In the light of the federal government's desire to equip the country with an integrated system providing users with direct access to labour market information, and of the need for each state to offer efficient services in the place of numerous personalised services which have been ended as a result of budgetary cutbacks, many information tools have been reviewed, improved, or created in recent years. The Occupation-Based Statistical System for Employment Projections (SPEPP) offers an example in which the services provided to users (cf. choice of means of information diffusion) have been reviewed and their content redefined, as well as an example of collaboration between two different levels of government.

The peculiar features of this programme as compared with systems observed in other countries lie in the involvement of state employment services in data collection, in the contractual agreement between the federal and state governments for its implementation and financing, and in the opportunity it offers of direct free access for all users to this information - information which can be used in making decisions about training, career guidance, the development of a firm, the planning of training programmes, etc.

The federal government first created an Occupational Outlook Service in the US Department of Labour's Bureau of Labour Statistics (BLS) in the late 1940s, in order to provide occupational-based employment projections to ex-servicemen with information and career guidance. This remains the objective of the Bureau's employment projections programme, although its projections are now used for a wide range of purposes.

Since 1960, BLS has published ten to fifteen-years employment projections. As of the early 1970s, the projections have been prepared on a two-year cycle. The present projections of the size and composition of the labour force, economic growth, detailed estimates of industrial production and of employment by industry and by occupation. The information produced is used by those concerned with the course of economic growth and its effect on the job market for specific occupations. They include, among others, labour force advisers, trainers, career advisers to young people, and officials in the spheres of education and training programme planning.

A major change took place during the first half of the 1990s as a result of a request by the Congress to the Secretary of Labour to undertake a complete review of market needs and of existing output as regards labour market information (the American Labour Market Information System - ALMIS). The study was entrusted to the Employment and Training Administration (ETA) and the BLS in collaboration with a certain number of Directors of state Labour Market Information Systems (SLMIS), the committee overseeing the Interstate Conference of Employment Security Agencies (ICESA). The report of this working group, dated July 1995, insisted on the need to establish a LMIS based on the following principles:

focus on the user (including individuals) and responsiveness to the user's needs;
ease of access and use (state of the art technology);
link-ups with other information sources;
reliability, i.e. the same level of integrity and confidentiality as the information contained in the current system.

This measure paved the way for the design and improvement of four data banks: America's Job Bank, America's Talent Bank, America's Career InfoNet and America's Learning Exchange, all grouped together under the joint title of America's Career Kit.

At the state level, governments have felt the need to produce statistical studies of their own in response to specific needs. Due to the major budget cutbacks of the 1980s, governments were forced to modify the mission of their State Employment Services, as follows:

changes in the services provided (i.e. a 50 per cent cut in professional advisory services);
reduced access of clients to the services themselves (office closures and shorter opening hours);
staff cuts (24 per cent);
changing client profile.

One of the principal ways found by the State Employment Services to preserve the quality of their services in the face of these difficulties was to improve the content of and access to their statistical information output. Client services thus came to be structured around three lines:

self-service (especially in the form of electronic information);
assisted self-service;
service provided by a professional advisor (on a limited and specialized scale in view of the limited human resources available).

With respect to the improved content of the output, states take advantage of the data collection undertaken by them as mandated by the LMIS and funded by the federal government by processing the data collected for their own purposes once the federal requirements have been met. Each state organizes the service according to its own needs and priorities.

The case of the state of Wisconsin illustrates how this works. The state is interested in developing occupational projections on account of the investments it needs to make in education and training, and also on account of the labour market information which will be required in the future by the employers and job-seekers who constitute its clientele. (For example, the projections published in September 1997 for the period 1994-2005 forecast that in 2005 there will be 103,201 job openings in the state, of which 59,711 will have been generated by people employed in 1994, who leave their job, and another 43,490 will be new jobs created by market expansion.) The occupational disaggregation shows that the openings are of six types:

occupations with the highest number of jobs;
occupations with more than 500 jobs where growth is fastest;
occupations with the highest number of growth opportunities;
occupations with highest rate of job growth;
occupations with highest number of jobs lost;
occupations with highest number of self-employed.

To avoid future shortages in jobs that cannot be filled by untrained workers, these projections are used to plan formal education programmes and also to project training and reskilling programmes for people in employment. New technology and new management methods also mean that currently employed skilled workers will need to learn new skills.

The national employment projections for 1996-2006 published by BLS in December 1997 provide an overall picture of economic and employment growth, a substantial part of which consists of occupational employment projections.

The role of the leading actors

In 1976 the US Congress created the National Occupational Information Coordinating Committee (NOICC) and its state counterparts, and the State Occupational Information Coordinating Committee (SOICC). Their objective in so doing was to promote a coordinated approach to the development and use of labour market information for planning education and training programmes. These committees are supposed to stimulate coordination, cooperation and communication in the development of occupational information. Subsequent amendment of this legislation in Congress added the task of also providing career information to young people and adults. Underlying the work of these Committees is the premise that by providing users with tools and information, they will be able to make an informed education and training and career choice.

The Bureau of Labour Statistics, an agency of the Department of Labour, is the leading agency responsible for the collection, processing, analysis and dissemination of information in the labour market. It is also responsible for the development of data collection methods and procedures by the states. Responsibility for occupational employment projections lies with the BLS's Office of Employment Projections, which consists of two divisions - Occupational Outlook and Industry Employment Projections.

At the state level, and returning to the case of Wisconsin, the Governor is assisted in the labour sphere by, among others, three advisory bodies: the most important is the Wisconsin Job Council (on which various interest groups are represented, including employers and workers), in addition to the State Collaborative Planning Team, whose members are mostly state government officials, and the Wisconsin Occupational Information Coordinating Council, created by the State Congress and which has brought representatives from the education sector into the management of labour market information. This latter group is composed of representatives of the State Employment Security Agency (known as the Jobs, Employment and Training Service Division in Wisconsin), of the Economic Development Agency, of the Educational Science Committee, of the Employment Training Coordination Council, and of the Committee responsible for occupational retraining programmes, and has as its role to disseminate information among different agencies and to support the development, maintenance and diffusion of careers information. The WOICC is very eager to encourage direct access for users to information.

The Governor oversees a certain number of Departments, including the Wisconsin Department of Industry, Labour and Human Relations. This Department manages a series of Divisions, including the Jobs, Employment and Training Services Division, which co-ordinates the activities of six Bureaux, including the Division of Workforce Policy and Information, the Bureau of Job Service, the Bureau of Workforce Development, the Bureau of Apprenticeship, etc. Of these, the Bureau of Workforce Policy and Information is charged with collecting and having collected - for example by the Bureau of Job Service - and with processing and analysing all information required for the production of statistical projections. The BWPI comprises three sections: the LMI/Data Collection Section which collects and processes employment data in cooperation with BLS, the Local Workforce Planning Section, which offers technical assistance and staff training, and the Workforce Information and Coordination Section which analyses data and disseminates information.

Implementation

State employment services in the United States seem to play a more prominent part in the collection of labour market information than in many other countries, where it is usual for a national, central statistical agency to collect data while the employment services use them and disseminate them. In the USA the BLS negotiates contracts with each state's employment service for data collection relating to five major programmes. For example, in a state of 5 million inhabitants the employment service will distribute, collect and analyse some 150,000 questionnaires per year. No other state government agency has access to such a quantity of information on labour markets or on economic activity as a whole.

The responsibilities of the state agencies are standardized as far as data collection is concerned, but states' activities differ in the analysis and distribution of information, depending on policies, priorities, differing procedures, and variations in the funds allocated by the LMIS.

The federal Bureau of Labour Statistics develops its projections in six stages, each of which has its own models, procedures and hypotheses:

the size and demographic structure of the labour force;
the growth of aggregate economic indicators;
final demand, or GNP divided into consumer and producer goods sectors;
production;
industrial transactions (input-output);
industrial production and employment;
employment by occupational sector.

The occupational labour force models in industry are complemented by information collected by the State Employment Security Agencies, of which state job placement agencies form a part - information which concerns 250 industries and 500 occupations.

All projections are subjected to a final review prior to publication by internal and external experts with different specialisms, who conduct a cross-tabulated analysis.

For their part, the State Employment Agencies generally produce two broad types of statistic:

industrial employment;
employment by occupation.

Occupational employment studies (OES) give the level of employment by branch of activity for the secondary and tertiary sectors. In the state of Wisconsin, since the self-employed sample is too small, it is replaced by extrapolations from the BLS's national figures. Thus data are obtained either by the Wisconsin Bureau of Workforce Policy and Information (BWPI) or through methods and statistical models from the BLS.

Employment projections are nonetheless insufficient, especially as regards training needs. While they do provide projections of needs for new and better trained labour for new jobs, they do not take account of changes in the content of existing jobs, arising above all from new technologies and new methods of quality improvement. It is left to company managers, training programmes and the government to keep a watch over these developments so that training programmes can remain in tune with their needs.

The reliability of projections is evaluated once a target year has been reached, and the results are published. All the projections and evaluations are available on the BLS web-site under the title Employment Projections (http://www.stats.bls.gov).

The LMIS offers numerous products, including occupational employment projections:

for employers:
- wage rates;
- additional benefits expected,
- labour supply;
- national and local economic conditions;
- decisions on the choice of firm size;
- new products and services expected;
for job-seekers:
- types of job on offer;
- type of training required;
- type of training provided;
- wages on offer;
- costs of living in the location where jobs are on offer;
- growth or decline projection for individual occupations;
for government agencies:
- economic activity and the state of the economy;
- the unemployment rate;
- reasons underlying unemployment: industrial policy or international trade;
- additional labour force training needs;
- labour productivity;
for trainers:
- types of job available after schooling;
- location of these jobs;
- skills required by employers;
- wage rates on offer;
- jobs likely to be on offer in the future;
- training on offer;
for advisers:
- comparisons with wages offered across the region;
- availability of workers;
- skills possessed by available workers;
- types of training meeting the workers' needs.

Numerous channels of information are available to users, such as:

publications (containing employment projections);
access to local and national data banks, via:

advisors in local employment offices;
free open access electronic sites in Employment Offices;
free access on the Internet: at national level America's Career InfoNet (ACINET), and at local level the Wisconsin Career Information System /Career Visions (WCIS).

With the launch of America's Career Kit numerous changes were made in the content of the information service, as they were updated and integrated for inclusion in a direct access computerized system. For example the Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOT) has been reviewed, and will now be replaced by O*NET which will include information on new technologies, new skills and new forms of work organization, while the Standard Industrial Classification System, (SIC) will be replaced by the North America Industry Classification System (MAICS). The implementation of these two changes will require substantial training programmes for LMIS staff.

The BLS's Office of Employment Projections employs 47 staff, of whom three hold editorial positions in the OEP's review Occupational Outlook Quarterly, two hold administrative positions and the remaining 42 are all economists, including 12 who hold management positions. At the state level, for example in the BWPI, several staff use a specially developed programme to apply the projections forecasting methodology. In both cases, staff use data generated by other organizational units.

In most states, occupational and industrial projections undertaken by the corresponding department has been funded for the most part by the Wagner-Peyser programme or other revenues, which fund the basic state employment programmes. The passage of the 1998 Workforce Investment Act highlighted the role of labour market information in the workforce development system and new processes are underway at both the federal and state levels to better integrate labour market information into the broader workforce development system.