Economic Development:
The Growth Engine to All Careers
New Mexico must adopt an economic growth strategy that prepares it to rival states like Massachusetts, Washington, Maryland, California, and Virginia for venture capital investment and business activity in the industries that will dominate the future: bio and nano engineering, information technology, and renewable and advanced energy.
Planning for Strategic Economic Development
The Governor has charged the Coordination and Oversight Committee to define "five, ten and fifteen year strategic goals for both statewide and regional employment growth and training." The committee is developing a system to furnish the complex statistical information needed to better align the state's education and workforce development programming with the job demands of the future economy of the state.
Data available through the sources cited above provide only a snapshot of present and prospective labor market conditions. The state has the capacity to assess the supply of skilled workers who will be available to New Mexico in the next decades based on demographic and programmatic statistics that are compiled by the education departments and other agencies.
However, the process to project economic demand requires that the state collect new information, much of it directly from employers. The City of Albuquerque has undertaken a study being conducted by the Wadley-Donovan management consulting firm to identify shortfalls in its current labor supply and employers' projected demands for growth and attrition. The Coordination and Oversight Committee is interested in commissioning a similar profile of labor market condition statewide.
The Wadley-Donovan studies will provide baseline data, but are not able to forecast job demand or labor supply-particularly in the economic-base industries that export goods outside New Mexico-or predict the training gaps that our workforce and education programs need to fill.
The Committee will work with local and national experts to design a tool and methodology to predict labor market demand. With assistance from the state it will develop a process for collecting and managing the state's talent pool data and making it available to public and private stakeholders statewide through a community website.
New Mexican students, parents, teachers, policy makers, local planners, economic developers, and businesses must have credible evidence that the state's education and workforce development efforts are keeping pace with the needs of the rapidly changing state economy. The Coordination and Oversight Committee will ensure that economic and educational planning decisions are based on a common set of predictive data and a shared vision of the future.