What is LMI? How Labor Market Information Can Boost Data-Informed Decision Making

Every workforce development decision requires a “bet” on current labor market conditions and future trends. Without customized, regional, or population-specific data and evidence, these bets rely on perception, intuition, or incomplete information, which can slow momentum, misdirect resources, and reinforce inequities.

Labor market information (LMI) is one of the most powerful tools available to help strengthen these bets. Yet, many organizations focused on workforce development are unsure about where and how to access meaningful data tailored to their specific context and needs.

What is labor market information?

Labor market information, or LMI, is any data about a region’s labor force, labor market, or workforce development system. You might also see LMI called workforce data, job market data, labor market intelligence, and other similar terms.

Examples of LMI include:

• Data on regional businesses and their demand (number and type of employers, top sectors and industries, job postings)
• Employment, unemployment, and labor force participation rates
• Feedback from program participants, job seekers, workers, employers, and others
• The number of educational institutions or training programs and what they offer
• Regional demographics for those of working age
• Workforce development program data including participant demographics, services received, and completion and placement rates

The most common type of LMI involves secondary data, or data that are collected from an outside source (typically using surveys and statistical modeling) and readily available to you. These data are often quantitative and can be accessed through a variety of sources like your state’s LMI office, the U.S. Census Bureau, and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Primary LMI data are collected firsthand through surveys, interviews, focus groups, and roundtables and are often qualitative. While more difficult and time-consuming to collect, these data can help reveal the “how” and “why” behind quantitative data and provide deeper context about your region’s labor market strengths and needs.

What can you do with labor market information?

LMI data provide relevant, regional, and disaggregated insights into jobs, skills, and workforce trends, which allows employers to understand talent needs, enables education and training providers to align programs with local opportunity, supports workers in navigating their careers, and guides policymakers and workforce development practitioners in directing public and private investments to increase equitable outcomes.

To maximize impact, these data need to be collected at the right level and customized to meet an organization or region’s specific needs. Below are examples of how LMI has been tailored and used thoughtfully to advance practice in the field.

Map Quality Career Pathways

Students and workers often lack critical information about the steps needed to enter or advance within a specific field or sector. Community colleges and universities, industry associations, and other organizations see career pathway maps as a critical tool to help students and workers identify potential career trajectories and the experience or training needed. These maps incorporate secondary LMI data to identify high-demand occupations within a field along with their typical wages, time needed to advance, education and credentials required, and any on-the-job training or learning provided.

As part of its Scaling Manufacturing and Renewables Training in Iowa (SMART Iowa) project, Hawkeye Community College worked with CSW to identify key manufacturing occupations within its service area, examining current employment, alignment to living wages, and hiring requirements, along with future demand. Using secondary LMI data collected through the paid subscription service Lightcast™, along with findings from additional research, CSW created career pathway maps for the Industrial Maintenance and Production subsectors and worked with employers to validate the information in the maps—including wages, career progression, and the time needed to advance—to ensure they are aligned with industry trends and reflect realistic local opportunities.

Track Local Labor Market Trends

Secondary LMI data provides cities and local workforce development systems with a consistent method of tracking, measuring, and understanding their labor force and industry demand to assess regional performance, training needs, and priorities.

For over ten years, CSW has provided the City of Detroit with monthly U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Local Area Unemployment Statistics (LAUS) data through three-page reports. These reports include a data table, data visualizations, and historical analyses that speak to changes in the city tied to employment, the labor force, and the unemployment rate. These data are used by partners for planning and shared with the Mayor’s Workforce Development Board. In addition, CSW collects secondary LMI data from publicly available and paid sources to provide strategic support around the city’s workforce planning and investments. This includes data on the city’s top industries and occupations and the city’s talent pipeline, including workers’ skills, inflow/outflow, and disaggregated demographics.

Develop Strategies Informed by Data and Community

To plan and implement large-scale, high-impact initiatives, local governments and other organizations need to identify and understand who they are trying to serve, why, and how. Demographic data from the U.S. Census Bureau and other secondary sources, while relatively easy to collect, are often not available at the right level or with the desired indicators. In addition, primary LMI data better speaks to people’s needs, perspectives, and experiences within education and workforce systems, including the training and supports that are most relevant to them.

In 2023, CSW provided Oakland County, Michigan, with strategy consultation to support implementing its Oakland80 initiative, with the goal of increasing attainment of post-secondary degrees or credentials to 80% by 2030. CSW used the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey Public Use Microdata Sample (ACS PUMS) to identify the characteristics of county residents across a range of indicators, disaggregated by those with and without post-secondary degrees (both county-wide and in eight subregions). Based on these data, CSW developed and refined five strategies to support equitable post-secondary attainment in the county. Feedback on these strategies was collected through meetings with six Oakland80 committees and focus groups with Oakland County residents to ensure the strategies would be realistic and impactful.

Where can you explore labor market information?

There are many sources of LMI data to help answer questions about your region’s labor market, existing and emerging talent pipelines, and workforce development system. CSW’s Understanding Your Community: Labor Market and Workforce Development System Data Toolkit, funded by JPMorgan Chase & Co., offers a deep-dive on the available sources, most of which are free. These sources include:

• The American Community Survey from the U.S. Census Bureau, which provides a wide variety of population and demographic indicators.
• Local Area Unemployment Statistics from the BLS, which provides monthly labor force estimates for regions.
• National Equity Atlas, from PolicyLink and the USC Equity Research Institute, which offers data on a range of indicators like housing burden, vehicle access, and poverty broken down by race, gender, nativity, and ancestry.
• Occupational Employment Statistics from the BLS, which provides occupational information including employment and wages for select geographies.
• The Occupational Outlook Handbook from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, which contains detailed information on a wide variety of occupations, including training expectations and work environments.
• O*NET, from the U.S. Department of Labor, which contains detailed information for a wide variety of occupations, including numerical measurements of different kinds of knowledge, skills, and abilities that allow for comparing relative skill levels of occupations.
• Your state’s LMI office and other state-level departments, which can offer data on employment, wages, occupational licensure, and health indicators.
• Primary LMI data! Talk to students and workers, education and training providers, employers, economic development organizations, and others to discover even more about your local labor market.

These resources provide a great start in exploring the available LMI data for your region. However, these data are most effective when you can tailor them to meet your specific needs. CSW has over three decades of experience with collecting, analyzing, and interpreting both secondary and primary LMI data together in ways that are thoughtful and impactful for our clients.

CSW also provides organizations with not only access to LMI, but with the tools, support, and technical assistance needed to collect these critical data on their own and use their findings most effectively—both in one-on-one settings and through structured learning cohorts like the inaugural Partnering Economic & Employment Research (PEER) Academy, in collaboration with the New York Association of Training & Employment Professional (NYATEP), with funding from the Ballmer Foundation and the Ralph C. Wilson Foundation.