Need another talent pipeline for your business?  SLC Economic Development Workforce Development Manager Jake Maxwell offers this latest blog on transferable skills and how to use data to diversify your employee portfolio. As always, we’d love to hear your feedback.

The diversity of job offerings in Salt Lake City is very different from most of the county. If you think of the visual shape of this city, we have all of this high rise office space which makes Office and Admin Support the occupation with the most positions at 52,928 people working in this field. In addition, this occupation will see the most separations (retirements or moving to a new job type) at 6,008 jobs over the next year. When the buildings taper off, a major portion of the West side is occupied by huge manufacturing or distribution centers, which covers the occupation with the third highest positions, Transportation and Material Moving at 20,164 spots. The number 2 spot is Sales and Related Occupations at 24,409 workers in the City, and an annual separation projection of 3,220.

Who else has a large share of employment in this city? These may be what you would expect as we see Management (19,076), Food Preparation (17,039), Business and Financial Operations (18,061) and Healthcare Service Practitioners (16,482) just to highlight the top few.

So what can we do with this information? Well, finding talent is tight but people are underemployed and people are leaving their fields for something completely different. Even in fields with presumably high paying opportunity, people find they don’t like the field and move to something else. With access to information that highlights both high rates of employment AND high rates of exits, a business might want to consider who leaves those careers with the transferable skills needed for their sector.

LQ

Another source of information that can help better inform our businesses is our Location Quotient (LQ), or how we compare to the national average. Interestingly, Salt Lake City has a high LQ for Social Service Occupations, Arts, Design, Entertainment, Sports, and Media occupations. These contribute to some of the great culture we experience as a city. We can also highlight real time wages for the field from thousands of aggregated jobs posted on multiple sites as recent as yesterday.

More and more, I find myself asking businesses to treat their talent like any other capital improvement or investment in their future. Even if we bank on another recession leveling the playing field, Salt Lake City and Utah in general has done an excellent job insulating our economy from huge fluctuations from the nation’s cyclical recessions. If we think of this like our retirement, we still want our investments to perform through all economic up’s and downs and we feel strongly the data can empower businesses to build a pipeline or two to do just that. For more information on your sector, please reach out to us and we can come by to discuss your business challenges in Salt Lake City.