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O*NET Resources ~ A Piece of the Action
Manpower, Inc. Uses O*NET To More Effectively Evaluate Opportunity and Make Better Fact-Based Decisions
"{In looking for a way to code skills and occupations} O*NET came out head and shoulders above anything we found." ~ Kathi Dolan, Manpower, Inc.
Manpower, Inc., a worldwide provider of high value staffing services with nearly 1,100 offices in North America and 4,000 offices in 63 countries, provides jobs to over 2,000,000 people every year, and services more than 400,000 customers worldwide. The O*NET occupational and skills taxonomy helps Manpower match the right person for the right job. The O*NET system also offers a systematic structure that enhances their analysis of the employment marketplace as well as its tracking of staffing trends.
The Need
The classification of job titles and skills presented a challenge for Manpower, due to its diverse customer base. Most of these customers maintained proprietary classification systems. In addition, often their coding systems fell short of capturing many of the new jobs that have and continue to surface each year. As a result, it was difficult to efficiently analyze their occupational mix and high-demand skill-sets. Manpower sought a more granular coding structure that could be automated with a high level of accuracy to track the millions of transactions processed each year.
Kathi Dolan summarized her experience with O*NET as follows: "The most important thing about O*NET is that it meets our complicated and diverse needs. When you add the fact that it has been validated by teams of Industrial-Organizational Psychologists, that it has the weighted correlations between skills and occupations, that it is externally maintained, that it is used in government employment data and that it's free - well, it just makes sense to adopt O*NET."
Manpower conducted a thorough evaluation of its options and researched skills and occupational taxonomies. Manpower concluded that O*NET provided the right mix of occupations that was both broad and flexible enough to meet the demands of its clients. Using O*NET enabled Manpower to change its coding systems to incorporate the O*NET skills and occupational taxonomy across all 1,100 field offices in the U.S.
O*NET Role
Manpower's practice is to locate offices near their recruiting base. Accurate occupational data was needed to evaluate the types of in-demand skill-sets a field office's market was currently encountering and was projected to encounter. Along with BLS data on the geographic distribution of those who perform these occupations, O*NET enabled Manpower to develop and classify this needed occupational information. Manpower could then track their workforce and customer base and benchmark against the employment market at the national, state and local levels. Using O*NET data, in conjunction with information from the new North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) (the replacement for the U.S. Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) system), further enhanced their ability to understand the correlations between the U.S. employment market and their own customer and employee bases. (NAICS was developed jointly by the U.S., Canada, and Mexico to provide new comparability in statistics about business activityacross North America.)
Manpower developed documentation for their field offices on how to code jobs so they map to standard O*NET occupations. The system takes into account types of clients, work sites and work environments. Manpower created a type of "O*NET Plus", that accommodates alternative titles when necessary, tied back to the standard O*NET code for consistency in reporting and analysis.
Key Results
By incorporating O*NET structure into its procedures, Manpower experienced benefits in a number of areas. These include being able:
? To accurately identify the types of placements each field office makes.
? To locate field offices where the highest need and/or demand exists.
? To more accurately consolidate information for various types of analysis, including marketing analysis.
? To begin the process of having Manpower offices in other countries map their occupations to O*NET. This will enable Manpower to more efficiently consolidate information for global reporting.
Manpower is a National Business Partner of the Department of Labor - working with the Business Relations group (BRG) at ETA.
Branka Minic, Director of Manpower's Workforce Development Division explains: "TechReach is Manpower's workforce development program targeting unemployed and underemployed persons and transitioning them, through training and mentoring, into available career opportunities. To bridge the digital divide, TechReach is incorporating O*NET to compare job-seeker's portfolio of skills with the skill requirements in demand in their labor market, and provide training to alleviate identified skill gaps."
This O*NET-enabled information from TechReach benefits workers, both domestically and overseas. This includes individuals working on visas, such as H1-B.
Manpower believes that the uses for O*NET data will continue to grow as they further expand its use into their assessment, training and career development systems.
"O*NET," says Manpower's Kathi Dolan, "is a common language that provides interoperability throughout our employment lifecycle. O*NET allows it to all work together, enabling us to take a higher level view and then drill down to the individual transaction level."
Key O*NET Benefits for Manpower
O*NET helps Manpower to:
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Make better fact-based decisions,
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More effectively evaluate opportunity,
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Benchmark progress,
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Track market share,
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Better analyze the employment market, tracking trends on a consistent, standardized basis, and doing it automatically.
Contact
Kathi Dolan, Manpower
Email: Kathi.Dolan@na.manpower.com
Telephone: 414-906-6909
URL: www.manpower.com
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