Belated News - Local Employment Dynamics Reflections

Sadly, the HCPI blog has been woefully neglected over the last few months. I'll spare you the excuses and move on to meaningful content... First, I should recognize my colleagues at the Three Rivers Workforce Investment Board and Carnegie Mellon's Center for Economic Development. We recently presented the "Managing an Aging Workforce" report and information-sharing process at the Local Employment Dynamics State Partners conference held at the Brookings Institution in January, 2007. View our presentation here. Here are a few things I took away from the conference:

1. Southwest PA rocks! Our drill down on the aging workforce topic, combined with an information dissemination strategy is noteworthy. Sure, data can be cool and interesting. (Or at least, so say the data geeks.) We went a step further and made it accessible.
2. It's worth thinking about the gender differences of the region's aging workforce. Look at Maine's manufacturing analysis. Would we have skilled labor shortages if we effectively recruited, retained and advanced women in this industry?
3. Data sources such as LED are essential. It's a shame not every state participates and that much time must be spent maintaining support for/funding for this program.
4. LED presents some very cool opportunities for mapping. (See Peter Haas' presentation on the LED site.)
5. There are some frighteningly smart people working on LED. The presentation about synthetic data made my brain hurt.
6. My colleagues at CED and the TRWIB are great presenters, brilliant researchers, pragmatic policy analysts... and a heck of a lot of fun!