Blog Entry List

North Carolina has a tight labor market, which is creating opportunities for jobseekers but challenging employers who are looking to hire. This article uses LEAD’s North Carolina Labor Supply/Demand data to show how the labor market has tightened across our state’s various regions and occupational groups.

Completing higher education is becoming increasingl

The labor market is heating up across much of the United States, with employers posting a record number of job openings and reportedly turning to 

North Carolina’s Northeast Prosperity Zone is a diverse and beautiful part of our state that attracts talent and visitors from around the world. It’s also a region where many communities face economic challenges as they look to the future.

We’ve heard a variety of accounts of wages rising since the recession began.  Explanations generally show some degree of positive news, from recently rising wag

A Wall Street Journal article noted that less educated American workers saw the largest weekly pay bumps since the recession began, but is this the case for North Carolina’s less educated workers?

After a volatile year, newly-released data revisions show that North Carolina’s unemployment and labor force participation rates are in fact on a steady path as we head into 2018.  This article explains what labor market watchers can learn from these new data and provides some helpful tips to avoid getting caught off-guard by data revisions.

Since 1990, women have become increasingly concentrated within the ranks of healthcare practitioners. A look at the data shows that Registered Nurses don’t explain the trend. To identify many of the women finding work in this field, you have to look for the white lab coats.

Workers with Bachelor’s degrees earn far more on average than the rest of the population. But some college majors lead to higher-paying jobs than others. This article shows which majors yielded the highest earnings for 2002-2003 graduates of North Carolina’s university system, using data from LEAD’s outcome reporting website NC TOWER.

Are counties seeing their resident workers report to work in county more today than in the past?

Different industries have different starting times for work.  This post explores industry and regional differences in work starting times among North Carolina workers.

The United Census Bureau introduced the 2017 North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) structure this year, as is done every five years. When looking at changes occurring in North Carolina, there are several worth noting.

The success of large urban metros has been well-documented across the country; They have long-since recovered from the Great Recession, while rural areas are still struggling by and large.  The idea that our very different urban and rural areas are competing against each other might not be fair, or realistic.  The question we need to be asking is how are these areas doing relative to similarly sized geographies across the United States?  And more importantly, what can we learn from these comparable areas outside of our state?

On September 15, 2017, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released the State Employment and Unemployment news release for August 2017. With so many people impacted by the never-ending barrage of storms in the news lately, BLS included the following statement.