What's all this about LMI?

Every one seems to want to know more about LMI and to gather more LMI. Therefore, I'll cover some of the basic LMI issues in the next post.

There is, however, a good question to start with.

What does LMI stand for?

• Is it labour market intelligence?
• Is it labour market information?
• Does it matter?

I tend to think of LMI as being about intelligence.

There is a hierarchy of importance in this field

Data is the raw material of your investigation. The individual evaluation forms that you collect in at the end of a training programme contain data.

Information is created when you analyse that data

Your analyses are interesting, but you create intelligence when you use the information to help you to decide what to do next. You create intelligence when you do more than just analyse data.

You analyse the forms that you collected at the end of that training programme. In doing that you have created management information.

You then decide what actions your analysis suggests. It is that activity that leads to the creation of intelligence.

Thus, information has less value than intelligence. It’s an intermediate output.

Unfortunately there is a lot of labour market information around and not enough labour market intelligence.

Don’t be satisfied with Labour market information. Insist of being presented with labour market intelligence.