Louisville workforce-development agency KentuckianaWorks has released the first of what will be quarterly reports on the region's job market.
The first report, released Friday, has positive signs of recovery following the 2008 recession. The report shows a lower unemployment rate than in the recession years (now 5.5 percent) and average higher wages when adjusted for inflation.
But it also shows the need for specialized skills or higher levels of education, an issue that has been spelled out in reports by other groups, including this one from 55,000 Degrees.
Michael Gritton, executive director of KentuckianaWorks, said using this current data, the Greater Louisville region can see that healthcare and IT jobs are most likely to show up on websites and in newspapers. Also, the healthcare and commercial truck driver jobs had the most openings between July and September of this year.
“What we’re trying to do is let people know what’s been happening in the last 90 days by using data sets that we used to not be able to get and now we can," said Gritton.
KentuckianaWorks will release a similar quarterly reports regularly beginning in February.
The organization is getting help with the reports from labor consulting company Burning Glass, which has helped create a database that can feed regular reports on which jobs are hiring and why.