a special focus on what’s happening in our area’s “hot” fields of cybersecurity and data processing, hosting, and related services. Â I’m a big fan of these dashboards as they are a quick read for local business leaders and elected officials, and they get a lot of public attention. Â Lots of regions do them now, so I’m not sure this is a “best practice.” Â But, if your local workforce people aren’t producing data in digestible bites like these dashboards, push them to embrace this concept. Â In addition to learning from the team here in Northern Virginia, there are lots of other great resource groups such as the Labor Market Information Institute and the Community Indicators Consortium.