Issue Brief: EJP Skills Gap Analysis
June 08, 2023 / RERI Research Team
In August 2022, Florida Gulf Coast University was awarded a $22.9 million grant through the U.S. Economic Development Administration's Good Jobs Challenge. FGCU partnered with FutureMakers Coalition at Collaboratory to create the Southwest Florida Equitable Jobs Pipeline. The goal of the pipeline is to establish a system that assists employers in filling in-demand positions in five-county Southwest Florida region (Charlotte, Collier, Glades, Hendry and Lee counties) by providing potential workers with the required skills and credentials.
As part of this program, a skills gap analysis was conducted for the four industries that are the focus of the pipeline: healthcare, manufacturing, logistics, and K-12 public education. In this issue brief series, we will focus on region-specific data for these four sectors. In particular, we focus on the skills and qualifications identified, required and requested by local employers. We also document occupations and jobs that are connected to such skills and qualifications.
The analysis in this issue brief includes the skills supplied and demanded by the regional workforce and employers, the top sought-after qualifications from employers, and the top occupation postings in the region for each of the four sectors. The analysis utilizes Lightcast, a labor market analytics firm that gathers and integrates economic, demographic, and education data from various government and private-sector sources, and publishes county-level datasets.
Additionally, qualitative data from employer and education institution roundtables and surveys were collected as part of the Southwest Florida Equitable Jobs Pipeline (EJP) to help contour the regional aggregate data.
One of the main goals of this data is to provide guidance to educational institutions and entities in developing and scaling regional training programs that teach the required skills for in-demand jobs in the four sectors.
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