In each local labor market, we interviewed providers of postsecondary education and training; employers; and a few general respondents, like staff members of private industry councils, city economic development agencies, and employer associations.
The providers of education and training included all local community colleges and technical institutes plus any other institutions mentioned by employers. For example, in Frankton, an area vocational school north of the city was included; in Cotooli, the vocational high schools were included because many employers have co-op programs with them; and in Palmdale, a well-known community-based organization was mentioned by several employers and therefore included in interviews. Otherwise, however, we limited our examination to postsecondary institutions and did not interview proprietary schools because they were so infrequently used by employers.
The interview protocol used for education providers specifies questions for deans, directors of placement, and other central administrators and somewhat different questions for department heads (e.g., the heads of the business and the computer science departments) who were presumed to be more knowledgeable about the education and the labor market for the six occupations we examined. We also interviewed faculty where department heads referred us to particularly knowledgeable individuals.
We chose employers to interview in several ways. We generally began with lists of local employers from the Chamber of Commerce and local offices of economic development and firms mentioned by the educators we interviewed--particularly those represented on advisory committees, those with cooperative agreements with educational institutions, and those mentioned as particularly important sources of hiring for the institution. We then selected firms likely to include significant numbers of the six occupations we examined--for example, accounting and insurance firms for accounting and manufacturers for machinists and electronics technicians. Within these firms, we concentrated our questions on the six occupations we selected for study, as the employer protocol clarifies. We tried to interview the individual in charge of hiring in these occupations; when this individual was not the supervisor, we attempted to interview the supervisor as well in order to get more precise information about skills required on the job and the performance of individuals with various backgrounds.
In Frankton, Rosefield, and Palmdale, all interviews took place in person, save for a few that took place over the telephone where it became too difficult to schedule personal interviews. In Cotooli, located too far from Berkeley for frequent trips, interviews with education providers were conducted by telephone. For employers, we initially held a focus group with eleven employers and subsequently conducted employer interviews in person during a concentrated week.
Our interviews were not always comprehensive--for example, in some educational institutions we were unable to interview each of the six department heads--and the employers interviews did not contact a random sample of employers because of our need to examine firms with concentrations of employees in our six occupational areas. Nonetheless, the numbers of interviews were substantial enough and corroborated one another sufficiently; therefore, we do not think that the nonrandomness of our interviews affected the result. There is one potential exception: We were unable to interview in many small firms because they are difficult to identify and hire too few individuals in any one area to provide much information about their hiring policies. Therefore, it is possible that our description of middle-skilled labor markets fails to distinguish the special characteristics of small firms.The following table presents the numbers of interviews we conducted in each of the four labor markets:
| Table 1 Numbers of Interviews Conducted | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Frankton | Palmdale | Rosefield | Cotooli | Total | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Education providers: Institutions Institutions | 6 20 | 4 15 | 5 27 | 4 14 | 19 75 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Education: Firms Individuals | 31 46 | 20 28 | 27 36 | 35* 43* | 113 153 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| General respondents | 4 | 3 | 2 | 2 | 11 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Virtually all interviews were tape-recorded and transcribed; therefore, the quotes we have included in the text are direct quotes and not reconstructions. A very few interviews over the telephone could not be transcribed; these were, therefore, reconstructed from notes.