Topics Related to Lead Feed

In celebration of CTE Month, we’re exploring how North Carolina’s CTE concentrators (students who earned two or more technical credits in a Career Cluster Pathway) are doing in the workforce a decade after high school—and how those outcomes differ by career cluster. Using NC TOWER data from the Common Follow-up System, we tracked 32,000 graduates from the Class of 2014 and examined their employment rates and wage earnings in 2024.

When we think about economic booms, we picture prosperity: jobs everywhere, wages climbing, and opportunity knocking. But here’s the twist - those same booms might quietly discourage education. Why? Because when the job market is sizzling, the opportunity cost of staying in school skyrockets. Why sit in a classroom when you can earn a paycheck right now?

Last month, the Census Bureau released the 2023 Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) data. This blog highlights the counties with the highest share of worker inflows and resident outflows.

Graduating college is a milestone worth celebrating, but the economy might have its own plans for your career. The timing of your entry into the workforce can dramatically shape your early career trajectory, and as history shows, graduating during a recession can leave more than just a temporary dent in your wallet.

Lack of access to affordable, high-quality child care is a barrier to labor force participation for working parents in North Carolina and affects our state’s economy. In 2024, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation, the NC Chamber Foundation, and NC Child released Untapped Potential in NC, a statewide study that estimated that child care-related work disruptions cost North Carolina’s economy $5.65 billion annually, driven by $4.29 billion in employer costs and $1.36 billion in lost tax revenues.

Nursing graduates enter the workforce with specialized, job-ready skills that are in high demand, positioning them for early career success. Drawing on the latest NC TOWER data, we take a closer look at what happens after graduation for nursing students – where they land their first jobs, average starting salaries, and how their career paths begin to take shape in the years that follow.

Our previous LEAD Feed analysis raised a puzzling question: why has North Carolina's manufacturing output stagnated while the nation's has grown by roughly 30% since 2004? We showed that NC's Nondurable Goods Manufacturing declined 17% over this period even as the national Nondurable Goods output rose 10%. Durable Goods Manufacturing told a similar story: NC's early gains have eroded, and the state is no longer outpacing national growth.

In this edition of NC Economy Watch, we examine labor market data released during and after the federal government shutdown. Despite a partial data blackout, these indicators demonstrate that North Carolina’s labor market has continued to progress along the same path it has in recent years. Although layoffs remain relatively uncommon, a slowdown in hiring has made it increasingly difficult to find a new job. As we enter 2026, we find ourselves staring down the fifth year of a prolonged labor market slowdown.

Lost in the news and hype of Artificial Intelligence’s impact on office work is the current and potential effects AI and machine learning are having on manufacturers and production work. But before ChatGPT and the wave of generative AI, cutting edge manufacturers were beginning to utilize artificial intelligence and machine learning to dramatically reshape factories and work.

This blog dives deeper into gross domestic product (GDP) data for manufacturing, showing trends among durables and nondurable manufacturing industries.