Industry Reports | Skill Builders Institute
The workforce and education research we use to decide what to teach — what we look for in a report, and where to find the ones we rely on.
We do not publish our own industry reports. What we do is read them closely, because the decision about which skills to teach in a given community should be grounded in something better than instinct.
What we look for
Most workforce reporting is either too broad to act on or too narrow to trust. The research we keep tends to do three things: separate the roles that are genuinely growing from the ones that are merely fashionable, say something about skills rather than only job titles, and publish its method so the numbers can be checked.
National projections still need translating locally. A report saying a sector is expanding tells you nothing about whether the employers on one county's main street are hiring for it. We use these sources to frame the question, then answer it by talking to employers directly — the approach described on our placement program page.
Where to find them
Rather than keep two lists that drift apart, the sources we rely on live in one place: our whitepapers and reports page groups them by workforce and skills, and by entrepreneurship and small business. The wider resources library holds everything else, filterable by category.
They include labour market and training data from the U.S. Department of Labor, international education benchmarks from OECD and UNESCO, STEM workforce indicators from the NSF, and the World Economic Forum's work on how jobs and skills are shifting.
If you are researching a specific community
If you are trying to understand the skills position of a particular county, city or region, we are glad to talk through what the national picture does and does not tell you. Share what you are looking at and we will point you at what we would read first.