workforce

The Milken Institute report ranks the best performing cities by U.S. metropolitan areas recording the top economic performances and creating the most jobs in the nation. Fayetteville, AR topped the list for 2003, moving up from 23rd last year. Coming in second place was Las Vegas followed by Fort Myers, FL and San Diego, CA.

The study assesses Iowas creative workforce and creative industrial composition to determine a baseline of the states creative workers and the industries that employ them. The study concludes that Iowa exceeds national averages in education and social work, and is at the national average in managerial professions.

The report from the National Science Foundation (NSF) offers examples of creative ways to explore science and technology and catalogs the methodology and results of 211 NSF grants given since 1993. Programs and projects are also featured that are normally not offered in elementary curriculum.

The U.S. General Accounting Office report identifies issues with the current funding formulas and proposes potential alternative allocation formulas of the Workforce Investment Act of 1998.

The strategic assessment of Arizonas bioscience workforce development is focused on developing a fact-based understanding of Arizonas demand for bioscience workers across the bioscience cluster and how it is aligned with the states current capacity to generate trained bioscience workers.

The report based on Census 2000 data states that young, single, college-educated people are moving to large metropolitan areas, often to central cities — a trend that defies the general population’s outward migration from the same areas. The report indicates that the New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Washington-Baltimore metro areas remained popular magnets for young singles who had graduated from college, despite these areas’ overall net out-migration rates.

The study funded by The Rockefeller Foundation states that many of New Yorks troubling trends predate the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. Advances in technology, the study observes, have enabled firms greater flexibility in choosing whether to create or reallocate new positions, and many companies are increasing revenues without increasing their workforce. To recharge the New York economy, the report suggests that city officials pursue policies that help to retain fast-growing companies and sectors.

The report from the National Coalition for Advanced Manufacturing indicates that nearly 60 percent of the new jobs in the knowledge-based economy of the early 21st century will require skills that are held by just 20 percent of the present workforce. The study also examines a growing skills gap in the nations manufacturing sector and the problems employers have in finding skilled workers able to deal with technological changes in the workplace.

The study uses state-level variation in labor productivity levels at twenty-year intervals between 1880 and 1980 to examine the relative importance of institutional and geographical influences in explaining observed and persistent differences in standards of living over time and across regions.

The Information Technology Association of America study finds that racial minorities and women lost ground in information technology (IT) employment between 1996 and 2002, based on data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Current Population Surveys. Among the key findings of the report is the percentage of women in the overall IT workforce fell from 41 percent to 34.9 percent between 1996 and 2002.