Infographic: State of St. Louis Workforce 2013

Creating an informative graphic representation of a 108-page report in just three and a half pages of the St. Louis Business Journal is an interesting challenge. There’s lots of great information and stories to share from the 2013 State of St. Louis Workforce report. For the graphic summary, we concentrated on information from the Employer Survey (based on a telephone survey of 1,200 employers in the region and in depth interviews of selected employers) and highlights from the Community College Completer Survey (a combination of an on-line survey and focus groups to gauge students’ perceptions of their training experience and job readiness) sections of the report.

The infographic tells the St. Louis Workforce story in five clusters. The Employer Outlook shows the main barriers employers report to expanding employment and their anticipated change in employment levels. We included the main takeaways from the new survey question on anticipated retirements here as well. Finding the Right Skills tells the shortcomings employers faced with recent hires, the skill shortages they experienced in functional areas, and the specific reasons for skill shortages in seven key functional areas: Engineering, Information Technology, Patient Care, Finance and Accounting, Business Management, Skilled Trades, and Customer Service. Burning Glass data on the basic and specialized skills in greatest demand in the St. Louis area, as well as the certificates in greatest demand, completes this section.

Finding the Right People shares the methods most used by employers to assist current workers in skill acquisition. We illustrated the shifts in addressing skill shortages, and highlighted the increasing demand for knowledge workers. Experience does matter, with positions for 1 year or more experience increasing, while positions for those with less than a year experience significantly decreasing. We saw this in education as well – demand is up for those with post secondary credentials and degrees, while demand continues to fall for those with only a high school degree or less than high school.

We explored three new for this year employer survey questions in the What Employers Value section. How do employers rate an industry recognized certificate vs. different traditional degrees? How would you evaluate a new graduate with the most current skills vs. an experienced applicant with less-than-current skills? And how do you view job candidates who obtained their degree online vs. a traditional “brick and mortar” degree? And in What Graduates Say, we looked at strategies that help students complete training and succeed in the workforce, how graduates feel about the training they received, and what challenges they face attempting to enter the workforce.

So after four and a half intensive days of deciding the stories to tell, how to best illustrate them, and lots of Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop work, 18,000 copies were distributed to our St. Louis Community in the St. Louis Business Journal. I’m very proud to share the results of that work with you, as a great way to summarize the key findings from the 2013 State of St. Louis Workforce report. Please download our complete report, or download a PDF of the 4-page infographic summary.

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