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The Importance of a Market Analysis

Oct 4, 2007

The importance of a good market analysis in your area cannot be over emphasized, and whether you’re a large corporation or a small firm, understanding your market will help identify many different factors that can have an impact on your business or clients.

As a recruiter or consultant, the employment market analysis will give you an overall projection of industries within a specific state, region, or ZIP code. There are many different companies offering detailed employment or industry data along with many different factors. I like to use www.economicmodeling.com, which has detailed data on occupations and industry location quotient, to name a few.

These reports are derived from information obtained through various state and federal agencies. I use this information in my workforce planning to clients and in business development.

Economy Overview. A good market analysis will have an economy overview, which is very helpful in understanding where your current market is and where it is going. My analysis focuses on five-year trends, which can tell me if a specific industry is growing or not. This can be important in identifying industries in your business development that you can capitalize on. It is also helpful in establishing parallels in which one industry may suffer but, because of the paralleled verticals, you can focus your candidates in another direction.

Shift Share Analysis. Shift share analysis, or regional competitiveness, isolates growth (projected to occur over the next 10 years) that can be attributed to regional causes rather than simply to national economic or industry trends. In my case, this is especially important in Hawaii due to our specific region. Local knowledge should be employed to discover why these industries in your market analysis are outperforming national trends and thus reveal the region’s competitive advantages. A very good report will give you these specific details in presentation-ready graphs, bars, tables, and maps.

Occupational Changes. My report usually shows the fastest changing occupations in my particular region and, as I previously mentioned in the article, this information will not only guide your business as a recruiter or consultant, but it will also be valuable in educating clients with respect to growth. The information in my report will give you a rough calculation of the change in five years. This may be very useful for a recruiter or consultant who is working in a new region or market and needs a snapshot usually arrived at with local knowledge.

Strategic Advantage. Providing your company or a client with a detailed report gives a strategic advantage with information and demographic analyses that can be used to analyze the regional economy and workforce. In my case, having a tool like the market analysis provides that advantage. Knowing the impact of businesses entering, leaving, growing, or shrinking in a region can be valuable not only to your success but that of your clients. I recommend taking a look at a sample of these reports so you can gauge how it will be helpful in your particular situation. The ability to understand current and future trends in a regional economy is more important than ever to both add value to your knowledge as a recruiter or consultant as well as to provide leverage in your area of business development.

A good market analysis is important, and I would recommend it to anyone looking to stay competitive in today’s market.

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