Employer engagement
Choosing which employers to partner with
A workforce office replaces "whoever answered the email" with a concentration-and-growth analysis of its actual regional industry base.
Who this is: Director of Workforce and Continuing Education, working with the regional workforce board
Advisory boards had drifted to whichever employers responded to invitations, which skewed toward two large long-standing partners. Nobody could say which industries in the service area were genuinely concentrated, which were growing, or where the employers were that the college had no relationship with.
Run location quotient and shift-share on the service area's industry base to separate genuine local strength from national tailwind. Layer the establishment-size distribution to see whether an industry is a few large employers or many small ones — which entirely changes the engagement approach. Then use staffing patterns to see what occupations each target industry actually demands locally.
A ranked target list with an explicit rationale per industry: concentration, five-year change, the competitive residual from shift-share, establishment count by size band, and the occupations that industry employs. Employer outreach is aimed at industries the region is actually strong in and at size bands the college can serve.
Concentration and growth are different questions
Location quotient tells you what a region does unusually much of. Shift-share tells you whether recent change came from national growth, from being weighted toward growing industries, or from something genuinely local. An industry can be highly concentrated and declining — which is a retraining conversation, not an expansion one — and the two measures together separate those cases.
Establishment size changes the strategy
Two industries with identical employment can be four large plants or three hundred small firms. The first is an account-management relationship; the second needs an association or a chamber as an intermediary. The establishment-size distribution by county is one of the most actionable and least used views in regional analysis.
From industry to occupation
An industry target is only useful to a college once it becomes an occupation and then a program. National industry × occupation staffing patterns, applied to local industry employment, estimate what a target industry demands here — including occupations suppressed at county level.
What to take from this
- Separate concentration from growth before targeting an industry.
- Check establishment size — it determines whether outreach is direct or intermediated.
- Translate industry targets into occupations before translating them into programs.
- Keep the rationale attached to the list, so it survives a change of staff.
The methods behind this, documented
Illustrative scenario. Figures shown are for demonstration of method and are not outcomes attributed to a specific institution.
Walk this through on your region.
Thirty minutes, your service area, your programs. We will run the same analysis live and you keep the export.