CREC Project News and Updates

CREC’s Kenneth Poole Receives U.S. Census Bureau’s Local Employment Dynamics Innovation Award

March 8, 2016

 

Center for Regional Economic Competitiveness (CREC) CEO Kenneth Poole was recognized Monday for his work to promote efforts around the U.S. Census Bureau’s Local Employment Dynamics (LED) program. In doing so, Census noted that his efforts raise the bar on practices that help America’s jobs, workers, and local economies.

Poole, who founded CREC in 2000, stated that the award recognizes CREC employees and partners whose hard work has helped promote information about trends in employment, hiring, job creation and loss, and earnings. In the effort to use LED tools and facilitate learning about the Census programs, CREC and its network of organizations continues to connect state labor market information agencies and census program developers through in-person and online LED trainings.

Specific Trainings:
CREC training sessions promote best practices for using the Quarterly Workforce Indicators (QWI), LED’s flagship product. CREC also uses LED tools on a daily basis for economic-development projects, and it showcases how LED programs provide accurate insight into the labor-supply. Other tools CREC promotes through trainings include:

  • The QWI Explorer, which offers comprehensive access to the full breadth of the Quarterly Workforce Indicators dataset, namely through charts, maps, and interactive tables
  • The OnTheMap tool, which offers maps, charts, and reports on demographic characteristics and commute patterns of workers and jobs covering 50 states plus the District of Columbia
  • The OnTheMap for Emergency Management tool, which delivers real-time geographic data of disaster events
  • The LED Extraction Tool, which provides easy access to raw data extracts from the Quarterly Workforce Indicators dataset through a simple query-building interface

LED helps develop new information about local labor market conditions at low cost with no added respondent burden and the same confidentiality protections afforded by census and survey data.

About CREC:

The Center for Regional Economic Competitiveness (CREC) is an independent, not-for-profit organization founded to provide policy-makers from around the world with the information and technical assistance they need to formulate and execute innovative, regional, job-creating economic strategies. Our primary goal is to help regions compete. The organization works to further regional economic competitiveness in global, rural, and metropolitan communities. It also manages three organizations with individual missions that align with our overall, long-term goals:

Upcoming In-Person and Online Trainings

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About the Client

Los Rios (CA) Community College District

The Los Rios Community College District is one of the nation’s most respected learning institutions and the second-largest community college district in California, serving the greater Sacramento region. We have four colleges, six education centers, and specialized workforce and economic development programs for local businesses, governments, and organizations.