Ohio Workforce Coalition

In this webinar we heard from from Kyle Fee, Senior Policy Analyst, Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland. He shared an overview of a new report he co-authored with Keith Wardrip from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia and Lisa Nelson from the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland. Combining publicly available labor market information and online job ads data, their work identifies a subset of occupations that are generally accessible to those without a four-year college degree but pay above the national annual median wage (adjusted for regional price differences). They refer to these identified occupations as “opportunity occupations” and total amount of employment associated with them as “opportunity employment”. Their work also explores the factors that help explain the differences observed in the share of opportunity employment across the largest metros in the US.