Solutions for Workforce Agencies

In the midst of the current economic crisis, workforce agencies and policymakers are being asked to provide the leadership necessary to bridge the gaps between job seekers and employers in order to improve employment outcomes and promote skills, talent, and economic development at both the individual and regional levels.

Bringing together education and training, economic development, workforce development, and labor market information toward the common goal of reemployment is a huge challenge – but Burning Glass can help. By leveraging the power of artificial intelligence, our solutions provide you with the strategic and tactical capabilities to:

• Provide job seekers with more powerful, accessible, and cost-effective job search and career development services
• Offer employers quick and easy access to a large repository of relevant talent
• Screen job seekers to identify those most likely to benefit from high impact retraining and/or to flag cases more effectively for early intervention
• Triage resources, in order to deploy them where they will achieve the greatest return
• Identify population-wide skills gaps between the workforce and high-demand occupations, in order to guide educational/training program design and development
• Generate the detailed intelligence needed for regional promotional activity, including who is hiring (both inside and outside the region) and the specific jobs, skills, and qualifications they are seeking
• Partner with employers to develop training programs that are directed to their hiring needs
• Connect local employers with local training resources to help upskill incumbent workers and keep the local workforce competitive

What’s more, our self-service reemployment solutions are designed to help you adjust to new economic realities by enabling your staff do more with less while actually expanding access to services for both job seekers and employers.

 

As the pace of layoffs continues to increase and as those displaced find themselves unemployed for longer and longer periods, the burden on workforce boards and their staffs has grown significantly. Rather than deteriorating service quality by stretching resources thinner and thinner, technology can be brought to bear to change radically the economics of service while actually improving the quality, scope, and personal relevance of the assistance provided.

Our solutions provide displaced workers with 24/7 access to a comprehensive suite of high impact, self-service tools that expand access to services well beyond the bounds of the career center. These include:

• A resume builder that creates a professionally formatted resume without requiring job seekers to write – highlighting transferable skills and the kinds of experiences real employers are asking for – or uploads an existing resume for an “Extreme Resume Makeover”.
• Highly relevant matches based on individual experiences, qualifications, and career paths and their correspondence with actual patterns of placement – no keywords or O*NET codes required.
• Feedback to help job seekers understand the qualifications and experience they need for successful placement into the jobs that interest them and identify relevant, local training opportunities.
• Automated daily job leads based on a database of millions of current job listings, updated daily.

By providing technology that effectively assumes the responsibility of resume building, job search, and training referral activities, Burning Glass frees up workforce center staff to spend their time on other priorities, including outreach activities and hard-to-place clients.

The efficacy of this platform is not just theoretical. Rather, Burning Glass brings together a range of services proven in the field to have measurable impact on reemployment outcomes. In a statewide job matching program Burning Glass administers for the State of New York, 67% of job seekers reported receiving good matches they had not found anywhere else and, during the program’s ramp up phase alone, nearly 2,000 job seekers were reemployed from matches Burning Glass delivered.

In an economy in transition, it is not at all uncommon to find employers starved for talent in areas of high unemployment – there are plenty of job seekers but the skills they bring with them don’t quite line up with the skills demanded by those industries that are growing today. Sitting at the nexus between job seekers and employers, workforce boards play an important role in adapting the local skills base to meet both the current and future needs of business and in matching job seekers with training options that make sense for them. Burning Glass can help by delivering the strategic intelligence needed to develop more effective programs as well as the tactical screening tools needed to identify those job seekers most likely to benefit from available training resources.

Designing Effective Programs

Effective retraining and upskilling programs aren’t implemented in a vacuum. Programs need to be grounded in a thorough, practical awareness of what is currently in demand. But how can you systematically acquire that intelligence? While a few employers may be vocal in articulating their unmet needs, many others do not interact as closely with workforce boards, making it difficult to know exactly which jobs are truly in demand and which skills they require of job seekers. Similarly, government data, such as those provided by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, can be months or even years old – somewhat akin to driving a car by looking in the rearview mirror – and at a level of aggregation too broad to be meaningful.

Labor/Insight™, Burning Glass’s job market intelligence application, provides you with the information you need in order to understand how your local skills base fits employer requirements, identify resolvable skill gaps, and mobilize training resources accordingly. It starts with the recognition that online job postings are a channel by which employers “voice” their skill requirements, followed by deployment of a highly advanced text mining engine that analyzes each job listing in order to identify and catalog the specific skills, educational qualifications, certifications, and experience levels required. By providing a level of insight that goes well beyond that of any other source, our solutions provide:

What’s In Demand –our solutions give you access to the world’s most comprehensive database of millions of local and national jobs. You can find out exactly what you need to know about hiring activity, broken down by occupation, industry, skill, geography, level of required experience and education, certification, advertised salary, and dozens of other categories – telling you precisely where the jobs are for any given occupation, skill, educational level, etc. Or you can click through beyond the summary statistics to see who’s hiring and the actual jobs they have posted in order to help you partner with local employers.

Occupation Skills & Qualifications – Knowing where the jobs are is only half the battle. To help job seekers build the right skills portfolio to gain employment in high demand fields, workforce development professionals need a detailed inventory of the skills and technologies required for those jobs. Our solutions help you get beyond assumptions and generalities by reporting on the exact skills, qualifications, and certifications employers are asking for in their postings – all broken out by specific type of job. For example, knowing that high-demand computer systems analyst jobs require a greater degree of process engineering and usage analysis skills than hardcore IT knowledge has significant implication for how training resources are deployed and targeted.

Regional Skill Gap Analysis – Our solutions can also be used to highlight regional gaps between supply and demand, broken out by specific skills, seniority, education-level, certification, occupation, and industry. Comparing the number of currently open jobs requiring a given skill with the number of available job seekers reporting experience in that skill can be very suggestive of specific opportunities to deploy highly targeted training resources to realign otherwise qualified talent.

Job Seeker Training Referral

In the past, although many excellent skills building and retraining courses have been available, it was not always clear how to identify the job seekers who could benefit most directly from them. After all, successful screening and referral demands an understanding of each individual job seeker’s skills, experiences, and reemployment prospects, in essence answering the question “What jobs would represent a good match for this job seeker if she can eliminate her skill gaps?”. Absent this awareness, placement into retraining programs can be haphazard and results are often mixed. At the same time, for job seekers, difficulty in identifying directly relevant resources has been a major barrier to rapid access. It may take months, if at all, before job seekers find training resources that are relevant both to their goals and to local job market demand.

SuggestTraining™ is a powerful tool for identifying both (i) skill and credential gaps relative to the kinds of opportunities job seekers might otherwise be well qualified for, and (ii) local academic and skills training courses that can help resolve these gaps. It also helps raise the awareness of job seekers who previously have not understood the connection between education and training in specific skills and corresponding employment success.

Burning Glass solutions keep training referral grounded in the job market, with reemployment the top priority. A preliminary client-specific job search helps establish the individual’s reemployment prospects while our interview-based resume building process can also be used to determine eligibility. This, in turn, provides the basis for screening and referral, guiding job seekers to programs that are directly relevant to placement in jobs for which they are otherwise well suited while avoiding the deployment of limited training resources where there is limited relevance or little likelihood of tangible benefit.

At the same time that the ranks of the unemployed surge, many employers still find that their need for talent goes unmet. Burning Glass provides workforce agencies with the tools they need to help employers find relevant job seekers. In addition, our solutions enable employers to take advantage of local training resources in order to support continuing professional development for incumbent workers, while also providing insight into the availability of relevant local talent in order to guide capital investment decisions.

Our solutions help employers to:

• Automatically register jobs with the same ads they place on a job board or in a newspaper
• Create polished postings that articulate detailed skill requirements and work activities – without requiring writing skills or industry expertise
• Automatically identify great candidates with the right qualifications and experiences using the same predictive intelligence deployed for virtually all of the world’s top recruitment agencies
• Grow locally by upskilling existing workforces via incumbent worker training
• Align investments based on detailed skill-level labor market supply maps

In addition, our solutions support workforce boards in their role as trusted partner to the business community, identifying employers with job openings for outreach efforts and enabling proactive “marketing” of relevant job seekers.