About Workforce Match IO
Turn labor-market data into workforce and program decisions
A workforce readiness platform for institutions responsible for aligning employer demand, local talent, and education or training capacity.
Communities often know that an industry is growing, or that employers are struggling to hire. Workforce Match IO connects industry staffing patterns, local occupational supply, occupational capabilities, education programs, graduate output, and reskilling relationships in one decision workflow.
What is harder is determining which occupations are creating the constraint, whether the local workforce can meet the demand, and what type of intervention should follow.
Decisions
The decisions the platform is built to support
Seven questions, each answerable on its own, and each with a different institution on the other side of it.
Where will staffing constraints emerge?
Translate expected industry hiring demand into occupation-specific needs and identify the roles least aligned with the local workforce.
Economic development organizations can focus employer and workforce strategy on the occupations most likely to limit growth. Higher education leaders can identify where program capacity deserves closer review.
Which of several locations can actually staff it?
Run one project's hiring requirements across a shortlist of candidate metropolitan areas or counties, and rank them on the same workforce assumptions.
Site selection teams and the regions competing for a project can put candidate locations on one comparable footing, rather than on whichever labor-market summary each has to hand.
Which industries can this region support?
Sweep a single metropolitan area or county across every industry at a common scale, and rank them by how well the local workforce could staff each one.
Target recruitment, sector strategy, and program investment at the industries a region is positioned to staff, rather than at the ones growing fastest nationally.
What occupations actually define employer demand?
See the occupational mix of an industry, the concentration of each occupation per 1,000 employees, and median annual wages.
Ground employer engagement, advisory-board conversations, program review, and regional workforce planning in the actual staffing structure of an industry.
What talent is already present locally?
Map the occupational distribution of a metropolitan area or county and examine specific workforce populations.
Understand the local talent base before creating new programs or recruitment initiatives, and identify workforce populations that may represent underutilized capacity.
Where can transferable talent come from?
Use occupational skills, knowledge, abilities, and education requirements to identify closely related feeder occupations in the local labor market.
Design bridge programs, short-term credentials, incumbent-worker training, and targeted recruitment around the capabilities workers already possess.
Is the education and training pipeline aligned?
Connect an occupation to the academic and training programs that feed it, the institutions offering them, credential levels, and recent graduate output.
Identify existing programs that can support employer needs, potential institutional partners, and areas where current graduate production may be too limited relative to labor demand.
Who it is for
Built for institutions that have to act on labor demand
Higher education & training
Align programs with occupations experiencing real talent needs
Use occupational constraints as a demand signal for program review, credential development, employer partnerships, and resource allocation. Connect high-need occupations to the programs and institutions already producing related talent.
- Program portfolio review
- Employer alignment
- Credential strategy
- Graduate pipeline
Economic & workforce development
Target workforce interventions where staffing risk is highest
Move from broad labor-market descriptions to occupation-specific workforce readiness. Identify where local supply aligns with employer demand and where recruitment, training, or reskilling strategies are most likely to matter.
- Workforce readiness
- Industry strategy
- Talent recruitment
- Reskilling pathways
Inputs
A connected evidence base
Four bodies of evidence, joined on the occupation. That join is what lets a hiring question, a training question, and a recruitment question be answered against the same picture.
Industry demand
Occupational staffing patterns and wages translate industry growth into specific talent needs.
Local workforce
Federal labor microdata and population filters show where talent capacity is concentrated, for a specific metro or county.
Occupational capabilities
National occupational profiles describe what each role requires, with education treated as its own requirement rather than folded into a general similarity.
Education pipeline
Federal completions reporting connects occupational needs to the programs, institutions, credentials, and graduates that feed them.
The model
Comparable occupational matching
Occupations are compared on what they actually require: skills, knowledge, abilities, work activities, and education. The comparison is balanced across those categories, so a category described in more detail in the underlying data does not dominate the result by weight of rows alone.
Scores are calibrated so that they mean the same thing from one analysis to the next. Two occupations that score as close in one region score as close in another, which is what makes the results comparable across places, industries, and time rather than only within a single run.