Imagine. A powerful magic box. Inside this magic box is information – and this information has the ability to influence your knowledge of job market trends by presenting the most current and in demand jobs, skills, and certifications, in any area of the state of Minnesota. Remember, the box is magical – so feel free […]
As Career and Technical Education awareness month comes to an end, we acknowledge our many partners that play a vital role in CTE and thank you for all your hard work in this space. RealTime Talent has long collaborated with many of our CTE partners to provide labor market and career data aimed to inform students and job-seekers. In 2017, through Perkins federal funding, we created a series of reports offering insight into three career clusters through the lens of employer demand including Agriculture, Food, & Natural Resources, Business, Management, & Administration, and Finance. These reports, along with a series of career pathways reports, were distributed among CTE coordinators and educators throughout Minnesota. To view or download these reports, click HERE.
Last November, RealTime Talent developed career pathway handouts for the White Bear Lake area school district, highlighting four key areas including Healthcare, Manufacturing, Construction, and IT pathways in Ramsey County. “These youth-friendly handouts were created to inform students on the career building jobs they may qualify for now or in the near future,” said Erin Olson, RealTime Talent Research Strategist. “By using school colors and images like emojis, these reports are appealing to the reader and can spark great conversation about these careers.”
Jenny Moore, the Career Pathways Navigator for the White Bear Lake Area Schools said, “I love everything about these reports” as she distributed them at a career expo attended by over 300 students and more than 70 industry partners. “It is truly amazing what RealTime Talent has done for our local community.” After Jenny shared these reports with secondary educators in her district, Shannon Grant, a Health and Physical Education Teacher at White Bear Lake High School, used the reports for a unique classroom assignment. Her students used the data provided on the career pathway handouts to gain insights and do further research on a career they may be interested in. These students experienced a fun way to engage in career exploration and developed some creative handouts of their own as well.
As we continue to promote the use of tools that address labor force needs and support our education system, RealTime Talent has been working with multiple CTE consortia, providing training and data consultation with TalentNeuron – a real-time job post data tool. Recently, RealTime Talent trained 30 career counselors and educators from the Wayzata area high schools. We look forward to how these educators will incorporate real-time labor and career information into their own classes. If you are an educator who’s interested in our research services or real-time labor market tools, reach out to us today!
If you have any questions about the work of RealTime Talent with Career and Technical Education, please contact Phil Arellano.
Did 2018 fly by for you? It did for the RealTime Talent team. About this same time last year, we were welcoming our new Executive Director, Deb Broberg, to RealTime Talent and we had just finished moving into the Chamber Foundation location. We adopted the mantra, “new year, new location, same mission.” As the year moved on and we settled into our new home, we continued to focus on our mission: to help create more informed, market-oriented decisions throughout the Minnesota workforce and education ecosystem to ensure the state’s economy has the talent it needs to help Minnesotans prepare for well-paying careers. We also continued our aim to create a movement toward workforce alignment, support sector-based collaborations for quality employment opportunities, increase cross-sector collaboration, and ensure daily decision-making is guided by strong data in the workforce and education ecosystem. Phew! That’s not only a mouthful – that’s a big task at hand! It’s a great thing we have so many great partners dedicated to Minnesota’s workforce and economy.
In 2018, RealTime Talent developed 113 data driven reports. From occupation snapshots and industry overviews, to labor market analyses and custom-built surveys, we offered just-in-time insights to decision-makers and encouraged data-informed planning in our workforce and education systems. Many of these reports are available on our website at http://www.realtimetalent.org/research.
We also gave 85 presentations and trained 310 participants on real-time labor market data tools both in the education and workforce space. 95 organizations and institutions of higher education that work with students, job-seekers, or employers currently had access to TalentNeuron Recruit and training and about 335-400 people currently use TalentNeuron Recruit on a regular basis in service to students, job-seekers, or employers. Between 6,400 and 7,350 job-seekers statewide received job search assistance that included data from TalentNeuron Recruit in FY2018, doubling the reach of the tool in 2017.
An estimated 7,200 students were advised using data from TalentNeuron Recruit in FY2018, with many more being reached with modified curriculum, programs, and materials that introduced them to high-demand career pathways. Approximately 60% of users working directly with students said use of TalentNeuron Recruit “increased the relevance of job opportunities to student needs” between April and October 2018.
RealTime Talent continued to use its unique position as a public-private partner to bring creative solutions to Minnesota’s labor shortage, skill misalignment, and labor market inefficiencies.
In K-12 education, we expanded TalentNeuron access and training, developed customized career pathway reports, and provided data consultation to Career and Technical Education (CTE) consortia across Minnesota, leading to in-depth engagement and increased use of labor market data in the classroom. For Higher Education, RealTime Talent created customized reports or provided consultation around program development, expansion, modification, as well as regional workforce data for institutions including, but not limited to, The College of St. Scholastica, St. Cloud State University, Normandale Community College, and AgCentric Center of Excellence. Some of RealTime Talent’s contributions to the workforce system include engagement with the Greater Metropolitan Workforce Council’s workforce planning efforts, supporting the sector committee, data work team, and the strategic partnership team in employer engagement and securing appropriate labor market data. RealTime Talent also supported the curriculum and delivery of the GMWC Sector Skills Academy, focusing on data-informed decision-making and employer engagement strategy. We were privileged to collaborate with the DEED Workforce Strategy Consultants and the Center for Economic Inclusion to support the GMWC and local Workforce Development Board employer engagement needs in the six key industry sectors.
This past year, RTT established a Business Talent Initiative, with the support of GreaterMSP, MSPWin, the Minnesota Chamber, MN Business Partnership, and the Itasca Project, to facilitate employer involvement in partnership with key sector team leads: MPMA, Hennepin County, AgriGrowth, and MHTA. This Business Talent Initiative is now a working group within RealTime Talent’s Advisory Council. We continued the development of diversity reports and talent sourcing strategy consulting for private companies and business associations, provided labor market data for industry membership organizations, and solidified relationships with the commercial building trades associations, offering demographic and workforce data for four quarters to help guide apprenticeship program enrollment planning.
We look forward to the work ahead of us in 2019 and collaborating with our partners in the great state of Minnesota.
If you have any questions about the work of RealTime Talent, please contact Phil Arellano, phil@realtimetalent.org.
Content contributed by Phil Arellano and Erin Olson, RealTime Talent.