Edition 47 - Where I find LMI

Welcome to a special edition of Pondering Careers - this week we're celebrating National Careers Week Australia which is obviously my favourite week of the year! It doesn't hurt that the new Bridgerton episodes are dropping today - all in all, it's shaping up to be an excellent week.

For this special edition, I'm going to share some of the best posts and resources from this week, because there have been some crackers, and then we'll talk for a little bit about Labour Market Information (LMI).

It's Day 4 of NCW, and each day this week I've been sharing some of the resources that really helped me out when I started working as a Career Counsellor, so today I feel like an LMI Deep Dive is in order. LMI is one of those essential things that you really need to be across when you're working in our space, because without a working knowledge of the labour market how are you going to provide informed guidance to students?

That being said, it's a slippery beast to grasp - always changing and moving and sliding all over the place.

You can't rely on just one source of LMI to rule them all - you need to use a variety of sources to get a great grasp of what's happening, and it's something that takes pretty much constant maintenance.

So, this week I'll share what I do, and if you have other things you do to stay on top please add them to the conversation.

But first, all the best bits (so far) from NCW 2024

One of my favourite bits about my favourite week is that we see more people talking about careers and sharing their thoughts, so here are some of the best I've seen this week:

Chrissy De Blasis asked us about how we make well-informed decisions (very pertinent to today's Pondering Careers), and she posed a great set of questions that can help us reflect and make career decisions. I love that she included one of the questions JP Michel has been posing lately around challenge mindset, since I feel like this is such a great way to reframe purpose/passion in a way that's more accessible and less elitist.

Her post prompted a bit of self-reflection on my own career, which is something I should certainly do more of! Beth Welden joined the celebration with a post about careers in forestry -

Apparently they have a new Forest VR program which sounds amazing. When I was little, we would drive past plantation forests and I always wondered what went on inside, so I'm really looking forward to checking these resources out.

The NSW Department of Education have been sharing some great posts with little stories on inspiration and career decisions, which is such a smart way to celebrate NCW -

Amanda McCue and Jennifer (Jenn) Barfield RPCDP, PCDAA, CHATP are hosting an event this afternoon (Thursday) talking about helpful career concepts for Defence members and Veterans -

And I believe they've just unlocked some additional tickets because it sold out so quickly! Staying in the defence/technology space for a moment, the South Australian Space Industry Centre shared this fantastic career story earlier this week -

I love it when organisations share career stories like this, because they make it real for students; 'Launch Operations Engineer' sounds quite abstract, but Nishanth's story puts it into context.

Last but not least, Michael Healy shared a couple of great webinars he's running for myfuture which focus on social justice and equity in career development:

The second webinar is on tonight and it's not too late to register.

Where I find my LMI

As I mentioned earlier, LMI can be a complex beast, so rather than doing what I usually do and giving you a raft of links to click on I thought I'd go through how I keep on top of what's happening in my own local area.

For the past ten years I've been living in Cairns (which is about halfway towards becoming a local), and I love it up here.

We're in the tropics, so it's wet and hot for about 5 months of the year, and dry and warm for the rest. Winter takes about a week, and we all rush out to buy jumpers that then collect mould for the other 11.5 months of the year.

Things are quite laid back, but we have two universities, a thriving defence industry, strong agricultural industry, and as the gateway to everything north and west of us we have a stack of other essential services.

We also have some exciting projects in the works; Screen Queensland have just opened their facilities here, so they can shoot movies more easily (we get quite a few of them) and there are plans in the works for Space Centre Australia to build launch facilities locally.

So, when I'm working with young people up here I need to look at a couple of different sources, which start at the macro and then move to the micro level.

Macro LMI

When I say 'macro' LMI I'm really talking about the national stuff. This either relates to the national (and international) labour markets, or is collected and then shared at that level.

This sort of LMI includes information on changes broadly in the world of work, the unemployment and underemployment rates (particularly for young people), and as well as staying on top of the news, I'll also refer to websites like the Australian Bureau of Statistics and Jobs and Skills Australia 's Labour Market Insights Portal.

I like both, although you could find a lot of the ABS data on the JSA site, but the ABS site has stayed the same for a while now so I know where to find things, so I'll often go there first.

LMI that matters for me includes national data like this table on the unemployment rate from the Labour Force release:

This is a super broad picture, but I can see that this graph confirms some of what we're hearing in the news, and that the unemployment rate is starting to creep up from it's historic post-pandemic lows.

This data is repeated (with a bit more colour) on the LMIP:

We don't have the graph, but it's a bit more user-friendly, and I'd probably go here if I was working directly with a student who wanted to know what was happening.

On this site, I can also drill down to local data for my region:

A lot of the data at the top does exactly what we expect, and simply reflects national data, so I'm going to scroll to the industry breakdowns:

This kind of data is what I try to stay on top of, which means regular visits back to this page and also keeping an ear out for news on the most significant industries.

It's easy when we live somewhere to focus on the 'noisy' industries - the ones that make us stand out from other areas, and which set the tone for the region while also providing a good chunk of the employment, but in doing this we can sometimes distort the picture for young people.

The reality is that most towns anywhere in the world will look pretty similar to this. Lots of people are employed in healthcare, education, retail, and construction, and the noisy industries (in my case defence, agriculture, and tourism) only make so much impact.

In between LMI

You can also usually find some LMI that sits kind of in-between the Macro and the Micro, which is often state or region-based, and which I find can be useful for different things.

For example, the Queensland Treasury and Energy share regional unemployment figures which are broken down in a more sensible way than the national data. Obviously the type of data you can get from sources like this will depend on what's on offer in your local area, but in mine I like this data because it tells me different things. For example, this graph shows how employment changes in Cairns by month:

There's nothing super earth shattering here, but I can see that we have a regular pattern throughout the year (excluding the covid blip) where employment stagnates at the end of each year. This makes sense, as organisations will often hold off on hiring new people right before Christmas (unless we're talking Christmas casuals), and then we see a sharp rise again in the new year.

If I'm working with a job seeker who's starting their search after September, I might use this graph to point out that it's normal to feel like they can't find anything at the end of the year, and to reset their expectations.

Another source of in-between LMI is the information published by local organisations, including groups like the Chamber of Commerce and the local council (or other government body, depending on where you are). For Cairns, this means we can use sites like Choose Cairns to talk about local conditions with students and job seekers.

I love these local sites because they go beyond the raw data and talk about what's actually happening, for example:

Tourism has always been a huge part of the Cairns local economy, but contrary to popular perception, Cairns has one of the most diverse economies in Australia. Retail, education and training, public administration, transport, manufacturing and professional service industries are also well-established employers. As the capital of Far North Queensland, Cairns is the primary service centre for the wider region, which has established economic strengths in Mining, Renewable Energy, and Agriculture.

Micro LMI

The most specific level of LMI for me is that which is current and on-the-ground, such as local job ads.

Job ads are a great source of LMI, because they go beyond the theoretical to look at what's actually happening on the ground. I can see what types of jobs are on offer, what they pay, what the conditions are like, and where I'd be working.

A quick search of SEEK for jobs in Cairns turns up 1723 jobs, which is a good number to be starting with. I can easily refine by classification, and I can also see how many jobs are advertised in each classification as I search:

Instantly I can see that there are lots of jobs on offer in admin and also in community services, but that if I'm looking for something in advertising or the arts I may be out of luck.

If you wanted to incorporate this into a lesson students can quickly build an idea of the jobs that are out there and available right now, and if I was working one-on-one with a student I might use this in a session to help them build their own ideas about the labour market, rather than just sharing my opinion, and I find this is particularly useful when I'm working with someone at either end of the spectrum.

Sometimes people are convinced they'll never find work, even when they want to get into a field that's in high demand, but I also see the other side where a person is convinced that they can find work that meets all their demands with no consideration of what's actually available in the labour market, and this exercise is a good way to reset both ideas.

Other types of micro LMI include things like Chamber of Commerce events or local economic updates or industry expos, and as someone working in careers these events can help you get the 'pulse' of what's really happening on the ground, because you can have conversations with a range of stakeholders.

How do you use LMI?

What works for me might not work for someone else, so finding your own sources of LMI and methods for using it is so important. I'd love to hear about your own favourite sources of LMI and tricks for using it with students and clients, so please reach out or share in the comments so we can all learn together.