Having identified growth industries to target (Part 1), and then looked at what occupations they employ (Part 2), the final step is to find out who the employers are, and what they are looking for, as this can help in opening the door for engagement. Ordinarily, identifying these things would be a painstaking business. However, within our data tool, Analyst, we have a number of functions that give you a wealth of insight on businesses in your area.
Identifying Business Sizes
Using the Enterprise M3 LEP Region as our example once again, let’s take a look at the Construction of residential and non-residential buildings sector, which we identified in Part 2 as the biggest specific industry within Construction as a whole in the area. Our data shows that in 2017, there were a total of 1,967 business establishments within the sector in the region, and we can further dig down into the details by identifying the size of these companies according to the numbers they employ:
Where are These Businesses?
Also of great interest, is the question of where these businesses actually are within the region. The graphic below shows the Top 5 locations in the region, at Local Authority level, in terms of the number of business establishments in the Construction of residential and non-residential buildings sector. We have also included projected job growth for each of these areas from 2017-2022:
Who is Hiring?
Using localised LMI can therefore give a sense of business size and where those business located. But we can go even further than this by digging into Job Postings Analytics to find out who’s actually hiring. In Part 2, we established that the biggest employing occupation in the Construction of residential and non-residential buildings sector is Production managers and Directors. The table below shows the Top 10 unique job postings for this position in the region, over a 12 month period, from June 2017 to June 2018:
What Skills Are They Looking for?
Equally useful is being able to understand not just what occupations they are looking for, but the also the skills. The table below shows the Top 10 Hard Skills that employers within the Enterprise M3 Region have been looking for over the period June 2017 – 2018 in their adverts for Production managers and directors in construction:
This type of knowledge has obvious uses for curriculum planning, but it also has great potential to be used in employer engagement, since the more your organisation can establish about what employers are looking for, the better prepared you can be to enter into conversations with them.
In Summary
What we have shown throughout these three pieces has been all about establishing a method by which your organisation can approach its employer engagement from a more strategic and targeted standpoint.
By following the steps we have set out, your organisation will be far better placed to:
• Hone in on the sorts of employers that are most likely to engage, by identifying those that are growing in your region.
• Dig into these sectors in order to establish what their occupational needs are.
• Identify a number of details about the employers in these sectors, such as their size, where they are based, which of them are hiring, and what skills they are looking for.
Taking this approach will therefore help you to improve your employer engagement strategy, enable you to target the right employers, and mean that you can go into conversations with employers armed with insight about their industry, their occupation demand, and their skills needs.
We’d love to hear about how you are currently engaging employers, the specific challenges you are having, and whether we can help make this process more targeted.
