Holly Peoples
Director of Business Services
Michigan Works! Job Force Board
Escanaba, Michigan
With Michigan’s unemployment rate hovering near 10%, the highest in the U.S., Holly Peoples at Michigan Works! Job Force Board understands the value of assessing dislocated workers’ skill sets and looking for crosswalks to high-demand jobs. That sort of transition analysis is made simple with EMSI’s Career Pathways (CP) tool, which combines up-to-date labor market figures with O*NET data to rank the relative compatibility of occupations. According to Peoples, “I think it gives the jobseeker a really good sense of what might be currently available that matches with their skill set – and if there isn’t anything, what they need to do next to build skills to kind of move forward.” She says the Job Force Board, the Central Upper Peninsula’s workforce investment board, is seeing regional demand in the health care industry, as well as for high-level welders, maintenance mechanics, and line workers. But mostly, Peoples and her colleagues are making sure area stakeholders and jobseekers are aware of the importance of looking at replacement jobs – those that take into account retirements and outmigration. “We know based on our population that we will have, even in the manufacturing sector, opportunities for people at some point,” she says. “We anticipate a large number of retirements of some pretty high-skilled people.”
For more on the Job Force Board, click here for its website.