Introducing Skills Outlook: Workforce intelligence for tomorrow's skill needs

What skills will employers need in five years' time? Which industries will create the most jobs? And how can training providers ensure their programmes remain aligned with the needs of the labour market?

These are critical questions for tertiary education and training providers, industry organisations, workforce planners, and policymakers. They're also the questions that Skills Outlook, Infometrics' new workforce intelligence platform, is designed to answer.

Launching on 14 August, Skills Outlook combines Infometrics' trusted economic forecasting expertise with comprehensive workforce and skills data to provide a forward-looking view of every sector in the economy.

Building on the foundations of our long-standing Sector Profiles product, Skills Outlook delivers familiar insights through a modern, intuitive platform with significantly enhanced functionality.

The real strength of Skills Outlook is its ability to go beyond historical data. Rather than simply showing where the labour market has been, it helps users understand where it is heading.

Skills Outlook helps organisations make more informed decisions by providing insights into projected employment growth, changing workforce demand, and future skills requirements – specifically tailored to their sectors.

For organisations involved in education and training, this intelligence can support a wide range of decisions. Programme planning can be better aligned with employer needs, through examining the forecast demand from businesses for those roles into the future. Investment decisions can be backed by robust evidence. Stakeholder discussions can be informed by a shared understanding of emerging skill requirements.

Whether you're designing qualifications, planning programme delivery, or identifying future workforce needs, Skills Outlook provides the evidence needed to support better decision-making.

One of the platform's key strengths is its depth and breadth of coverage.

Skills Outlook provides a wide range of workforce, occupation, qualification, and skills metrics for every sector of the New Zealand economy. Users can define their own sectors, using Infometrics’ sophisticated methodology for defining sectors using industries and/or occupations at a very fine level of detail, with around 500 detailed in industries and nearly 1,000 occupations.

Users can analyse trends in their sectors at the national level or drill down into regions and territorial authorities. Skills Outlook also provides detailed insights into the makeup of sectors, to help build an understanding of who is part of the sector. These insights range from demographic information about age, ethnicity, and gender, through to productivity across the workforce.

Underpinning the platform is Infometrics' renowned economic forecasting capability. Refreshed six-monthly, our forecasts of employment over the next five years at a detailed level and across both new jobs and replacement of current workers provide a rich forward view of how the workforce demand is set to change. The result is workforce intelligence that is both detailed and reliable.

Interested in seeing Skills Outlook in action? View the Skills Outlook product page where you can book a personalised demo and discover how better workforce intelligence can support your organisation's future success.