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

1 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

information on 595 occupations present in the region, each with detailed information on nearly 30 factors that make them unique.

We encourage readers to take the time and review the extensive details compiled for a full understanding of the challenges, and opportunities, facing the region’s workforce and employers in the years ahead and provide this executive summary to highlight the most important components of each.

Demographic and Workforce Characteristics

With a population of just over 523,000 in 2020, the South Bend - Elkhart region has continued to grow over the last 30 years and is projected to reach nearly 550,000 residents by 2030. However, this pace of growth is below both the state and national averages and, when coupled with the fact that nearly 40 percent of the population is aged 45 or older, points to potential challenges on the horizon for meeting the labor demands of the region. Nearly 48 percent of the region’s residents have a high school diploma/equivalent or less, however, over the last 10 years modest gains have been made in the percentage of residents who have earned associates, bachelor’ s, or graduate degrees.

In terms of unemployment, employment, and labor force participation (employed plus unemployed persons) in the region, nearly a decade of improvement across all three measures of labor force vitality was interrupted by COVID-19 related disruptions of 2020. The year 2021 did, however, mark a nice recovery, with annual average employment and unemployment rates in Elkhart and Marshall counties approaching pre-pandemic levels, and outpacing the average, statewide rates of recovery. While employment for Marshall County has reached close to prepandemic numbers, it is the only county in the region to experience a labor force decline both in the last five and 10 years.

Industry Analysis

The average annual employment in the three counties in the South Bend - Elkhart region in 2020 was 272,954, up just over 10 percent from 2010. The Manufacturing, Health Care, and Retail Trade and Government sectors remain the largest, accounting for just over 60 percent of all employment in the region. The sectors of Management of Companies and Enterprises, Utilities, and Finance and Insurance offer the highest average annual wages in the region, with each coming in above the $90,000 threshold. The Manufacturing and Education sectors, unsurprisingly, top the location quotient scale for the region, with the former coming in at a concentration rate 3.64 times the national average, and the latter at 2.37. In terms of projected growth over the next decade, the Accommodation and Food Services (3,631 new jobs by 2030) and Healthcare/Social Assistance (3,221 new jobs by 2030) sectors are poised to add the most net new positions. Interestingly, the Arts, Entertainment, and Recreation sector is projected to see the largest percent increase over the next decade, growing 65 percent (adding just over 1,300 new jobs). In terms of projected declines by 2030, the Manufacturing sector is predicted to shed the most net positions (7,628 or nine percent of 2020 employment) and the Administrative and Support and Waste Management and Remediation Services sector is set to see the largest percent decrease, with a 21 percent decline in employment (1,952 less positions). Pages 24-25 of the full report breakdown the industries in the region in a Competitive Effect analysis.

Occupation, Wage, and Benefit Analysis

The region has a high concentration of employment within the Production, Office and Administrative Support, Transportation and Material Moving, and Sales and Related families of occupations. These two-digit Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) families of jobs account for just over half (51 percent) of all employment in the region, with annual average employment in 2020 totaling 139,329. Production related occupations also top the job location quotient for the region, with their concentration 3.78 times the national average, in similarly situated communities. The Management (SOC 17), Healthcare Practitioner and Technical (SOC 27), Legal (SOC 37), and Architecture and Engineering (SOC 13) occupation families pay the highest average wages in the region, each at or above $34.18 per hour. Projecting growth out to 2030, the Healthcare Support (SOC 31), Healthcare Practitioners and Technical (SOC 29), and Food Preparation and Serving Related (SOC 35) are poised to see the largest net growth, combining for an additional 4,431 new jobs by the end of the decade.

Top Jobs Report

Informed by the South Bend - Elkhart Regional Partnership’s previous work on Lifeboat Jobs, and further refined and reformed through ongoing conversations with the South Bend - Elkhart Regional Partnership, this section lays out the methodology used to score and evaluate the “Top Jobs” in the region. Using measures for Current Demand, Earnings Potential, Ease of Entry, and Long-Term Stability, the team scored all 595 occupations in the region across all four measures, ranking readily available, low barrier to entry, stable positions offering a family-sustaining income higher than those that score less well along these four identified criteria. Included with the full report is a spreadsheet with all the scores, factors, and ancillary measures for each of the Top 120 occupations in the region, to help jobseekers and policy makers better map out micro and macro workforce development strategies. Some of the highest scoring occupations included those in the fields of product and services sales, engineering, industrial mechanics, nursing, management, and transportation industry specialists. Please see the Appendix for a sample of the top 20 jobs, based on the team’s scoring criteria.

Automation Report

While impossible to accurately predict the full impact of automation on the region into the future, given the erratic (and often frenetic!) pace of technological innovation and advances, this section takes a closer look at the potential impact of automation on the production and healthcare occupation families. Utilizing Automation Index scores produced by Emsi – based in part on the oft-cited work of Frey and Osborne (2013) – we model scenarios of job loss across four categories of risk for the occupations: below-average, above-average, elevated, and highest. In general, the risks for job loss among the healthcare occupation family are much lower than those in the production family of occupations, so closely tied to the manufacturing industry. Baseline projections developed by Emsi indicate a potential of approximately 7,300 jobs lost in production occupations by 2030. By extending their models to 2035 and calculating the potential for “shock loss” of additional jobs triggered by automation breakthroughs, we estimate that an additional 11,000 production jobs could be at risk by 2035.

Manufacturing, Healthcare and Social Services Industry Deep Dives

These sections provide additional, deep-level detail on the manufacturing and health care industries in the region. Included are overviews of specific occupations, demographic statistics for employment in the industries, a summary of the in-demand skills, and fuller details on trends in hiring and turnover.

Job Posting Analysis

This section disaggregates the 141,804 “unique” job postings in the South Bend - Elkhart region between January 2020 and the end of September 2021, highlighting county distribution, post duration, and posting intensity. Using information on salaries and hiring trends from Emsi and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, we find that approximately 62 percent of all advertised positions pay less than $60,000 annually, with the remaining 38 percent of all postings falling between $60,000 and $259,000 in annual wages. This section further examines the top companies, by volume of posts, in the region and highlights the industry breakdown of advertised positions. In terms of advertised occupations, Heavy Tractor-Trailer Truck Drivers and Registered Nurses were the most oft posted jobs, while Retail Salespersons, Customer Service Representatives, Stock and Orders Fillers, and Nursing Assistants show wide-open potential for job seekers, with each boasting a 1-to-1 hire to posting ratio. Certifications like a Commercial Driver’s License (CDL) and Nursing licensures remain in high demand, and the most common “soft” skills requested by employers include the ability to effectively communicate and a focus on customer service.

Concluding Remarks

This full report contains the latest available detail on the labor force, hiring trends, and industry employment in the South Bend - Elkhart region. The information it provides can help lay the groundwork for future initiatives and extensions in the region, helping to navigate the ongoing upheaval in the workforce, accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic and the longerterm trends it brought to the forefront.

While the data we present and utilize in the analysis of top jobs and the potential impact of automation is the best available, it is vital that work of this nature be updated regularly to capture and gauge short-term movements that can arise quickly and echo far into the future. As a next step for the South Bend - Elkhart Regional Partnership, development of an automated dashboard, drawing on the most important measures and insights from this report, is an important next step. Careful planning and intentional upskilling and (re)training of the workforce should remain a priority for the region, to mitigate the (potential) disruptive impact of automation on area employees. Given the strong partnerships between workforce development, education providers, and economic development in the region, the area is wellpositioned to meet these challenges head-on with innovative solutions.