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Supporting data-informed partnerships that help employers find the talent they need for success.
WIN’s mission is to cultivate a comprehensive and cohesive talent system to ensure employers find the workers they need for success.
WIN specializes in high-level research and data analytics on the labor market and talent system, managing workforce innovation initiatives, and fostering collaboration among talent partners such as workforce development, community colleges, four-year postsecondary institutions, K-12 schools, economic development organizations, government, community-based organizations, employers, and others.
WIN’s primary goals are centered around effectively utilizing data, using employer-driven strategies, and advocating for changes in policy.
For every dollar that WIN has earned for its operations through grant-writing and direct support, WIN has directly contributed $33 to the community and partners. For every dollar WIN has received from its board members, including community colleges and Michigan Works! Agencies, there has been a $58 return on investment.
Since it was founded, WIN has brought in over $132 million in funding to southeast Michigan through grants awarded to various organizations in the region. To support this investment, WIN has written, supported, helped design conceptually, and informed proposals with data and other research. WIN also has made possible and contributed to sponsored research projects that have informed regional partners’ work, another important form of investment.
WIN has led direct grant writing support in the region, which has yielded over $19 million with another $9 million in leveraged funds.
Advance Michigan is a consortium of partners from a 13-county region, anchored by Detroit, Flint, Lansing, Pontiac, and Ann Arbor, that, in 2014, applied for and received the Investing in Manufacturing Communities Partnership (IMCP) designation from the White House. Only 24 national communities have earned this designation.
WIN was the central convener and facilitator of the planning effort to achieve the southeast Michigan region’s IMCP designation. The effort included:
More than $39 million was invested in southeast Michigan under the IMCP designation in two years.
In just three years, the IMCP designation has helped bring close to $35 million into the southeast Michigan region, with a high concentration on investment in Wayne County and the City of Detroit.
The designation has also been leveraged by partners to bring in another $2.4 million in additional funding, bringing the total direct and leveraged funding associated with Advance Michigan to $41.78 million.
Funding has helped support infrastructure, brownfield redevelopment, education and training, business assistance, economic diversification, and many other efforts.
From 2012-2014, southeast Michigan’s regional economy lost over 38% of its defense contracts. As a result, and as part of the Advance Michigan IMCP designation, the region was awarded funding for economic and workforce diversification. The grant included:
Autonomous transportation and connected mobility (particularly the electronics, sensors, and componentry sector)
Lightweight materials manufacturing sector
Information Technology with a focus on increasing security of automated transportation systems and products
The Advance Michigan Center for Apprenticeship Innovation (AMCAI) is a grant awarded in 2015 to IMCP and other partners through the U.S. Department of Labor’s (DoL) American Apprenticeship Initiative.
With a special focus on intelligent transportation systems, the effort tasks local partners with expanding registered apprenticeship through various types of innovation, including process improvement, apprenticeship design, and new occupations of focus.
In the last 10 years, demand for robotics and automation workers has climbed nearly 40% and is expected to accelerate as more companies adopt production-enhancing technologies. With an anticipated retiring manufacturing workforce and an insufficient number of students pursuing careers in this field, WIN anticipates that there is a mismatch of 3:1 between employer demand and new graduates completing programs in robotics and automation.
Because of this need, WIN was awarded a grant to help underemployed and unemployed workers gain skills and jobs in robotics and automation in southeast Michigan through a U.S. Department of Labor America’s Promise grant.
Michigan is facing many critical skills gaps in high-demand, well-paying fields in areas like advanced manufacturing, information technology, and health care. Yet, the most popular career of interest among Michigan middle- and high-school students is professional athlete. The lack of awareness and interest in Michigan’s most critical occupations threatens future jobs and economic success.
MI Bright Future is a dedicated group of K-12 education, higher education, government, nonprofit, and workforce development partners who are working to connect students to future jobs offered by Michigan employers.Through a virtual platform, students can explore their personal career interests, gain information about specific careers, ask questions and get answers from local employers, then participate in work-based learning activities in career pathways that interest them. This helps students see, touch, and feel jobs in their community and give them a realistic understanding of the talent they should cultivate to gain meaningful employment in high-demand areas.
Local businesses are represented across 21 career clusters and pathways.
Companies choose from 20 different work-based learning opportunities to offer, or customize their own.
In the pilot year of the program, students requested 58 work-based learning activities at local companies.
The MI Bright Future partnership is currently in several intermediate school districts in southeast Michigan, including:
Michigan Governor Rick Snyder and the legislature have designated $1 million in funding to support and expand MI Bright Future as part of the state’s School Aid Fund and the renewed commitment of the Michigan legislature to provide career pathway development for K-12 students.
MI Bright Future is continuously expanding and reaching more counties across Michigan.
Michigan Governor Rick Snyder and the legislature have designated $1 million in funding to support and expand MI Bright Future as part of the state’s School Aid Fund and the renewed commitment of the Michigan legislature to provide career pathway development for K-12 students.
WIN is the lead labor market analyst for 2 National Network for Manufacturing Institutes (NNMIs), including light weight metals (LIFT) and flexible hybrid electronics (NextFlex), and has been the lead market analyst for composite metals (IACMI).
The Michigan Alliance for Greater Mobility Advancement (MAGMA) is a collaborative consortium that includes original equipment manufacturers, tier suppliers, educational institutions, and workforce organizations to address the automotive industry’s skills and training needs, particularly around connected and autonomous vehicles.
Through a proven partnership approach, MAGMA provides a neutral platform for industry to collectively assess their talent skill gaps across all vehicle systems, technologies, and processes. Those needs are then addressed through MAGMA-approved education & training programs, which have been vetted by an industry-led review process. Also, through its partnerships with many workforce and economic development agencies, MAGMA has access to a variety of industry trend reports and experts that further assist industry in staying ahead of what’s next.
Opportunity Detroit Tech was established to raise awareness of and shape community responses to the southeast Michigan information technology industry’s talent, customer and supply-chain, and other growth needs.
The goals of Opportunity Detroit Tech include:
In 2012, WIN became the first non-employer partner in Experience IT.
Experience IT is a game-changing partnership between tech companies, workforce agencies, and educational institutions that work together to teach, train, and prepare the next generation of IT professionals in Detroit.
From 2013 to 2016, WIN served as the Region 10 Career Liaison. As a part of the statewide initiative (known as Career Jump Start), the Career Liaison aimed to provide career-focused support to the region’s schools and communities. This included awareness of high-demand occupations, post-secondary education and training options, and regional recruitment efforts of the MAT2 Apprenticeship program.
As the Career Liaison, WIN annually reached 64,700 youth: 60,000 virtually and 4,700 in person. Over the course of this program, WIN engaged:
Since 2015, WIN has been a leader in the National Manufacturing Day efforts in Wayne county and throughout southeast Michigan. In Wayne county alone, WIN has helped to coordinate 40+ schools, 3,000 students, and 35 manufacturers, exposing middle and high school students to the viable career options in the manufacturing industry.
Data and research are the backbone of WIN’s partnership, policy, and process improvement efforts. WIN data helps inform local, state, and national partners’ decisions about education and training investments, program design, equipment purchases, talent pipeline management and workforce planning, career awareness and readiness efforts, career pathways, and much more. WIN is a national leader in analyzing and applying labor market data, including real-time data gathered from online job postings. WIN’s research and data capabilities include primary and secondary data gathering, analysis (including statistical and econometric analysis), application, and communication.
WIN’s labor market reports are directly distributed to nearly 3,000 WIN partners and have been accessed by approximately 5,800 unique users since 2013. These numbers are consistently gimpact-report-rowing, as WIN’s labor market reports reach more regional stakeholders with each distribution.
WIN’s labor shed report, also referred to as the commuter report, highlights the need to think regionally when it comes to talent. Why? The workforce is mobile. Although 91.6% of the region’s workforce live and work in the 16-county area, not all residents work in their home county, and commuting distances are longer than ever before.
In its CAV report, WIN found that information technology is the strongest occupational driver of connected and automated vehicles job demand and employment, and Michigan has great strengths in this field relative to other...
benchmarked national communities. Companies and talent partners must work together more collaboratively to identify and put forth industry standards for job skills and future training to develop the workforce to ensure Michigan’s leadership role in intelligent transportation systems.
With the outcomes of the CAV report in mind, WIN developed the Connected and Automated Vehicles Social Network Analysis (CAV SNA), a visual mathematical analysis showing how people and organizations in the region’s CAV...
ecosystem interact, exchange information, learn, and influence each other. The analysis was conducted using publicly available data sources to identify 351 “nodes” or organizations in the southeast Michigan connected and automated vehicles ecosystem resulting in over 1,399 “connections” or relationships between them.
WIN is conducting statistical analysis to understand the relationship between online job postings across different industries and hiring, whether new hires or hiring due to employee turnover. This research eventually could result in an early warning system to help partners understand when major job gains or losses will be occurring in the economy and within certain occupations and industries.
To better understand future workforce demands in the cybersecurity space, the Workforce Intelligence Network for Southeast Michigan (WIN) conducted research to analyze job postings for a broad set of occupations associated with aspects of cybersecurity, including the development of software, testing, hardening, connectivity, business related cyber roles, physical security implications, and general cybersecurity knowledge needs.
The Transportation Safety report – conducted by WIN and the Center for Advancing Transportation Leadership and Safety (ATLAS Center) – looked at Michigan workers employed in engineering and design, operations, and planning occupations related to transportation safety to understand workers involved in transportation safety or with relevant skills to the field.
WIN is able to measure the health of partnerships in the local community. Social Network Analysis (SNA) helps illustrate which organizations are working together most closely, how ideas are shared, and around which special topics and initiatives partnerships are strongest. SNA allows partners to make decisions about how to best engage different organizations...
,where and how to launch new initiatives, how to align assets and resources, and how to measure the success of existing partnerships. Research shows that communities with strong social networks have more agile and resilient economies.
Recently, WIN conducted SNA relating to connected and automated vehicles and found over 300 organizations working in partnership with one another and making over 1,200 connections to help move efforts forward.
WIN’s Eureka report surveyed over 200 southeast Michigan employers to understand how changing technologies will affect the region’s future talent needs. Employers were concerned with generational differences in how technologies would be taught and used, the safety and security of information, and understanding which technologies to adopt in a rapidly evolving tech environment.
WIN took a deep dive into exploring career pathway development, with retail and hospitality as a primary focus. WIN analyzed actual career paths that people in the industry have taken, looking at their current jobs and reviewing their historical employment. WIN found that most people who enter retail and hospitality jobs...
, which have long hours and relatively low pay, seldom leave the field for other opportunities and have trouble advancing. WIN made recommendations for education and training to advance retail and hospitality workers’ careers, along with a focus on career pathway development.
WIN was one of the first organizations to identify the fact that the student-to-counselor ratio in Michigan exceeds 700:1. WIN also found that youth employment has been decreasing while older worker employment has been increasing, essentially displacing younger workers. WIN also highlighted the major differences between employer demand for talent in key occupational clusters versus the number of people actually pursuing education and training in those areas (in IT the ratio of workers completing related education and training relative to employer demand is 20:1).
WIN has created short profiles on specific occupations that provide information about wages, employment projections, and recent job postings. These one-pagers are geared toward students and job seekers looking at prospective careers and educators interested in developing curricula for in-demand jobs.
Intellectual Capital Report:
This profile introduces meeting planners to the raw data of Detroit and its gimpact-report-rowing business, academic, creative and cultural sectors. It sorts through the clutter, illustrating the tangible benefits of Detroit as a meeting destination with worldwide appeal — one that should never be dismissed. Industry snapshots in this report include: creative and design, higher education, defense, IT, medical manufacturing, medical services, philanthropy and nonprofit, professional services, research and development, and professional sports.
Tourism and Hospitality Workforce Profile:
Increased travel to metro Detroit has created greater demand for workers in tourism and hospitality. This report highlights labor market statistics such as employment, wages and demographics for 123 occupations in 10 sectors related to tourism and hospitality. Whereas other reports study the economic impact of the tourism industry to a certain region, this report analyzes the valuable economic contributions of workers in tourism and hospitality in metro Detroit. The DMCVB commissioned this report from WIN to classify workers currently in related jobs, understand jobs and workers contributing to Detroit’s tourism and hospitality industry, and analyze the economic and fiscal contributions made by these workers in the region and state.
WIN is conducting statistical analysis to understand the relationship between online job postings across different industries and hiring, whether new hires or hiring due to employee turnover. This research eventually could result in an early warning system to help partners understand when major job gains or losses will be occurring in the economy and within certain occupations and industries.
WIN wants to help employers understand the return on investment (ROI) they experience when investing in training for staff, particularly apprenticeships. To do this, WIN gathers data from state and federal sources, as well as actual data from employers, to develop a model that demonstrates the financial benefit for companies training workers in Michigan across an array of industries and occupations. WIN bases its methodology on international best practices applied in Great Britain, Canada and elsewhere.
WIN is a trusted broker, convener, facilitator–community partners trust WIN to digest, understand, and address their needs.
WIN supports regional transformation strategies that integrate talent, economic development and entrepreneurship.
WIN helps convene partners in the design and implementation of innovative strategies that result in jobs and workers’ connection to them.
WIN facilitates institutional collaboration between private and public sector partners with a stake in regional talent and economic development.
WIN identifies opportunities for process improvement and aligns resources for fostering successful partnerships, particularly around talent development.
WIN shares intelligence about high-demand jobs among adults and youth as an advocate of career awareness and readiness, which is essential for post-secondary success.
WIN is a net donor organization to the region and represents a strong return on investment for southeast Michigan, including Detroit.
WIN needs community support to help bring innovative ideas to the table and draw down federal and other funds that support transformation efforts.
WIN is directly addressing the regional skills gap by raising awareness of and connecting people to work-based learning experiences and high-demand careers
WIN helps drive innovative, collaborative solutions that address the region’s top jobs challenges.
WIN has a strong focus on inclusivity, targeting solutions that engage traditionally underserved populations.
