Identifying the Workers We Need and Where To Find Them

By: Workforce Supply Chains (WSC) Initiative is a Carnegie Mellon-led research effort that builds and deploys analytical methods to quantify the readiness of regional labor markets to meet skill demand. These methods have been used to evaluate workforce gaps to meet the needs of a variety of industries, including commercial semiconductor and battery production.

Selecting a category from over 1,000 occupations (or a custom occupation), across any industry, the WSC methodology identifies which other occupations may have a minimum level of readiness to meet the requirements of the needed occupation. With these inputs, the tool estimates:

• The number of workers available in any region of the country to meet a given level of demand.
• Their demographics and their current wages (hence, the potential economic attractiveness of transitioning to a new role).
• How many may change occupations each year. 

This methodology identifies gaps between skill demand and supply both at a moment in time and over a given period, and quantifies which skills are most frequently missing in a region (such as a county or a metropolitan area).

What we’ve found: Our work has shown that: 

1. Rural regions, especially Pennsylvania communities, have essential skills for scale-up of energy systems and infrastructure.
2. Demand for workers in manufacturing and deployment of critical grid infrastructure could be served quickly through pipelines from occupations that are projected to decline.
3. Automation can close labor gaps, but make some skills matching more difficult.

The bottom line: Meeting the energy needs of re-industrialization and strategic AI capacity will require a construction, manufacturing and operational workforce. CMU integrates the analytics capability to evaluate the skills that are needed, where they can be found and the gaps between demand and supply, with the capability to design and execute digital training solutions to close gaps at scale.