Good Data, Great Presentation: A New Report on Kansas City Manufacturing

Good data can be powerful. Good data packaged well and explained clearly can be even more potent.

The Mid-America Regional Council (MARC) demonstrated that principle with its Manufacturing in the Kansas City Metro report, released earlier this summer and highlighted at kceconomy.com.

The short report brought together EMSI industry and workforce data, plus skills and certification data from WANTED Analytics, to give a snapshot of the Kansas City metro manufacturing sector. Using colorful graphics and charts, MARC gave an overview of total and projected employment by manufacturing subsector, multiplier effects for the industry overall (and specific subsectors), wages, and jobs by education level for the occupations that staff the industry. It also included workforce success stories from K.C. and a workforce development resource and partnership guide.

The following are big-picture takeaways gleaned from the report:

“EMSI provides us with a trusted source of detailed employment data that we simply can’t get from our other sources. [It] really allows us to see our region’s relative strengths and weaknesses at a level we can begin to take action.” — Jeff Pinkerton, Mid-America Regional Council

The manufacturing sector accounts for more than 76,000 jobs and nearly 2,000 establishments in the Kansas City metro area. And for every 10 manufacturing jobs in the region, another 33 are created in other industries in Kansas City — a multiplier effect of 3.3. Individual job multipliers for high-growth manufacturing industries, taken from EMSI’s input-output model, range from 2.87 for communications equipment to 1.82 for signs.

Manufacturing employment in Kansas City is projected to exceed 80,000 jobs by 2022. That’s 5% projected growth, compared to 1.3% nationwide. The most growth is projected in auto manufacturing (2,249 net new jobs), which makes sense given that General Motors and Ford are the area’s two largest manufacturing employers — ahead of ATK Small Caliber Systems, Garmin, Honeywell, and Bayer.

Nearly 8 out of 10 manufacturing jobs require, on average, less than a college degree. That includes computer-controlled machine tool operators, who make $15.50 per hour in Kansas City on average and account for an estimated 395 job openings.

All the above numbers cited in the report come from EMSI’s labor market research and data tool, Analyst. Why did the Mid-America Regional Council use data from EMSI for this project, and why does it continue to turn to EMSI for other projects?

“EMSI provides us with a trusted source of detailed employment data that we simply can’t get from our other sources,” MARC senior researcher Jeff Pinkerton explained. “The industry details really allow us to see our region’s relative strengths and weaknesses at a level we can begin to take action.”

To access the full report, click here. Learn more about the Mid-America Regional Council at MARC.org.

For more examples of how practitioners in workforce and economic development, education, and workforce planning/HR use EMSI data, peruse EMSI’s case study page. And for more on EMSI data, see this page and contact Josh Wright ([email protected]). You can EMSI on Twitter here: @DesktopEcon.