Southwest Florida Workforce Development Board, Inc.

News Release

 

CONTACT:

Southwest Florida Workforce Development Board, Inc.

Jim Wall

PH:  239-992-8000

EMAIL:  jwall@sfwdb.org

URL:  http://www.careerandservicecenter.org/

 

ERISS Corporation

Barbara Nyegaard

PH: 866-491-3747 ext.202

EMAIL: barbara.nyegaard@eriss.com

URL: http://www.eriss.com

 

 

 

SURVEY TO EXAMINE LOCAL EMPLOYMENT SITUATION

Approximately 6400 Southwest Florida businesses

will be contacted over the next six weeks

 

 

Southwest Florida – November 9, 2004  - Southwest Florida businesses will be getting a call in the next few weeks as part of the 3^rd annual study of local salaries, hiring trends and occupations.

          The Southwest Florida Workforce Development Board is sponsoring the study, which targets all businesses with ten or more employees.  The Southwest Florida Workforce Development Board, Inc. is a partnership between business, labor, education, community, and government services. The Board oversees workforce development initiatives in Region 24, which is compromised of Charlotte, Collier, Glades, Hendry, and Lee Counties.

Information collected through the telephone interviews will be used to assist the Southwest Florida Workforce Development Board in developing programs that serve jobseekers and employers.  The information gathered in the survey will also provide an accurate forecast of Southwest Florida’s future job growth and salary ranges for specific occupations.

          "In the current economy, employers are having more and more difficulty finding good people with the job skills they need," said Joe Paterno, Executive Director of the Southwest Florida Workforce Development Board.  "The data from this survey will allows us to do a better job of matching employers with qualified job candidates and determine which training programs should receive priority."

 

          The telephone interviews begin the week of November 15^th and are expected to take six to eight weeks to complete.   Businesses will receive a fax notice prior to their call.  Individual interviews, conducted with the company's human resources representative, will last between 7 to 10 minutes.  Following completion of the survey, the data will be analyzed.  A final report is expected early March 2005.

 

          The Southwest Florida Workforce Development Board has contracted with ERISS Corporation to conduct the survey.  Barbara Nyegaard, COO of ERISS, says all wage and salary information collected during the survey will remain confidential.  The data will be aggregated; business names will not appear in the final report.  Once the phone interviews are completed ERISS will build an interactive Web application to display the information collected. This web application www.usworks.com/SouthwestFlorida will provide jobseekers and employers with a wealth of online tools for researching Southwest Florida’s current job market conditions.

          Site visitors to www.usworks.com/SouthwestFlorida will be able to review:

·      Average salaries

·      Local Hiring trends

·      Local Industry supply and demand

·      The fastest growing local occupations

·      Local occupations in the most demand, and much more

ERISS, a leading provider of job market information and web applications, has conducted similar projects in Florida and across the United States.        "This is the largest job market survey of its kind conducted in Southwest Florida," said Nyegaard.  "As a result, local workforce development agencies, employers, job seekers and training providers will be provided with the largest data base assembled of current, local information on which jobs are in demand and which are not, what they pay and where they are located geographically.  "This in turn will help foster a significantly more efficient environment in local school-to-work, work-to-work and welfare-to-work programs where job seekers can spend less time finding gainful employment, employers will have an easier time finding qualified applicants, and schools will train more people for jobs that are in demand," said Nyegaard.

 

          Employers interested in more information on the survey are encouraged to call Jim Wall of the Southwest Florida Workforce Development Board at 239-992-8000 or Barbara Nyegaard of ERISS at 866-491-3747 ext 202.

 

 

END