Are you a small business impacted by the pandemic or experienced workforce loss due to the pandemic? Lake County small business can subsidize employees' wages through paid work experiences! You may qualify to have Business Services sponsor a qualified individual for a paid work experience for up to 6 months or 1,000 hours. Click here to apply today! 

    SAI Infusion Technologies    
SAI has benefited from the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) program with less out-of-pocket expenses and more time to focus time on training and development. The Work Experience Internship program has relieved pressure on current employees and was able to spread the workflow needs for the day-to-day operations. The  WIOA program has also allowed SAI to be able to bring in employees and expose them to the industry. This allows both parties to have the time to complete training and observe without any financial stressors. “I recommend the Work Experience Program because it’s a great way to help relieve pressure from hiring requirements and alleviates the onboarding expenses to the employer and the employee.”– Liane Pinkos, Vice President of HR, LVT, LATAG, SRS. Read full report here.

Through the Lens of Skills

A perspective is one point of view. A valley looks one way when standing on its floor; much different when standing on a nearby mountain top. Most often our perspective of a regional economy is formed by its industry and occupation mix, the wages of each, GDP, and other standard economic metrics. But one of the great powers of data is that it unlocks different ways of seeing things.

When it comes to the labor market and workforce development, the emergence of skills data provides another perspective. This different perspective is centered on Regional Skill Clusters the reality that a person’s skills can be used in multiple industries and various roles. Especially with reskilling or additional training. Thus, when we conduct regional skills analysis, our career area of Business and Finance represents not the employment within industries such as banking and financial advising, but all the different types of jobs requiring business and finance skills—financial accountants, logistics analysts, and human resource representatives to name a few—irrespective of industry.

But this isn’t to say NAICS and other traditional labor market information (LMI) is no longer useful. If LMI is the valley floor, when such data is overlaid with skills, it’s then like seeing that same valley from the mountaintop. In the below table, median salary and jobs (LMI), along with demographic information, is categorized by skill career areas in the Tampa Bay MSA. Read full Lightcast report here.