Giving Compass' Take:

• Technology is changing the future workforce but simultaneously helping us navigate these changes. There are services that provide individuals more job boards and targeted searches to help people who will experience massive shifts in employment and economic development. 

• Will our dependence on growth and advancement in tech become harmful? 

• Read about how employers are thinking about building the STEM workforce that is necessarily the future. 

Technological innovation is remodeling the workforce, transforming the jobs people do as well as how, where and when they do them. While these changes free up workers to focus on more challenging problems and complex decisions, they also are eliminating many of the jobs on which 20th-century middle-class growth was built.

An increasing share of the remaining jobs are contract-based, untethered from a specific location, and lacking the benefits that protected workers in previous generations.

City halls and regional economic development organizations have an important role to play in developing jobs and helping workers navigate the uncertainty of the current labor market. However, many of the workforce development tools that have been available to them originated from a social service point of view -- how to help unemployed or underemployed individuals.

Today's dynamic economy puts a premium on work support services that help prepare people for trades that will endure as occupations shift.

Online job marketplaces and data collected by social media companies like LinkedIn can help a city understand the local supply and demand of labor to an unprecedented degree. With more precise analysis, cities can better monitor that data and identify specific opportunities to improve employment.

The workforce insights from current data that these emerging tools provide allow communities to much more accurately design support services and interventions that will help smooth the disruptions, increase opportunities for their residents and assist workers displaced by today's accelerating workforce transformations.

Read the full article about using data to help with economic shifts in the workforce by Stephen Goldsmith at Governing Magazine