Of all the numbers you come across in your ongoing site location search, perhaps none will be as important as these: 18 to 25.
What's so important about the numbers 18 to 25? Well, if you're talking about the 18-to-25 age group, you're talking about the future of your company. You see, 18-to-25 may be the most important piece of demographic information you ever come across because it enables you to see into the future.
When companies look at work force availability, they tend to look at the unemployment rate. They try to get a feel for the degree of underemployment in a region. They look at education levels of the population and they look at the quality of the local schools to ensure that future workers will be at least as bright -- if not brighter -- than the current crop of workers.
But one demographic indicator that site selectors are looking more closely at is the number of 18-to-25-year-olds in a community or region.
This figure tells employers what their labor pool will look like five to 10 years from now. If the number is large and is increasing, you can feel somewhat more confident that a community will be able to support your work force needs in the future.
| What that tells you as an employer is that the
overall size of the labor pool is getting smaller
and that, 10 years from now, that community
may have a hard time supplying your company
with enough skilled workers, middle managers
and supervisors to run your operation. |
A more telling indicator, however, occurs when this number is decreasing. What that tells you as an employer is that the overall size of the labor pool is getting smaller and that, 10 years from now, that community may have a hard time supplying your company with enough skilled workers, middle managers and supervisors to run your operation.
Of course, you also need to check those numbers against a couple of others that will enable you to predict the quality of this demographic group: the average college board scores (SAT and/or ACT) for the local school districts, as well as the graduation rates for the past five years. After all, it doesn't do you much good if you have a rapidly growing population that can't read or write. In fact, Expansion Management Magazine acquires this data from more than 1,300 school districts nationwide as part of our annual Education Quotient rankings, which will appear this fall in our upcoming Ratings '98 issue.
One of the goals for your current facility site search should be to find a location that can support the future growth and expansion of your company. After all, you don't necessarily want to be going through this same process five years from now if you can avoid it with a little bit of extra due diligence now.
So next time you ask a community to provide you with a laundry list of data, don't forget to ask them to include the 18-to-25 age demographics. It could save you a lot of time and money five to 10 years from now when your company undergoes its next business expansion.
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