The Training and Education Planning System (TEPS) is a tool designed to aid the analysis and discussion of the demand and supply of talent in Connecticut’s workforce. It is intended to help identify where there may be skill shortages or surpluses in the labor market, and thereby guide investments in education and training programs by program planners and administrators, as well as by individuals considering career options.
The TEPS is intended primarily for educational administrators and workforce development training providers who are considering whether or not to develop a new program, expand or contract an existing one, or drop an existing program entirely, by showing where there may be a need for trained workers. It can also be used by employment counselors and career counselors in schools for identifying and recommending enrollment in programs that may offer greater opportunities for employment. A better understanding of workforce supply and demand can also be helpful to employers and human resource managers as they assess the education levels of their potential applicant pools. State planners and policy makers can use this data to better integrate workforce development and economic development initiatives by identifying the types of training available and coordinating this training with future economic development goals.
Analysis of supply and demand information is as much of an art as it is a science. Many factors must be considered beyond the numbers of graduates and annual job openings that the TEPS makes available. The TEPS includes data from many sources, including the Department of Labor, Department of Higher Education, and State Department of Education. While these may be the best data available, the TEPS only displays data for a particular period of time and cannot account for all the factors that may influence labor supply and demand in an occupational field. The TEPS data are a starting point, and users will need to use their own knowledge and experience, as well as input from advisory groups and other knowledgeable individuals, to supplement the data available in this system. To help inform this process, users are encouraged to refer to the Comments & Cautions for things to consider when assessing supply in a particular area.
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The information in TEPS can be accessed from several starting points: occupations, programs, supply-demand clusters or keyword searches. Whichever option you choose to start from, you will end up with the related supply-demand cluster report. Each report displays the occupation(s) and program(s) assigned to that cluster with the associated demand and supply data.
The information in TEPS is organized by supply-demand cluster, groups of occupations and the programs that train for those occupations. A cluster can be as simple as one occupation matched with one program, or as complex as many occupations matched with many programs. There can also be clusters that contain only occupations or only programs.
The supply data includes only graduates of formal training programs from public and private higher education institutions, private occupational schools and technical high schools. There are other sources of training for many occupations, such as non-credit education programs, apprenticeships and on-the-job training, for which we do not have good information on the numbers of training completers.
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