The 7-county Minneapolis-Saint Paul region faces a worker shortage of over 62,000 by 2020. We need “all hands on deck” if we are to maintain our region’s growth and competitiveness.

If you are a jobseeker, the two most important questions are:

1) What’s the best job I can get?
2) What training program can help me become a skilled candidate for that job?

Workforce development professionals must be able to quickly answer these questions in a customized way for each jobseeker; using data analytics on a regular basis creates stronger coordination between organizations and the best results for both jobseekers and employers.
In the last few years, a range of online analytical tools have enabled a clear view of our dynamic and constantly changing labor market. For the first time, this data is available to job counselors not just as information for reflection, but as a real-time action tool to direct jobseekers to the best opportunities.

These Sector Analysis Reports – the regional overview document and its one-page profiles of IT, manufacturing, construction, healthcare, business and financial services, and government – provide an analytical methodology to know and react to demand, supply, and training program outcomes. In other words, these tools can help us more efficiently close the worker gap. We hope that you see value in this data and decide to replicate this kind of analysis in your own sectors and communities. See the back page of this report for more on the methodology used to identify the most promising middle skill (Associate Degree or less), living wage jobs (over $30k annually) in the Minneapolis-Saint Paul region.

We believe workforce development must now be based on a real-time feedback loop. If you don’t know the analytics and if you can’t easily answer the top two jobseeker questions in an informed way, you can’t advise jobseekers well and you can’t help close the gap. So let’s start doing things differently. Take a look at our historic employment trends and where we are expected to grow by 2020, and we guarantee that it will have implications for how you serve your clients.