In this low-cost competitive environment, a region’s best chance to differentiate itself is with its brainpower: the education, knowledge, skills, and abilities of its workforce. From this perspective, every region has the potential to be competitive. Until recently, economic development practitioners paid scant attention to workforce issues, but this is changing. In addition to globalization, the retirement of the Baby Boom generation and the move of businesses toward more innovative, knowledge-based markets have combined to make the skills of the workforce central to economic development. Until now, economic development practitioners had few tools to evaluate the knowledge, skills, and abilities.
