What Dallas Does Different

Deep in the heart of Texas, the Dallas-Fort Worth region (DFW) has become a powerhouse of business growth and economic success. Thanks to high scores on criteria like migration, job creation, and skilled job openings, two counties in the metro (Collin and Denton) have both ranked among the top five large counties in the US in the annual Lightcast Talent Attraction Scorecard.

Central to that run of consistent success is the Dallas Regional Chamber (DRC), which serves as a powerful advocate for business growth, educational improvement, and talent attraction in the Dallas region, working to enhance the area's economic vitality and quality of life.

“The work of the Chamber has really been a pillar in a lot of the success that our region has seen over the past few decades,” says Jarrad Toussant, Senior Vice President of Education and Workforce at the Chamber. “That work has included how to build talent pipelines to support our labor market here in the region, and that extends from things like childcare access and availability to career upskilling and reskilling, and everything in between. We have a very specific focus on putting effective, evidence-based policy in place both locally and at the state level.”

The Question

How could the Dallas Regional Chamber predict the future of work in the region?

In order to support business development in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, the Chamber can’t just focus on present business needs; it also needs to look to the future. What jobs will businesses need to fill in the coming years? At the same time, where can local residents find jobs that will provide stability and success throughout their careers?

Labor market data would indicate it’s in middle-skill occupations, which require less than a full four-year degree, and are concentrated in two fields: IT and health care.

The DFW region has seen remarkable growth in its IT and health care industries, according to Lightcast data, with job increases of 16.5% and 12.1% respectively over the past five years. This growth trajectory is expected to continue, creating both opportunities and challenges for the region's workforce ecosystem.

The Answer

A data-driven approach to build a future-ready workforce

The result was the DFW Health Care & IT Talent Pipeline, a cohesive data platform that analyzes supply and demand for IT and health care talent in the Dallas region using Lightcast data on skills and job postings. This comprehensive tool provides insights into the current and projected middle-skill workforce, high-need occupations, and demographic breakdowns within these sectors. It highlights critical and emerging skills, education requirements, and major employers, while also identifying industries with the highest demand for middle-skill IT workers. By providing that access, the platform enables employers, workforce development organizations, career advisors, and educational institutions to collaborate more effectively in filling IT and health care jobs with qualified talent, ensuring the region's talent supply meets demand, and ultimately helping residents attain living-wage employment.

Their focus is on employers and industry professionals, rather than jobseekers, because these "power users" have specific needs for detailed labor market data and analysis, while separate campaigns were created to target jobseekers with more qualitative, engaging content, including subsets of the Chamber’s “Say Yes To Dallas” campaign—”Say Yes To Tech” and “Say Yes To Health Care.”

Developing and deploying the portals was not something the DRC took lightly. They began the process by researching similar talent dashboards and economic development campaigns across the country from similar metro areas, examining their data fields, functionality, and user customization features.

Initially we thought we would build this [tool] entirely in house and leverage our own internal research and innovation team, but as we unpacked what that would entail, it was going to be daunting and take our time and effort away from our other priorities. So the Chamber decided to use Lightcast— leveraging their specialization and expertise.

The Chamber collaborated with Lightcast and eIMPACT (now, a Lightcast company) to outline feasible objectives for their own platform. To refine the tool, the Chamber conducted four rounds of focus groups with various stakeholders, including K-12 and post-secondary educators, industry leaders, and economic development organizations. Finally, they engaged about 50 IT and health care employers in user testing to ensure the platform's design, functionality, and content were user-friendly and met the needs of their target audience.

“It certainly wasn’t a light lift, but compared to what we internally were anticipating having to do, it was a breeze,” Toussant says. “The partners at Lightcast and eIMPACT really helped do a lot of the yeoman’s work, like wireframe development and design iterations, and we benefited greatly from that partnership.”

Results

The results have been encouraging: The talent pipeline site has received thousands of visits so far, on target for the DRC’s goals.

Though the potential impact is large, reaching many thousands of workers, the use case is still specific to a particular subset of workforce professionals, so outreach is still focused on that community. Even so, word has gotten out, and other industries beyond health care and IT have reached out with interest about similar portals for their sectors.

For the Chamber itself, the dashboards have been useful as a way to analyze the same data they’re providing to businesses, since the Lightcast data synthesizes inputs from many different sources and packages them all together.

“Looking at our MSA, we typically had to reverse-engineer labor market data across our counties, districts, and higher ed regions and workforce development regions, which all have different geographical footprints,” Toussant says. “And now, for our two highest-demand industries, we have an aggregation that fits the regional scope of the Chamber, and that’s a big time saver. We don’t have to try to triangulate multiple sources in order to answer questions.”

Having the right data in the right place helps enable clearer understanding of the Dallas labor market, which is valuable to stakeholders throughout the region, but ultimately, the end result will be better labor market success for Texans.

Toussant outlines the Chamber's vision: "For us, building economic prosperity and quality of life is the North Star. A key factor in that success is young adult living wage attainment. I think the Chamber is particularly interested in measuring that as a function of a decrease in our middle skills gap in our region. And so if we can close that gap, we think we can make meaningful progress there."

As it continues to evolve and adoption grows, this data-driven approach to workforce development is driving the Dallas Regional Chamber’s success, and ensuring continued prosperity for workers and businesses.