Laborshed and Employment Benefit Analysis

Laborshed studies provide community leaders, economic developers, site selectors, and existing or prospective employers with a flexible tool for understanding the workforce characteristics of their local labor market.

A Laborshed is defined as the area or region from which an employment center draws its commuting workers. It shows the distribution of these workers regardless of political boundaries. Laborshed studies also address underemployment, availability of labor, and likeliness of the employed or not employed to change or accept employment. Other topics covered within a Laborshed analysis include: current and desired occupations, wages, hours worked, job search resources, and distance willing to commute to work. The Laborshed study process takes approximately ninety days from start to finish.

​This portion of text was taken from Iowa Workforce Development Laborshed Studies.

To access the Iowa Workforce Development Laborshed studies page complete with links to executive summary, community profile, map tools, and much more, please visit the Iowa Workforce Development Laborshed Studies page.

Employment Benefit Analysis

Meanwhile, the 2017 Employment Benefit Analysis is a twenty-page report that highlights and compares employee benefits offered in Western Iowa Advantage’s eight-county region of Adair, Audubon, Carroll, Crawford, Greene, Guthrie, Ida, and Sac counties. The data analyzed in this report was collected from 887 employers through the Workforce Needs Assessment Survey. The results of the survey were analyzed on both an overall and per-industry basis.