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"Minnesota's Most Marketable
Skills: The contribution of occupational skill requirements to wages and
employment growth"
Minnesota Department of
Economic Security
Summary
This study had two primary objectives:
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Develop a simple skills taxonomy based on
O*NET skills, abilities, and knowledges that is both intuitive to end users
and captures the ability to distinguish occupations based on a minimal
set of characteristics, and
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Identify which of these resulting aggregated
skills are "most marketable."
Marketable skills were defined as those occupational
skill requirements that are most strongly associated with high wages and
projected employment opportunities (based on OES wages and 1996-2006 occupational
projections).
The methodological approach involved using
factor analytic techniques to identify reduced skill and ability sets.
We successfully reduced the number of abilities from 46 O*NET characteristics
to 12 ability factors and skills from 42 O*NET characteristics to 14 skill
factors. A multinomial logit model as used to estimate the relationship
between each skill and wages/employment growth. Regressions controlled
for job zone to obtain the effect of each skill/knowledge/ability requirement
net of educational requirements.
Eighteen factors, categorized into five
skill clusters (fundamental, technical/scientific, managerial/administrative,
human service, and medical), were found to significantly contribute to
marketability.
How is O*NET being
used?
Skill factors were derived using the O*NET
database. O*NET importance and level data were used in regressions to determine
coefficient estimates.
Who is your target
population?
The target population for the Most Marketable
Skills Project was educational planners, workforce development policy makers,
educators and learners.
What kind of results
is O*NET helping you to achieve?
O*NET helped us characterize the contributions
of worker skills to worker productivity.
What are the related
program initiatives?
The reduced skill set derived from O*NET
KSAs will be applied in career information products such as Minnesota's
Internet System for Education and Employment Knowledge (ISEEK) for use
in self-assessment instruments. It may also form the basis for future surveys
that attempt to identify skill requirements to enable comparability with
existing O*NET occupations.
Is your product,
program or service available for others to use?
Information developed and learned during
the project has been incorporated into a report that is available on the
Web (http://www.mnworkforcecenter.org/lmi/pub1/mms/). Results were also
incorporated into an article entitled Skills for the 21st Century that
identifies key skills that are associated with either high-paying or high-growth
jobs. This is available in *.pdf format (http://www.mnworkforcecenter.org/lmi/pub1/mms4.pdf).
To order paper copies, please contact the Minnesota Department of Economic
Security, Research and Planning Office, 390 North Roberts Street, Saint
Paul, MN 55101 or call 651-282-2714.
What other strategies
make your product, program or service successful?
The sheer volume of information in O*NET
and its high technical level are indicative of its comprehensive content
model. However, not all users demand the complete O*NET descriptor set.
This project addressed this issue by using factor analytic techniques to
identify a smaller, more intuitive set of descriptors that maintained comparability
with the original O*NET taxonomy.
Do you have other
pertinent information?
A limiting factor in this study was the
lack of data to identify within-occupation skill changes. The MDES will
be doing a follow-up study for the Short Term Projections Consortium that
will address this and other methodological issues associated with projecting
future skill demands.
Contact Information:
Marc Breton
Career Information Unit
Department of Economic Security
390 North Robert Street
St. Paul, MN 55101
tele: 651-296-2072
e-mail: mbreton@ngwmail.des.state.mn.us
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