The availability of skilled labor and the cost of labor are two very important factors in selecting a location for a business expansion or relocation. To aid business executives and site selection consultants in their site selection, O’Brien County has developed two tools for assessing our labor market.
Skills Ready Models
This interactive Internet model allows you to enter the number of workers by occupation for your project. The Model will generate a custom report for you that will show the number of workers and wages by occupation in our labor market for your project. In addition, for each occupation the report also lists the number of workers in our labor market that work in the sector and have WorkKeys/National Career Readiness Certificate skills that are compatible to those required for the occupation. We have developed Models for our target industry sectors – Manufacturing and Logistics.
Skills Ready Profile
This document provides an overview of our labor market that includes employment and occupation information by industry and occupation. Employment and wage information are shown for all of the Manufacturing and Logistics occupations in the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Standard Occupation Classification (SOC) System for each of the target industry sectors.
Skills Ready Models
Click on the appropriate industry sector link at the end of this paragraph and you will be taken to the input form for your project. Enter your company and project names, your e-mail address, the expected number of employees by occupation for your project. If you have a job title that is not on this form list, contact a human resources or payroll professional in your company and they should be able to provide you with the appropriate SOC Code and Job Title that is appropriate for the internal job title. After you have entered your project information, click on the “send” button, and a custom report containing labor availability and wage information for your project will be sent immediately to your e-mail address. If the report you may see either a blank or a “0” in the employment and/or wage column, which is due to the fact the Bureau of Labor Statistics suppressed this data because of the very small number of workers in the occupation. You can return to the input form and enter another staffing scenario into the input form to see the labor availability and wages for this scenario.
Contact
For additional information on our labor market and the benefits of locating in O’Brien County, please contact Curt Strouth at 324-2813 or cstrouth@cityofsheldon.com
PRODUCTIVE, SKILLED, ETHICAL AND DEDICATED define the workforce available to businesses locating to O’Brien County. Our recently completed laborshed study by the Iowa Workforce Development can be found here: O’BRIEN COUNTY LABOR FORCE STATISTICS . Clicking this link will take you to the Iowa Workforce Development website and the O’Brien County report in .pdf format.