Chris Chmura

Entrepreneurial Dominion

Workforce Wizardry

Chmura Economics & Analytics has developed a Virginia labor-market database with extraordinary powers. Subscribers can conjure sophisticated analysis with a few clicks of a mouse.

Down in Southwest Virginia not long ago, an unemployed worker filed with a local “one stop” employment center and applied for training as a truck driver. A local administrator turned him down on the grounds that there was little demand locally for truckers skills. But someone deep within the bowels of the Virginia workforce bureaucracy thought otherwise.

In the old days, there would have been no easy way to settle that dispute. But the Workforce Investment Board (WIB) of far Southwest Virginia had access to JobsEQ, a labor-market database, which allowed its analysts to drill deeper into local workforce data than, literally, anyone else in the country.

“We looked at it and found out that there were 20 percent more unemployed truck drivers [in this region] than there were employed truck drivers,” recounts George Hunicutt Jr., vice chair of the WIB. “There was an oversupply. It didn’t make sense to train any more truck drivers.” Case closed.

JobsEQ promises to revolutionize a field where useful information has been hard to come by. There are gobs of workforce-related data but they reside in multiple silos, scattered across state and federal government agencies, that don’t connect with one another. Richmond-based Chmura Economics & Analytics has developed a way to pull the data together in a single user-friendly format and to generate queries that would have been unimaginable before.

President Christine Chmura sees two big markets for JobsEQ: workforce investment boards, which exist by congressional decree across the United States, and economic development organizations, which are equally ubiquitous. WIBs are charged with ensuring that local training programs are delivering the skills that local businesses require. Meanwhile, economic developers increasingly find themselves marketing their regions on the basis of the skills that local workers possess. JobsEQ equips them to conduct supply-and-demand analyses and what-if scenarios far more sophisticated than anything they’ve done before.

Although Chmura built the product in response to specs first articulated in Southwest Virginia, she plans to roll out the product statewide and, eventually, nationally. “We were attending a Washington workforce conference a few days ago,” says Chmura. “We talked to a lot of people. No one else has a product like this.”

Ed Barlow, a Michigan futurist working in economic and workforce development, describes JobsEQ as a “quantum leap” past anything else on the market. “I don’t know of anything comparable,” he says, that provides real-time information, allows thorough analysis and forecasting and provides for the cross-walking of several databases. “It’s an incredible strategic planning tool that ties economic and workforce development together in a way that’s never been tied together before.”

Building a proprietary product like JobsEQ represents a huge step for the boutique econometrics firm, which enjoys a comfortable niche specializing in the Virginia economy. Until now, the company had generated most of its revenue through consulting services and the packaging of economic data for republication. Now the company is expanding staff – adding a full-time database administrator and data-mining specialist -- and preparing to move into new quarters in downtown Richmond in anticipation of delivering a new range of workforce-related products and services.

Chris Chmura, a regular on the Virginia speaking circuit, has built a following around the Old Dominion as one of the few non-academic economists with in-depth knowledge of the state. For a long time, however, growth of her company was constrained by the fact that, as a hands-on consultant, speaker and idea generator, she had little time to spend on sales and administration.

Key to putting the company on a growth path was Chmura’s decision to bring on Leslie Peterson, a former chemist whom she’d met through church, as a partner and director of operations. Although Peterson had no formal economic training, she brought loads of managerial and research experience from the chemical industry, indefatigable energy and a passion for economic development. Handing operations to Peterson allowed Chmura to focus on what she does best: econometric modeling. “It was a stretch at the time, ”Chmura recalls, “but since Leslie’s come in, revenues have accelerated significantly.”

The idea for JobsEQ arose from ties that the two women had forged with local economic development and workforce groups. There are scores of consultants serving the profession nationally but surprisingly few of them are versed in econometrics. “We saw lots of people generating labor market reports using very high-altitude data,” says Peterson. “We knew there was so much more available.”

Also, Peterson observed, local workforce investment boards spent considerable resources conducting labor-market surveys – paper reports filled with data that got old as soon as it was published. The Chmura team got its chance to dig deeper into the data when Southwest Virginia’s WIB bought into the concept of building a Web-accessible database continually replenished with the latest labor-market data and offering the capability to slice and dice it many different ways.

With a contract in hand, Chmura embarked upon the building of JobsEQ in a project that took four programmers eight months to complete – not to mention a heavy time commitment by Chmura and Peterson to fine-tune the business logic underlying the databases. But the end result is a product with extraordinary capabilities that an economist like Chmura can play like a virtuoso.

For instance: Tapping into the database, you discover that the coal mining industry in Southwest Virginia declined from 7,500 jobs to 5,700 jobs between 1997 and 2002. Incorporating national economic trends, adjusted for the local sub-industry mix, JobsEQ can project the demand for coal mining jobs – 2,000 to 3,000 less than today – and supply of miners over the next 10 years. The database can break down the mining industry by occupational categories and identify the skills those unemployed coal miners are probably possess.

That kind of information allows educators, businesses and economic developers to get answers to critical questions, Chmura explains. What other industries require similar skill sets to those that coal miners possess? What kind of training would fill the skills gaps that other industries might find attractive? If a business of a certain size considered locating in Southwest Virginia, would the workforce possess a sufficiently large pool of engineers, mechanics, electricians, truckers, or some other occupations to meet its needs? Companies sometimes can find that information themselves by conducting an extensive and expensive workforce survey, but economic developers can deliver the information almost instantaneously.

Meanwhile, educators can use the tool to see if they’re delivering the right kind of training and educational programs. In the case of Southwest Virginia, Peterson says, it looks like the region is subsidizing its own brain drain – it’s educating young people with skills for which there is little demand locally. Frustrated by the lack of employment opportunities for which they’ve been trained, some of the best and brightest are leaving.

Chmura and Peterson have high hopes for growing the business, but they seems most delighted sitting behind a PC and playing with their creation. Their greatest pleasure comes from being able to deliver state-of-the-art economic development analysis and help rural communities like the Virginia coalfields preserve jobs and opportunities.

-- April 28, 2004

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