Recalibrate your economic development plan
Mark Lautman CEcD, Lautman Economic Architecture LLC
Understanding how many and what kinds of jobs a community expects to have in the future is predicate to any discussion about a workforce development. Unless you are one of the rare communities with a detailed and truly strategic economic base strategy, you are probably going to have to do much deeper economic base assessment and write a much more detailed strategic plan than you have before.
- How many people will be living in the community in ten years?
- How many will need jobs?
- How many of the total jobs, needed in the future, will have to be economic base?
- How many jobs in each industry sector?
- What factor of production gaps must be cured before those new jobs can materialize?
Understanding the community’s workforce dynamics
Coming up with a methodology, for predicting and managing the future mix of qualified workers, could end up being considerably more difficult than predicting the future economy. We know even less about how workers make decisions to choose careers, jobs or communities to live. This makes developing proactive program approaches to growing, attracting and retaining qualified workers that much more daunting.
A quick look at the Community Workforce Demographics Map below reveals a complex mix of forces at work on the scale, nature and quality of a local labor market.
The workforce planning process
A talent-attraction strategy needs to mirror the community’s job-creation strategy, or they are both likely to fail. In essence, you have to run two back-to-back strategic planning efforts: a jobs assessment and plan, followed by another for a workforce strategy.
Unlike the economic development planning process of iterating the number of jobs that must be created in each industry sector, a workforce strategy will fall out of deliberations focused on estimating how many qualified workers in what occupations in what industries will be needed to fully staff the economy that the community wants to have in the future.
How many extra workers will be needed for growth of the economy and to fill existing vacancies and leakage? Estimating how many workers will be leaked from the local labor market from retirement, skill obsolescence, out-migration, disincentives to work, health and family issues is going to be a major focus of inquiry.
Finally, the process will have to focus on the sources of new talent: the local P-20 school system, training up mid-career-change candidates, recruiting talent from other communities and mining talent from the community’s underclass of hard-to-employ and chronically poor residents.
Raising economic, workforce and community development strategies from tactical to strategic isn’t going to be the major obstacle to finding a new business model. The obstacle will be convincing educators, workforce developers and social service providers to bend their priorities to satisfy the needs of corporate interests. Additionally, employers and economic developers will have to bend to the needs of the workforce and community-quality champions.
Interesting take Mark. I think you do a good job of identifying the myriad of forces swirling around economic development. And as ornate as your charts are, they are probably even incomplete models for how LED works in real life. I get that you can only put so much on a pie chart!
I am skeptical though, that LED *policy* could be framed in this manner, given the blunt tools available to policymakers (public and private), the political time horizons involved, the disruptive nature of technology and the multitude of important actors outside of the LED tent.
Let’s consider an example that we are both familiar with- Albuquerque of 2009. We could agree that Albuquerque of 2009, much like Albuquerque of many decades before needed new economic base. It had moderate population growth, an overheated government sector as the bulk of its current base. What could the city do to improve its base over the next 5-20 years?
It could definitely upgrade its woeful k-12 system- not a cutting edge strategy but one with a lot of cutting edge empirical support, and not one, honestly that you need much LED planning to encourage.
But what else? What more detailed, coordinated efforts would you have suggested 5 years ago? Which sectors would the mid-career trainup efforts have been directed at? What kinds of workers would you recruit and how would you recruit them without a better economic base? It turns out that turning mechanical engineers into electrical engineers, and training electrical technicians might have been a good idea, improving the area’s ability to get TESLA. But no amount of foresight could have even predicted that the electric car would be the small semiconductor of the future for the city.
I just don’t see how this kind of framing is supposed to inform successful policy. I do think that it is one of a number of compelling ways to reverse engineer successful development after it’s taken place or to theorize about such a process..
What places have micromanaged the talent attraction and workforce development in this manner and succeeded by doing so?