Mid-Term Projections Update – Your Choice!
You now have choices when it comes to employment projections!
As you well know, employment projections are data-driven estimates about the state of the labor market for a certain year in the future. Job seekers, employers, training institutions, career counselors, and economic planners all use projections to help make critical decisions in areas including the following:
- Career counseling;
- Planning for employment, education and training programs;
- Economic development and other state or regional planning; and
- Supporting documentation to apply for federal grants.
Until now, you were required to produce 2-year and 10-year employment projections. If you chose, you could also produce projections for an additional timeframe—but that would have meant producing three sets of projections within your existing resources. And there was no established methodology for anything other than the 2-year and 10-year time horizons.
The Projections Managing Partnership (PMP), which is responsible for creating, maintaining, and improving shared software and methodologies for producing industry and occupational employment projections, has developed and piloted a new approach that allows states to produce mid-term projections by pro-rating the results of the 2-year and 10-year projections.
Once you have produced your 2-year and 10-year employment projections, you can quickly generate projections for any intervening year (i.e., years 3-9) using a new module in the existing projection software suite. Even better, you are only required to publish one timeframe in addition to the 10-year projections, which does not have to be 2-year projections. For instance, you can publish 5- and 10-year projections, 6- and 10-year projections, or 2- and 10-year projections. It all depends upon your customer demand!
This new functionality is even more important given the economic uncertainty brought on by the global pandemic. It allows you to incorporate the short-term economic reality of the 2-year projections but moderate that current state with the full-employment assumption of the 10-year projections. This allows you to customize your projection results using the timeframe that best meets your customer needs and reflects the future of your state’s economy.
To learn more, watch the recording of the July 16th State Projections Analyst Pre-Summit Forum.