Who uses LMI and what for?

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Learning objectives:

  • To explore who uses labour market information (LMI).
  • To consider why LMI is used by a wide range of people.

For effective career decision making, individuals need access to high quality, robust, up-to-date LMI.

  • Individuals making career decisions: LMI helps them to consider routes into, ways around and through the world of work. It can also help by raising aspirations, challenging stereotypes, increasing job knowledge and widening job knowledge. It is essential for making good career decisions, so that information about opportunities available now and in the future can be considered.

Additionally, it is used by a range of other people for different purposes:

  • Careers practitioners & teachers: LMI is essential for understanding the dynamic interplay between ‘supply’ and ‘demand’ in fast-changing local, regional, national and international labour markets. In this way, practitioners and teachers can support the development of career decision making skills in their clients/students by providing accurate and reliable LMI that enables them to weigh-up their potential options as their career progresses.
  • Policy makers, managers and planners: need LMI to develop strategies for the labour markets of the future, that may relate, for example, to the support that is required for unemployed people.
  • Course designers and/or curricula developers: use LMI to identify a range of issue, like what knowledge, and which skills, will be needed in the future. This includes where there is growth or decline in the number of job opportunities, the age profile of different parts of the labour market, the age profile of regional labour markets, the availability of ‘hard to fill’ vacancies, and competition for jobs in different areas and sectors, as well as the impact this has on wage and skill levels.
  • Researchers: use LMI in research, for example, to understand economic and social development at national, regional and local levels.

Reflection and further reading

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Think about how you have used LMI in the past, or might do in the future:

  • What  was your main purpose for using it?
  • What sort of  LMI did you nee d for your role?
  • Was it easy to find?

Download this more detailed handout on Who uses labour market information and for what purposes?

 

 

Quiz

Check your understanding of this unit with the short drag and drop quiz below

 

Go to the next unit: Sources of LMI