Federally Supported Partnerships Focus on Mapping Vital Skills for Manufacturing, Other Industries

Over the last several months, there has been a flurry of activity in government-supported efforts focused on addressing the skills gap faced by manufacturing firms and other key S&T industries. The intent of these programs is to develop industry-led partnership that align workforce development efforts with the needs of specific local industries to unlock a region’s economic prosperity.  In July, two new initiatives were announced that may help provide a data-driven guide for these efforts in the future. By mapping job skills around the nexus of manufacturing and design, the Chicago-based Digital Manufacturing and Design Innovation Institute (DMDII) hopes to better develop a workforce for the 21_st century manufacturing workplace. At the Center for Data Science and Public Policy (DSaPP) at the University of Chicago, a team of researchers hopes to develop a public database that will contain the “DNA” of every job in America that is akin to the output of the Human Genome Project.

In Partnership with ManpowerGroup, DMDII announced a new public-partnership to “define and map the roles and skills required by organizations on the forefront of advanced digital manufacturing.” ManpowerGroup and DMDII will identify the skills needed for 20 roles vital to manufacturing and design to help support workforce development efforts that better align the workers’ skills with the needs of industry.

In March 2016, DMDII launched the first phase of the project that will conclude in Q1 2017. By leveraging the expertise of its members — such as Lockheed Martin, Siemens and GE — DMDII will work “to identify the roles required for digital manufacturing and then create a framework to better understand and describe them.” In 2017, the partnership will launch Phase II, which “will focus on solutions like understanding the gap between projected industry demand and the potential supply of digital design and manufacturing talent, and identifying ways to close that gap.”

With funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation,  DSaPP announced the Skills Cooperative Research Database – a national resource of aggregated workforce data from both public and private sources such as the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Census Bureau, job websites, employment agencies, human resources management software, and others. Ultimately, the project will make the data available to users as API endpoints and downloads as well as provide more detailed datasets to authorized researchers.

The database will contain the “DNA” of every job in America and allow researchers to study phenomena such as post-recession job recovery, worker mobility, and labor market resilience, or to build new predictive macroeconomic models. Employers, economic development professionals, workforce organizations, and governments also could use the data to observe local and up-to-date trends in job skill supply and demand, guiding workforce training and recruitment programs.

The Skills Cooperative Research Database builds upon 2014 and 2015 projects from the Data Science for Social Good Summer Fellowship. As part of the current project, DSaPP built the Open Skills Project, a representation of the data that provides insight on job skill clusters and demand over time. Other partners include the U.S. Department of Labor, the National Economic Council, and JP Morgan Philanthropies.