Win-win-win results with employer engagement

There's no universal solution to bringing job seekers and employers together. It’s not simply a relationship between labour supply and labour demand; it requires the commitment of government to support relevant programs and services and the creativity of intermediaries to help employers access local talent. 

Employment support networks, often non-profits, are mandated to help employers access local talent to meet skill needs. For job developers, career developers, and local employment support organizations, being equipped with the right tools is a key success factor.  

Recognizing employer engagement as a priority, governments and other intermediaries have released some useful resources and launched initiatives related to the topic. Take a look at these examples from the United Kingdom, Australia and Canada. 

One such resource is a guidebook titled Strategic Employer Engagement: Building Dynamic Relationships with Employers in Teen and Young Adult Employment Programs. While targeting youth and young adults it offers concepts and approaches that can be adapted to other contexts. To take learning to a higher level, Workforce180, a workforce development training provider, is now offering is Employer Engagement Certification in Canada.

Engagement of job seekers, employers, government, and intermediaries connects people to jobs, a win-win-win scenario for everyone involved.

Why companies are moving downtown

The 1999 book Once They Were Greenfields identified that around 95% of the 15 million new American office jobs created in the 1980s were in low-density suburbs or “Edge Cities”, easily accessible by car to the workforce that had migrated out of city centres. This pattern of development achieved corporate objectives, but the loss of residents and associated commercial activity exacerbated many of the environmental, economic, and social challenges downtowns were facing.

Core Values: Why American Companies are Moving Downtown, released by Smart Growth America (in association with Cushman & Wakefield and the Center for Real Estate and Urban Analysis) offers strong new evidence to support a reversal in that trend, particularly since 2010. The report examines the motives and preferences of a wide range of companies that have chosen to relocate, expand, or open new offices in walkable and vibrant downtowns and urban centres over the last five years. 

Six themes emerged to explain these motivations including talent attraction and retention, building brand identity or corporate culture, increased support for creative collaboration, proximity to key downtown clients and partners, centralization of operations in an accessible place, and support for triple-bottom line business outcomes. Neighbourhood vitality remains a fundamental component – companies stressed that locations that can appeal to their workers and secure their investments are the most attractive options for investment, placing this trend firmly in broader downtown redevelopment initiatives.

Overall, the report offers concrete evidence that employment is starting to follow people back downtown, and provides direction on attracting these companies, including the fundamental role that downtown revitalization can play. Looking for strategies to support downtown redevelopment? The folks at the Higher ED blog have released the first and second posts in a series exploring downtown revitalization issues and strategies. 

Are you rich or poor?

As we discussed in TINAN 64, a strong “global consuming class” has significant implications for economic growth. Along the same lines, a recent Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) report, In it Together, argues that the growing disparity between the rich and poor tends to drag down GDP growth and is generally bad for long-term growth.

According to the OECD, income inequality has risen in most member countries over the past thirty years and has become an important topic of public debate. The report argues that, while we’ve seen a lot of discussion of the one percent in the United States and other development nations, the growing gap between a broader range of lower income households (the bottom 40%) and the rest of the population is the biggest factor for the impact of inequality on economic growth.

This gap is evident, for example, in the OECD estimate that about a third of all jobs in OECD countries are part-time or self-employment, leading to precarious employment and lower overall earnings. As a result, these workers are less able to invest in things like skills training and education that would impact their long-term economic success, as well as their families’ future economic mobility.  

Understanding the scale of the issues can be challenging. To help put inequality into context, the OECD has released an interactive “Are you rich or poor” tool that helps users to understand where they fall in their country based on their salary and family size. The OECD also provides some useful interactive visualizations of the report’s findings. Check out the full report or the summary overview for more on inequality trends and policy directions to close the gap.