EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Current Labor Market Trends and Future Implications: The South Bend Elkhart Region Introduction 2020 and 2021 brought major changes to the workforce landscape across the country, including the counties served by the South Bend - Elkhart Regional Partnership. While the initial shock of pandemic-related job losses (as reflected in the unemployment rates for Elkhart, Marshall, and St. Joseph counties) have passed, longer-term challenges within the workforce persist. Stories of the upheaval of the labor force have dominated news headlines for much of 2021, with employers scrambling to secure the workers they need and job seekers navigating the gaps between the skills they have and those they will need to secure their preferred positions in what has become a seller’s market. The wage movement alone, highlighted as part of the full report below, speaks volumes to the shift in the labor market in 2021—earnings were up across all major industry sectors and job posting activity continues at a frenzied pace. 1 This study, commissioned by the South Bend - Elkhart Regional Partnership, highlights the state of the labor market in the region at the end of a tumultuous 2021. The report itself contributes to three immediate goals of the South Bend - Elkhart Regional Partnership: 1. Provide a full and detailed assessment, using all available data, of the state of the workforce within the three county-region, highlighting industry employment, wage changes, demographic profiles of the real and potential labor force, in-demand skills, and occupational opportunities. 2. Building on the work of the South Bend - Elkhart Regional Partnership’s “Lifeboat Jobs” project, which identified in-demand opportunities for job seekers in need of work at the height of pandemic-related closures, develop a broader list of “Top Jobs” in the region, informed by factors and thresholds identified as important by regional stakeholders. 3. Refresh and update, in a straight-forward manner, previous attempts to estimate the potential impact of automation on two of the region’s most important occupation families: production and healthcare related jobs. Drawing from a wide assortment of data and information produced by the Indiana Department of Employment, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, the U.S. Census Bureau, and a collection of proprietary data tables and models produced by Emsi, the full report provides important detail on the labor force in the region. Meanwhile, the companion spreadsheet, which accompanies the Top Jobs analysis, includes specific
Earnings based on Average Weekly Wage in past 12 months, Q2 2021, QCEW U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Job Postings based on Emsi 2021.4 data
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