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1/26/17
Streaming Session #11
January 26, 2017 Transcript
Education and Business Engagement:
Expanding Opportunities for Students
(00:00)
(Sharon Acuff speaking)
Welcome to the Virginia Department of Education Career and Technical Education video training session #11 in a series of 15 for CTE administrators. My name is Sharon Acuff, Specialist for Marketing and Related clusters. Today’s session will focus on “Education and Business Engagement: Expanding Opportunities for Students”. Our presenter will be Kathryn, Crespin, Research and Policy Analyst in the Demographics Research Group at the Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service at the University of Virginia.
(00:41)
Welcome, Kathryn. We are excited about your presentation topic. This session will provide valuable information for local CTE administrators when making decisions about appropriate new course selections and completing the new course application that must accompany any new course addition in your school divisions. Also, this detailed information using 2014-2024 employment data can be used to make decisions to eliminate courses that are no longer meeting local and regional needs. Kathryn, I am going to turn the floor over to you, and we look forward to the information you will present to us.
(1:29)
(Kathryn Crespin speaking)
Thank you, Sharon. It’s my pleasure to be here today to talk about how opportunities for students can be expanded by being certain that our approach to education and business engagement is aligned appropriately with regional industry and labor market needs. Even in the midst of increasing economic globalization, localities and regions continue to serve as strong economic anchors of our state and national economies as a result of industrial specialization and concentration. Think of Detroit’s auto industry or California’s Silicon Valley, for example, or, in our own state, shipbuilding in the Virginia Beach-Norfolk-Newport News region, mining in Southwestern Virginia, or information technology in Northern Virginia. So let’s take a moment to review how this regional industrial specialization ends of having kind of a self-fulfilling “snowball effect” on local and regional economies.
(02:25)
Regional industrial specialization often results as companies and firms cluster in close geographic proximity to take advantage of a region’s resources as they relate to that industry. Whether it be that region’s supply of natural resources, or related manufactured resources, or knowledge resources that lead to innovation, or—perhaps most relevant to our discussion today—its supply of human resources—a workforce that is educated and trained in the skills that are required by that industry. As the economic benefits of this regional clustering effect continue to grow, new companies and suppliers move into the area, new ideas are exchanged, new innovations are made in relation to that industry, and all of this has the effect of creating more jobs in the region that are both related and not related to that specific industry. This is the “snowball effect” that I mentioned. However, due to the fact that all of this is a very dynamic process—whether as a result of new industrial innovations being put into practice, or a new set of suppliers moving into the are, or due to a change in demand for a region’s special product—regional labor market needs are constantly changing. So in order to maintain and promote continued regional economic development and to be certain that the needs, priorities, and activities of students, employers, and educators are all aligned, it is very important to be informed about what is going on with the regional labor market and to be engaged with local and regional employers to understand their needs. The focus of my presentation today will be a liitle bit more on the former—to show you what sources of regional labor market data are out there and how they might be used to inform your approach to engaging businesses in your own region.For additional tips on the latter—about resources that are available to help you actually engage with local employers—I’d like to refer you to last year’s video presentation on this topic by my Weldon Cooper Center colleague, Annie Rorem, (still available on the Virginia Department of Education’s CTE Professional Development web page) where she discussed this aspect of the topic a bit more and I have not repeated that information here.
(04:49)
So why is being familiar with regional labor market information important? Being familiar with this data can help you identify regional industry specializations and major employers; understand how regional labor demand relates to regional labor supply; cultivate regionally-appropriate strategies for business engagement; develop educational curricula that are relevant to regional demand; and provide career guidance to students in a manner that expands their career opportunities.
(05:31)
My goals for this presentation are: 1) to emphasize why it’s important to be familiar with regional industry and employment trends; 2) to help you learn what regional labor market data are available; 3) to teach you more about the Trailblazers regional occupational employment projections--how they can be used to increase your knowledge of state and regional labor demand as well as how they can be used to provide career and educational guidance to students in a manner that will improve their chances of success in the labor market; 4) to expand your understanding of location quotients and help you become familiar with VirginiaLMI.com’s Location Quotient Calculator; and 5) to discuss how regional labor market data can be applied to enhance regional business engagement and to expand opportunities for students.
(06:25)
These are the three sources of regional labor market data that I’ll be focusing on in today’s presentation, but, again, I also encourage you to refer back to the video presentations of my Weldon Cooper Center colleagues for additional sources of regional, state, and national industry and labor market data—Annie Rorem’s presentation on this same topic last year on January 14th and Luke Juday’s presentation on August 25th of last year on Preparing Students for High-Skill, High-Demand, and High-Wage Careers.
(06:57)
The first labor market data that I would like to go over with you today are the Trailblazers state and regional occupational employment projections. You may already be familiar with these data, however, the methodology for producing this data as well as the final data products have changed slightly since the last time they were released, so I’d like to spend a little extra time with you today to review these changes.
First, some background information about how these projections are developed. Every two years, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) releases new data about employment in hundreds of occupations across the country. Virginia, and other states, use the BLS data as the basis for developing state-specific occupational employment projections. The Virginia Economic Commission (VEC) is responsible for producing our state’s projection data, and they are typically published about a year after the BLS release on the Virginia Labor Market Information (LMI) website. Trailblazers labor market data provide special value to CTE students, educators, and administrators because they link the occupational employment projections produced by the VEC to the CTE Career Cluster framework, supplement this information with BLS occupational wage and education data, and provide this information at both the state and regional levels by Local Workforce Investment Area (L WIA).
(08:25)
I’ve included a map of the Local Workforce Investment Areas here on this slide for your reference.
(08:33)
To access this data, go to the CTETrailblazers.org website and click on the “Laber Market Data” tab at the top of the page. In the middle of this page, you’ll find links to both the state and regional occupational employment projections. (A note comes on the screen that reads “New information on using these worksheets to fill out the CTE New Course Application will soon be posted to the VDOE’s CTE Program Administration page.”) Click on any of these links, and an Excel workbook consisting of three different worksheets will be downloaded onto your computer. You can access each type of worksheet by clicking on the desired tab at the bottom of the screen.
(09:05)
The first tab, or ‘SOC Summary’ worksheet, displays the projections by Summary Occupational Group using the BLS Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) system. Data for associated individual occupations are aggregated into ‘minor’ occupational groups, which are then aggregated into ‘major’ occupational groups, and occupations are not assigned to more than one group. This worksheet obviously does not classify occupations using the CTE Career Cluster framework, but is helpful if you’re interested in viewing and working with the projections using the BLS Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) system.
(09:48)
The other two tabs, or worksheets, do present the projections using the CTE Career Cluster framework. The ‘non-duplicated’ worksheet assigns each occupation to only one CTE career pathway and cluster and should be the only one used for official labor market projection figures. Because employment numbers can be summed across pathways and clusters, the “non-duplicated” worksheet provides a more realistic assessment of overall employment levels within each geographic region. It does not provide a fully rounded picture of the occupational composition of each pathway or cluster because many occupations could reasonably be classified in more than one. Also, it is important to keep in mind that the VEC suppresses and does not release some occupational data when doing so might violate principles of confidentiality. This, of course, happens more frequently at the regional level due to smaller numbers of people being employed in certain occupations, and is particularly true for regions with smaller populations overall. Thus, caution and common sense is advised when comparing occupational data at the pathway or cluster level among regions of different population sizes.
(11:16)
The ‘duplicated’ worksheet assigns some occupations to more than one CTE career pathway and/or cluster and was intended to serve as a career planning tool for students and educators who are interested in seeing all of the occupations that might be open to students who complete programs in a cluster. Because the same occupation may appear more than once throughout the worksheet, employment figures for individual occupations should not be summed within or across pathways or clusters.
(11:52)
Both “non-duplicated” and “duplicated” worksheets provide information about each occupation’s predominant level of education and training. The “predominant” level of education and training is determined by Trailblazers based on U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics occupational education and training data and is the higher of either the typical education level that is required for entry into an occupation or the most prevalent level of educational attainment among all workers in the occupation age 25 years or older. If this column indicates that training/certification is required, that means that one or more of the following is typical in order to attain competency in the occupation: a postsecondary non-degree award, an internship or residency, an apprenticeship, or on-the-job training. If any level of work experience is typically required for entry into the occupation, that is also indicated here in this column.
(12:59)
The next five columns display the employment projection data. The first employment projections column shows the estimated number of positions in each occupation in 2014 within the geographic area of interest. It’s important to note that this figure is a count of positions and not workers, as many people have more than one job. The second employment projections column shows the number of positions that are projected to be available in each occupation in 2024 within the geographic area of interest, and again, this is a count of positions and not workers. The third employment projections column shows the projected numeric increase or decrease in the number of positions in each occupation over the decade from 2014 to 2024, and the fourth employment projections column shows the projected percent increase or decrease in the number of positions in each occupation over the decade. The percent change is especially useful for comparing the extent of employment change across occupations since each occupation consists of a different number of positions. The fifth employment projections column shows the number of job openings that are expected annually for this occupation within the geographic area of interest. Job opportunities arise in two ways: when employers create new jobs and when workers retire or leave an occupation and need to be replaced by new hires. The VEC projects how many people will be retiring from each occupation over the decade and combines this with the number of new jobs created to predict how many “job openings” will be available each year, and that’s what this figure represents.
(14:44)
When looking at the numeric and percent change figures, I’d like to remind you that a higher percent of job growth does not necessarily mean there will be greater job growth numerically for that occupation over the decade. Likewise, greater numeric job growth does not necessarily represent a higher percentage change. Looking at the worksheet on our slide, for example, which shows the Therapeutic Services career pathway in the Health Science cluster within the Piedmont Workforce Investment Area, we can see that, although Physical Therapist Assistants are projected to see 48% growth in the number of positions available in this occupation within the Piedmont region, this equates to only 37 new positions available over the course of the decade as well as only six job openings annually in this region per year. Along the same lines, though Registered Nurses are--quote unquote—ONLY expected to see 13% growth in their occupation in the region over the decade (which is still much higher than the average), this represents a projected numeric increase of 476 jobs in the region over the decade as well as 135 expected job openings annually. So, especially as you are comparing the percent change figures across occupations, it’s important to keep the numeric figures in mind as you interpret this data.
(16:11)
Also keep in mind that negative projected job growth for an occupation does not necessarily mean there will be no annual job openings in that occupation. As mentioned earlier, the annual job openings figure factors in the need to replace workers who leave their jobs, so a loss of jobs over the decade does not necessarily mean there won’t be jobs available each year. In the example shown on the slide—and this is looking at the Banking Services pathway for the state of Virginia—you can see that, although there is projected to be a loss of 742 Teller positions in the state from 2014 to 2024, representing a 6% decrease in the number of positions over the course the decade, there are still expected to be 493 openings for positions in this occupation each year.