by Dwayne Yancey for the Cardinal News

Virginia often finds itself being compared with North Carolina. 

Tax rates and tourism can be debated, but here’s something less open to interpretation: A greater percentage of North Carolina workers are prepared for the jobs available in the Tar Heel State than their counterparts in Virginia are.

That’s one of the key findings in a Georgetown University report earlier this year that looked at the problem of “misalignment” — workers whose skills don’t match up with the demands of the workplace. This report has been circulating around financial circles since then; I discovered it when it was shared by both a banker in Wise County and the Federal Reserve Bank in Richmond. However, the issues it addresses are ones that Virginia workers and employers (and schools and policymakers) deal with every day, so I think the report deserves a wider audience.

The study focuses on the so-called “middle-skill” jobs: jobs that require more than a high school diploma but less than a four-year college degree. In other words, jobs where the ideal candidate has either an associate degree or a credential from a community college, or perhaps some other sort of institution.

Georgetown found that a lot of workers have degrees/credentials, just not in the fields where the jobs are. “In 283 of the 565 U.S. labor markets that we examined, at least 50 percent of all middle-skills credentials would need to be conferred in different fields in order for the occupational distribution of credentials to match projected labor demand,” the report said.

Georgetown also produced an interactive map that shows how much misalignment there is between the skills the workforce has and the skills the economy wants. The darker the blue, the greater the misalignment. (The black indicates no data available.)

You can see at a glance that most of Virginia falls into that darker blue, while very little of North Carolina does.

The data is organized by laborsheds — technically, commuting zones — so we can’t look up specific counties, but we can get close enough. In some parts of Virginia, the misalignment is rated at north of 70%. That means 70% of the credentials in those areas would need to be awarded in different types of programs to match up with the types of jobs available. 

We see this 70%-plus figure in parts of Southside (Halifax, Charlotte, Lunenburg, Nottoway and Brunswick counties) and Southwest Virginia (Dickenson, Wise and Lee counties), but we see it around Charlottesville and Harrisonburg as well, so this isn’t purely a rural phenomenon (although, nationally we do tend to see more misalignment in rural areas than urban ones). 

On the plus side, the most aligned parts of Virginia are the ones on our side of the Bristol-Kingsport MSA, although the misalignment there is still 45.5%. For those curious, in Hampton Roads, it’s 46.3%; in Roanoke, it’s 51.5%; in Richmond it’s 54.7%; in Northern Virginia, it’s 56.5%; in Lynchburg, it’s 60.8%.

By contrast, only two zones in North Carolina show up in the darkest blue and none approaches 70% (or more). The Hickory MSA comes in at 60.8% misalignment; two counties in the state’s western tip at 61.8%. Meanwhile, Charlotte comes in at just 39.7% misaligned, better than any place in Virginia. 

Let’s drill down into just what these statistics mean. In areas with high levels of misalignment, a laborshed’s middle-skills education and training providers may be producing credentials that don’t directly match the needs of the labor market. For example, in the Lynchburg and Martinsville areas, Georgetown found that the percentage of middle-skills job openings in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) is smaller than the percentage of middle-skills credentials awarded in STEM. Meanwhile, the percentage of middle-skills job openings in the health sector is larger than the percentage of middle-skills credentials aligned with those jobs. In the Roanoke Valley and the westernmost counties in Southwest Virginia, the share of credentials awarded in the education sector is higher, and the share awarded in the “sales and office” sector is lower, than the share of available jobs in those respective occupations.

One thing that’s consistent in every commuting zone in Virginia is that the share of credentials aligned with blue-collar jobs is lower than the share of middle-skill jobs that are in blue-collar occupations. That’s suggestive of something we’ve heard a lot in recent years: that there aren’t nearly enough people going into the trades. If you’ve ever needed a plumber, you know this to be true.

The Georgetown report doesn’t examine why we see certain regional disparities — other than to point out that people in urban areas have more opportunities to find jobs aligned with their skills — so ultimately we can’t explain why there’s such a difference between Virginia and North Carolina. I have to wonder if it’s because of the different origins of each state’s community college system — Virginia’s sprang up on the academic side as two-year branches of four-year schools, while North Carolina’s began as technical-oriented trade schools. 

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The preceding article originally appeared on December 2, 2024 at the Cardinal News website and is made available here for educational purposes only. This constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in Title 17 U.S.C. section 106A-117 of the U.S. Copyright Law.