What is Labour Market Information?
Labor Market Information (LMI) includes quantitative or qualitative data and analysis related to employment and the workforce. It deals with status, changes, trends and projections of ‘demand for’, and ‘supply of’ labor.
Quantitative Labor Market data sources are employment, wage, jobs, vacancies, and other comprehensive reports from national, regional or local government statistical agencies, census bureaus, economic development bodies, etc., or analyses done by private providers of LMI (such as EMSI, ESRI, etc.).
Qualitative Labor Market data is usually collected through surveys, interviews and focus groups, with carefully selected experts or representatives from various stakeholders’ circles.
Real-time Labor Market data is compiled by aggregating and analyzing actual job postings on the Internet. Vendors (such as Burning Glass Labor Insight) gather information from online job boards, industry-specific job sites, and companies’ recruitment websites, and allow the end user to search with multiple criteria.
Understanding Labor Market Information helps stakeholders (policy makers, private sector employers, students and their parents, education and training providers, and others) to make more informed choices related to their personal career, or public and private workforce investments.
Benefits of Understanding LMI
- Enables data-based decisions on aligning education/training programs to current and projected hiring needs of local businesses, i.e., opening new and closing low returns programs, rightsizing and improving the quality of existing programs, and developing programs tailored to specific job opportunities.
- Assessing education/training program effectiveness by linking program content, rigor, and teaching approach to evidence of student success/failure in the labor market.
- Helping students make informed education and career choices, thus increasing their chances for graduation and employment.
- Demonstrating return on investment of specific education/training programs, and the education/training institutions, to employers, investors, students and their parents, and the local community.
Best Practices
- LMI is not just about data – it is a comprehensive system and process for gathering, organizing, analyzing, validating and communicating information and drawing conclusions.
- Combining quantitative and qualitative data, along with historical and real-time data (when possible), provides a more comprehensive and accurate base of information for analysis.
- Tracer studies that follow graduates and report on their labor market outcomes, such as length of job search/unemployment, retention in the first job, earnings, or job satisfaction are important for assessing the alignment of existing education/training programs to actual labor market demand.
- Leveraging technology and partnerships for improving access to systematic collection, analysis, distribution and validation of labor market information is crucial.
- Dedicated qualified staff and financial resources for LMI activities lead to better results.
Examples OF LABOR MARKET INFORMATION
New York’s Monroe Community College uses sophisticated data gathering and analysis systems to create local supply/demand dashboards for occupational clusters – all with the goal of developing and fine-tuning programs that address regional and local skill shortages.
MENA-YES youth training for employment program, launched by Global Communities and supported by the Caterpillar Foundation, used the concept of Sector Advisory Committees (SAC) to bring together representatives from private sector companies, education and training institutions, and youth supporting organizations all active in the same target industry sector. The main objectives of the SACs were to promote information sharing on hiring trends, skill requirements and job opportunities in the local market, and to agree on the curriculum outline for most in-demand job roles in that specific sector.
To incentivize employers to share their LMI, some TVET centers in the Philippines started offering free five-day certificate courses attractive to local businesses. Providing the course has improved the TVET’s access to LMI: many firms now share their immediate and future hiring needs, get involved in curriculum design and training needs analysis, and consider TVET graduates for their job openings.