The Workforce Plan for Hamilton County
Hamilton County has one of the strongest labor markets in America. Unemployment sits at 2.2 percent. Median household income is $127,452. We rank fourth among all 292 large U.S. counties on quality of life. And none of that is the whole story. This page is the whole story: what is working, what is not, the eight gaps we have to close between now and 2030, and the exact numbers we will use to hold ourselves accountable. No jargon. Every number sourced. Every report downloadable.
Start where you stand
Different people come to a workforce plan with different questions. Here is what this page answers for you, and what to bring to us when you are ready to act.
Is my city gaining or losing ground? Are the county's goals actually on track? Which barriers are holding my constituents back, and which levers sit in my budget?
Your city's numbers under Our Communities. Every county goal with an honest on-track, ahead, or behind label under Goals. The barriers that show up in constituent casework, childcare, housing, transportation, quantified under the Gaps.
Our Communities · Goals · The Gaps
Ask for your city's quarterly briefing. Every KPI on this page disaggregates by city.
Can I find the people I need here? Why does hiring feel harder every year? Is it pay, pipeline, or something structural? Who do I actually call?
Find your business among the nine employer types under Stories; each one names the real mechanism behind your shortage and the lever that moves it. Time-to-fill and turnover live under What We Track.
Employer Stories · What We Track · The Skills Gap
A business retention visit is free. Bring your hardest-to-fill role and we will bring the data on it.
Where is the biggest quantified need? What would a dollar actually move? Will anyone measure what happened after the grant?
Each of the eight gaps carries its baseline number and the single indicator we watch, so an investment thesis and its yardstick come pre-built. The equity lens under What We Track says exactly how outcomes get disaggregated.
The Gaps · What We Track · Research Library
Pick a gap. The baseline, the indicator, and the reporting cadence already exist; co-design the intervention with us.
Is there enrollable demand here? Which programs would fill? Is there a partner infrastructure, or would we be building alone?
The inverted skills gap is your market signal: demand for sub-baccalaureate credentials outruns supply 1.43 to 1, and Talent InSight 2030 documented thousands of high-wage pathway postings with zero local providers. Nursing shows the shape: one hospital posted 746 openings in a year against 376 local seats. IU already runs a management-development partnership here; the model works.
The Inverted Skills Gap · Occupation Stories · Research Library
Name a program you could deliver. We will run the demand analysis against real county postings, wages, and pipeline before you commit a dollar.
Which barriers actually block work for the people we serve? Where does our mission plug into the county's plan? Will data be shared responsibly?
The gaps on childcare, housing, behavioral health, and opportunity-population inclusion are your service map, each with the population size behind it. The resident stories show the eight situations we designed around. Our data ethics are simple: aggregate-only, person-first, never a judgment score on a human being.
The Gaps · Resident Stories · The Equity Lens
Your program data plus our baseline data equals a fundable, measurable proposal. We build those with partners for free.
Which careers should our students actually see? What does the local labor market reward five years after graduation? How do we build work-based learning without becoming a staffing agency?
The occupation stories show where demand, wages, and succession openings really sit, including the retirement wave arriving in the trades, schools, and healthcare just as your students graduate. The Hamilton Pathways Lab is the county's shared work-based-learning research effort with all six school corporations.
Occupation Stories · The Succession Clock · Research Library
The Pathways Lab is free and district-governed. Bring your CTE course list; we crosswalk it to live county demand.
Is this community pilot-ready? Is the evidence discipline real or decorative? Could what works here replicate somewhere else?
Every claim in this plan was tested before it earned a place: eight challenges, each with a published verdict, including one confirmed in the opposite direction we expected. Baselines are pre-set, the KPI board already tracks them, and five years of published research sits in the library below. The data infrastructure behind this page runs on public federal sources any county has, which is what makes a pilot here replicable anywhere.
The Evidence · The Measurement System · Research Library
Pick the gap that matches your thesis. You get a named baseline, a tracked indicator, and a community that publishes its misses as plainly as its wins.
Where we stand
Start with the honest baseline. These are the numbers that describe our county today, from federal sources anyone can check.
Here is the part most people miss: at 2.2 percent unemployment, there is no reserve of idle workers to hire. Labor supply is the binding constraint on everything this county wants to do next. So this plan is not about finding more people. It is about removing the barriers that keep our own people from working, growing, and staying.
“When people ask me what makes Hamilton County different, I usually start with a story. Lately I start with a number. Four. That is where we rank among all 292 large counties in America on quality of life. But a ranking is not a plan. A plan says out loud what could take that strength away, and what we intend to do about it. That is what this is.”
Two findings that change the plan
Before the pillars and the programs, two research findings reset how this county has to think about its workforce.
The amplifier chain
Hamilton County's asymmetric risk is AI-driven compression of knowledge work, not factory automation. An exposure-tilted job base (27.2 percent vs 25.4 percent US on the same tier), plus the most degree-saturated resident workforce in Indiana (61.8 percent bachelor's or higher vs about 36 percent of US adults), plus 80,900 residents commuting to Marion County jobs in an economy the county does not govern. Each link amplifies the next. Direction confirmed; the margin is method-sensitive and disclosed.
The inverted skills gap
There is no degree gap. 54.6 percent of stated posting demand is sub-baccalaureate against a 38.2 percent sub-baccalaureate adult population, a demand-to-supply ratio of 1.43 that deepens every year. The most-posted qualifications are licenses and certifications, not degrees. Employers who require degrees enjoy a deep bench; employers who need certified technicians, nurses, and drivers compete for a shrinking relative pool.
The five pillars
Everything Invest Hamilton County does hangs on five pillars. Every gap in this plan maps to at least one of them.
Full Employment & Public Safety
Everyone who can work, works. That includes neighbors returning from incarceration and neighbors in recovery, because employment is the single strongest predictor of staying out of the justice system.
One number that says why: Residents who are employed after release return to incarceration at 16 percent. Unemployed, it is 52 percent.
Community-Essential Workforce
The people who make a community run: childcare workers, teachers' aides, nurses' aides, hospitality and retail staff. If they cannot afford to work here or live here, everything else gets harder.
One number that says why: Four of our nine employer types fail on the same $28,000 to $36,000 wage floor, competing for the same workers.
Career Mobility & Discovery Systems
Every resident should be able to see their next step: the next rung, what it pays, and who will hire them when they get there. From middle school to mid-career.
One number that says why: Only 20.2 percent of county jobs today clear the bar of high wage, growing, and hiring. The goal is 60 percent alignment by August 2027.
Workplace Excellence
Keeping good people is cheaper than replacing them. We help employers build workplaces people do not want to leave, starting with the first-time manager.
One number that says why: Quarterly turnover runs 9.8 percent. Manager quality is the top controllable driver employers name.
Data Hub & Organizational Development
You cannot fix what you do not measure. Alex, our data hub, turns more than 11,000 curated data files into answers anyone can use. This page is one of them.
One number that says why: Every number on this page traces to a named public source and a named vintage.
Our communities
One county, four cities, three towns, and two rural data bands so small numbers still count. Population estimates are Census Vintage 2025.
Carmel 105,634 residents
- Growth since 2020
- 5.9%
Corporate headquarters and professional services. The county's largest concentration of office and finance work, which also makes it the front line of the AI exposure question.
What we watch here: AI compression of office roles; keeping headquarters talent as work models shift.
Fishers 104,812 residents
- Growth since 2020
- 5.8%
The entrepreneurial anchor. Launch Fishers, a growing life-sciences cluster, and a young, fast-moving employer base.
What we watch here: Scaling the specialized technician pipeline that life sciences will need.
Noblesville 76,111 residents
- Growth since 2020
- 8.9%
The county seat and the first city with its own cut of this plan. Home to Riverview Health, the logistics corridor, and the county's workforce hub: WorkOne, Ivy Tech, and the Excel Center at 300 N. 17th Street.
What we watch here: Healthcare pipeline depth and warehouse-agency churn.
Westfield 66,258 residents
- Growth since 2020
- 42.7%
The fastest-growing city in Indiana for much of this decade. Grand Park makes hospitality and events a signature industry, with Life Ready youth programs building the pipeline.
What we watch here: A hospitality wage floor that competes with every other service employer in the county.
Sheridan 5,746 residents
- Growth since 2020
- 10.2%
The county's rural north: agriculture, trades, and a proud small-town school system.
What we watch here: Access. County programs have to reach here, not just exist.
Cicero 5,581 residents
- Growth since 2020
- 5.2%
Lakeside small town anchored by Morse Reservoir, with trades and manufacturing ties to the corridor.
What we watch here: Same as the rural north generally: transportation to jobs and training.
Atlanta 731 residents
- Growth since 2020
- 2.8%
The county's smallest town, and part of its agricultural backbone.
What we watch here: Tracked in our rural-north data band so small numbers still count.
County-wide goals
A plan without numbers is a wish. These are the county's stated goals, where we actually stand against each one, and we say so plainly when we are behind.
Aligned-jobs share
Of the roughly 191,500 jobs in our county's job universe, only 1 in 5 today pays at least $70,000, is growing, and is actually hiring. The county goal is to make that 6 in 10 by August 2027. That is the single most ambitious number in this plan, and we publish our distance from it every quarter.
- Now:
- 20.2%
- Target:
- 60.0% by Aug 2027
- Detail:
- 38,764 of 191,500 county jobs today; gap of 76,136 workers
Population growth to 2030
The county planned for roughly 420,000 residents by 2030. We are at 387,036 and growing on schedule.
- Now:
- 387,036 (2025)
- Target:
- ~420,000 by 2030
Job growth
The 2030 forecast called for about 7,000 new jobs a year. We are adding closer to 3,200. Strong, but behind the forecast, and worth saying plainly.
- Now:
- 184,030 jobs (2024 actual)
- Target:
- 194,677 forecast for 2024
Labor force participation
More of our adults are working or looking for work than the plan assumed. We rank 15th of 292 large counties.
- Now:
- 72.1%
- Target:
- 71.5% forecast
The commuter gap
The plan projected commuting in and commuting out would roughly balance by 2030. The gap is narrowing slower than forecast: 13,933 more workers leave than arrive each day.
- Now:
- 13,933 net outbound (2024)
- Target:
- ~net zero by 2030
How we compare across America
We do not grade ourselves against the average. We grade ourselves against the best suburban counties in America: the Nashville, Washington, Denver, Dallas, Atlanta, Kansas City, Philadelphia, and Austin suburbs that compete for the same employers and the same families. Four of them rank ahead of us. Eight are chasing us. Here is the honest scoreboard.
| County | Peer type | Population | Quality of life rank | Median household income | Workforce score | Growth score |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hamilton, Indiana (us) | home | 379,704 | #4 | $117,957 | 82.5 | 89.1 |
| Williamson, Tennessee | aspirational | 269,136 | #1 | $131,202 | 93.0 | 89.8 |
| Loudoun, Virginia | aspirational | 443,380 | #2 | $178,707 | 91.6 | 83.9 |
| Douglas, Colorado | aspirational | 393,995 | #3 | $145,737 | 86.5 | 83.2 |
| Collin, Texas | aspirational | 1,254,658 | #5 | $117,588 | 74.9 | 97.9 |
| Forsyth, Georgia | similar | 280,096 | #7 | $138,000 | 76.1 | 88.6 |
| Johnson, Kansas | similar | 632,276 | #9 | $107,261 | 87.2 | 59.9 |
| Chester, Pennsylvania | similar | 560,745 | #11 | $123,041 | 90.9 | 43.1 |
| Williamson, Texas | similar | 727,480 | #12 | $108,309 | 71.6 | 98.9 |
| Washington, Minnesota | similar | 283,960 | #14 | $114,457 | 69.5 | 78.8 |
| Dakota, Minnesota | regional | 453,156 | #40 | $105,212 | 80.6 | 31.8 |
| DuPage, Illinois | regional | 937,142 | #45 | $110,502 | 73.2 | 34.3 |
| Waukesha, Wisconsin | regional | 417,029 | #44 | $104,100 | 78.5 | 35.2 |
292 U.S. counties with 250,000+ residents, scored across 10 domains. Peer set curated for comparability; every metric from the same national index so no county gets a thumb on the scale.
The eight gaps between now and 2030
Each of these was tested against the data before it earned a place here. Some were confirmed. One was confirmed in the opposite direction everyone assumed. For each: what it is in plain language, why you should care, which pillars answer it, and the one number we watch.
AI and automation exposure of knowledge work (Direction confirmed)
More of our jobs sit in the office, finance, tech, legal, and media work that AI reaches first: 27.2 percent here versus 25.4 percent nationally.
This is not a factory-automation story. It is a knowledge-work story, and we are more exposed than the average county precisely because our economy is more white-collar. The earliest edge is already visible: customer service representative jobs are down 6.1 percent since 2019.
Skills gap and reskilling capacity (Confirmed, inverted)
There is no degree shortage here. The gap runs the other way: 54.6 percent of local job postings that state a requirement ask for less than a bachelor's degree, but only 38.2 percent of our adults fit that profile.
We built the most degree-saturated workforce in Indiana and a job base that increasingly needs technicians, tradespeople, and licensed middle-skill workers. Demand outruns supply 1.43 to 1, and the ratio deepens every year.
Childcare access as a labor-force constraint (Confirmed)
For every 100 young children whose parents all work, we have 80 licensed childcare slots.
Roughly 18,300 children under six need care and 14,702 licensed slots exist. Every missing slot is a parent who cannot take a job, a shift, or a promotion. Infant care runs about 12.5 percent of even our high median household income.
Housing affordability for the workforce (Confirmed)
The people who staff our schools, hospitals, restaurants, and stores are increasingly priced out of living here. Home prices are up 63.7 percent since 2019.
The median worker in every in-county service occupation we tested cannot buy the median Hamilton County home on a single income. Among moderate-income renters, 60.6 percent spend more than they can afford on rent.
Aging workforce, retirements, succession (Partially confirmed)
About one in five workers in Hamilton County jobs is already 55 or older, and roughly 45,000 residents aged 55 to 64 cross retirement age within the decade.
That is a succession clock, not a cliff. It means about 3,800 retirement-replacement hires a year, concentrated in the trades, education, healthcare, and government. The question is whether the pipeline behind them is deep enough.
Behavioral health and burnout as a workforce drag (Confirmed)
Nearly one in four adults here is experiencing depression, and behavioral health crisis events have more than tripled since 2017.
These are not numbers from a struggling community. These are numbers from ours. More than half of 2024's 21,432 crisis events involved working-age adults, which makes behavioral health a workforce issue, not just a health issue. We remain a federally designated mental health shortage area.
Talent retention vs commute-out dependence (Confirmed, two-way)
64.3 percent of our employed residents work outside the county, and 62.2 percent of the jobs inside our county are filled by people driving in.
We are a two-way talent economy whether we like it or not. Marion County alone employs more Hamilton County residents than Hamilton County does. Only 35.7 percent of our employed residents both live and work here. Raising that share is the cleanest measure of local opportunity.
Opportunity-population inclusion as labor supply (Confirmed)
At 2.2 percent unemployment, our largest untapped labor pool is our own neighbors: residents with disabilities, residents in recovery, and residents returning from incarceration.
Residents with disabilities work at a 62.3 percent employment rate against 83.4 percent for residents without one. Closing that 21.1-point gap represents roughly 3,000 workers, about two-thirds of everyone unemployed in the county today. We already lead the metro, the state, and the nation here. The plan is to widen that lead.
What we track
We track two kinds of numbers. Outcome numbers tell us whether life actually got better: incomes, participation, people working close to home. Leading numbers move first and warn us early: posting ratios, childcare capacity, the occupations AI touches first. Strategic numbers steer decisions. Compliance numbers satisfy reporting. We label which is which, and where a baseline does not exist yet, we say so instead of inventing one.
Outcome numbers: did life get better?
At 2.2 percent unemployment, participation is the only supply number that can grow. It is the master gauge of Findings C, D, F, and H combined.
Tests whether the earnings engine survives AI-era task compression on both sides of the county line (Findings A and G).
Required for state and federal reporting; strategically read through the demand-to-supply ratio, not on its own.
The employer-side price of the middle-skill squeeze. If Finding B interventions work, this falls first.
Standard board reporting; watched for the Finding E signal (separations accelerating past the 2019 average of 10.5 percent).
The single number that captures local talent recapture. Rising share means employers are winning a larger slice of the workforce that already lives here (Finding G).
The county's primary remaining labor-supply lever (Finding H). Ratio up, gap down is the target direction.
Leading numbers: the early warnings
The earliest visible edge of Finding A. If compression accelerates, this line moves before any survey does.
The single number for the inverted skills gap. Rising means the squeeze is deepening faster than the pipeline responds.
Program throughput for funder reporting; meaningful only against the ratio and time-to-fill above.
The binding participation constraint for young families (Finding C). Every 0.01 of ratio is roughly 180 slots.
Whether the workforce that staffs the county can live in it (Finding D). Below 50 percent signals real progress.
Grant-required counts; the strategic read is the S1811 ratio in tier one.
The succession clock (Finding E). Sustained movement above 25 percent escalates succession work from advisory to urgent.
What unmanaged behavioral health demand looks like when it reaches the highest-cost setting (Finding F). Decline from the plateau is the success signal.
Every KPI is disaggregated by city and by population (residents with disabilities, residents returning from incarceration, residents in recovery, age cohort, parents of young children) wherever the source supports it. Person-first language is the standard; small populations report only above minimum cell sizes. Where a source cannot support disaggregation, the gap is named in the annual review.
Workforce stories
Averages hide people. So we break the county's workforce story into the real situations behind the numbers: eight resident situations, six occupations at a turning point, and nine kinds of employers with nine different problems. Find yours.
The second paycheck childcare decides
Around 18,300 Hamilton County children under six have all their parents in the workforce. We have 14,702 licensed slots. That 0.80 ratio is a daily math problem solved at kitchen tables: whose career pauses? Every added slot is a parent who can say yes to a job.
What we are doing: The Childcare Expansion: employer playbooks, provider tools, parent calculators, and a public policy dashboard.
Working here, priced out here
Home prices are up 63.7 percent since 2019. If you teach, cook, care for patients, or stock shelves in this county, the median home is out of reach on your income alone, and 6 in 10 moderate-income renters are cost-burdened. A county that prices out its own workforce eventually staffs itself from somewhere else.
What we are doing: Housing cost research in every plan review, and wage-floor analysis with the employers who feel it first.
Three thousand neighbors ready to work
Residents with disabilities here work at a 62.3 percent rate. Residents without one, 83.4 percent. Closing that gap means roughly 3,000 more people working, about two-thirds of everyone unemployed in the county. We already lead the nation among large counties. The plan is to widen the lead, not admire it.
What we are doing: InvestAbility, our disability workforce program, and employer inclusion training.
A next step, not a five-year plan
Employment is the strongest predictor of a successful return: 16 percent recidivism for people working, 52 percent without work. Nobody needs a lecture about a destination five years away. People need the very next rung, what it pays, and who is hiring.
What we are doing: The Re-Entry Workforce Initiative, funded by the county, from jail intake to first paycheck.
The succession question
One in five workers in county jobs is 55 or older. About 45,000 residents cross retirement age within the decade. That is 3,800 replacement hires a year in the trades, schools, healthcare, and government. Experience is walking toward the door; the question is who is walking in.
What we are doing: Apprenticeship expansion, succession-focused employer visits, and pipeline tracking by occupation.
Six in ten of us work somewhere else
64.3 percent of employed residents leave the county to work. Marion County employs more of our residents than we do. Some of that is healthy metro life. But only 35.7 percent of us live and work here, and every point that number rises means shorter commutes and more of our talent building our own economy.
What we are doing: Talent recapture: showing residents the $70,000-plus careers that already exist within county lines.
When the job description starts changing
27.2 percent of county jobs sit in the office, finance, tech, legal, and media work AI reaches first. Customer service representative jobs are already down 6.1 percent since 2019. The answer is not panic. It is a visible next rung for every role AI compresses, before the compression arrives.
What we are doing: Career ladders for every high-exposure occupation, tracked in this plan quarterly.
No bachelor's degree. No problem. Almost.
Most people assume this county only hires college graduates. The postings say otherwise: 54.6 percent of stated demand asks for less than a bachelor's. The catch is supply. Demand for middle-skill workers outruns the people available 1.43 to 1, which makes training the fastest door into a good career here.
What we are doing: Ivy Tech partnerships, The Pursuit Institute pathways, and credential programs mapped to real openings.
Customer Service Representatives
3,968 jobs in Hamilton County
3,968 jobs, down 6.1 percent since 2019. This is the occupation we watch to see AI compression arriving in real time. The work is not disappearing; it is thinning. The plan maps every escape route: the next rung, its pay, and who hires for it.
Office Clerks
3,490 jobs in Hamilton County
3,490 jobs doing the administrative work every industry runs on, and one of the highest AI-exposure scores in the county. The person in this job today has more transferable skill than any job description admits.
Registered Nurses
An aging patient base meets an aging nursing workforce and a thin younger pipeline. Riverview Health alone posted 746 openings in a year. This is not a pay problem. It is a pipeline problem, and Ivy Tech nursing seats are the rate limiter.
Home Health & Personal Care Aides
4,321 jobs in Hamilton County
4,321 jobs and among the strongest demand growth in the county, at a wage floor that competes with fast food. The people who care for our parents deserve a career lattice, not a dead end.
Laborers & Freight Movers
3,391 jobs in Hamilton County
3,391 jobs with the county's highest shortage score. Much of it is hired through staffing agencies, which hides churn the county still pays for. Stability, schedule, and a path to equipment certifications are the retention levers.
Accountants & Auditors
2,321 jobs in Hamilton County
2,321 jobs, solid pay, and a first rung that AI reaches before it reaches the partner's office. The profession is not shrinking here yet. The way into it is. Employers who redesign the junior role will own the pipeline.
When employers say they cannot find workers, they are describing nine different problems that happen to share a word. A hospital's problem is not a restaurant's problem is not a warehouse's problem. We studied the county's employer base as nine archetypes, each tested against Hamilton County data and the published research on why that kind of shortage happens. Here is each one, and the lever that actually moves it.
Four of these nine employer types fail on the same mechanism. The school district, the senior-living operator, the retailer, and the restaurant all compete for the same worker at the same wage floor: in a county with a $127,452 median household income, a job paying $28,000 to $36,000 competes against every other $28,000 to $36,000 job and loses the moment one of them raises pay. Telling a city 'workforce' usually means this wage-floor problem plus at least one genuinely different problem (a nursing pipeline, a manufacturing skills gap, an AI-and-commute squeeze, a thin specialized pool, or an agency-churn trap). That contrast is the whole point: 'we can't find workers' is not one problem, and the levers differ.
The Regional Hospital
Nursing demand compounds as an aging patient base meets an aging, burnout-thinned nursing workforce and a thin younger pipeline.
The lever: Ivy Tech nursing capacity; TPI health-science pathways; employer-sponsored clinical placements.
The Advanced Manufacturer
The 'shortage' is skill obsolescence and a broken vocational pipeline, not a raw headcount gap.
The lever: TPI Modern Youth Apprenticeship; Ivy Tech advanced-manufacturing certificates; employer apprenticeship sponsorship.
The School District
Classroom-support roles (aides, preschool teachers, bus drivers) are a low-wage care segment out-competed by retail and fast food for the same worker.
The lever: Childcare Action Dashboard (schedule and childcare as non-wage levers); WHS Life Ready pipeline; shared-services wage benchmarking.
The Senior-Living Operator
Direct-care aide turnover is the archetypal wage-floor failure: pay set below the local retail floor makes the job impossible to retain.
The lever: Childcare and transportation supports as retention levers; Hamilton County Express; wage-floor benchmarking through the BRE program.
The Retailer
The workers exist but cannot physically reach highway-corridor jobs or afford to live near them.
The lever: CIRTA Commuter Connect vanpool; Hamilton County Express; workforce-housing planning; employer shuttle pilots.
The Restaurant and Events Operator
Hospitality churn is structural, not cyclical: the shock passed but the workers did not come back, and wage-floor competition reset expectations.
The lever: WHS Hospitality Immersion Certificate; Grand Park event-day transportation; schedule-stability and childcare supports.
The Professional-Services Firm
A two-front squeeze: the Indianapolis commute pulls credentialed talent to Marion County, and AI compresses exactly its office roles first.
The lever: Workforce Ecosystem AI-exposure view; retention and role-redesign advisory; commute-retention (why-stay-here) positioning.
The Life-Sciences Plant
Specialized-technician scarcity: fast skill turnover on top of a thin local niche pool that forces in-commute dependence.
The lever: Ivy Tech employer-designed technician certificates; TPI health-science and STEM pathways; targeted in-commute and relocation support.
The Staffing-Dependent Warehouse
Reliance on temp and agency labor is both symptom and cause of churn, and because the agency is the employer of record, the churn is invisible in the client's own data.
The lever: BRE direct-hire conversion advisory; retention diagnostics; earn-and-learn pathways to convert contingent roles to permanent.
The research library
Every claim on this page traces back to research you can read yourself. 29 reports, all free, all downloadable, no email required.
Flagship
5 Years of Insights
Five years of Hamilton County economic and workforce research in one flagship retrospective.
DownloadTalent InSight 2030: 2026 Report Card
Annual progress report on the county talent strategy.
DownloadState of the Economy 2026: Public Summary
The seven-page version anyone can read in ten minutes.
DownloadWorkforce & Talent
The Great Mismatch: Executive Summary
Why the skills gap here runs the opposite direction most people assume.
DownloadThe County That Built the Mismatch, 2025 to 2040
The full study behind the Great Mismatch summary.
DownloadThe Retirement Bow Wave, 2026 to 2032
One in five workers here is 55 or older. This is the succession math.
DownloadIndianapolis MSA AI Exposure Index
Which metro jobs AI touches first, measured occupation by occupation.
DownloadFrom Paper to Pathway
An evidence-based framework for workforce re-entry after incarceration or recovery.
DownloadHamilton Pathways Lab: HSE Pilot Crosswalk Brief
Connecting K-12 coursework to real county career demand.
DownloadChildcare
Hamilton Childcare Research Series
Five studies in one volume: deserts, staffing, sector vitality, rigor audit, pre-K crowd-out.
DownloadChildcare 101: An Employer Guide
The practical playbook for employers who want to help staff find and afford care.
DownloadBehavioral Health
Behavioral Health Needs Assessment 2026: Public Edition
The countywide behavioral health assessment, written for everyone.
DownloadEconomy & Business Climate
Small Business Climate Analysis
How small business formation and survival really look here.
DownloadINZone / Foreign Trade Zone Opportunity Analysis
What an FTZ designation could do for county employers.
DownloadSEA 1 Property Tax Impact Analysis
What Indiana's property tax overhaul means for local budgets and services.
DownloadQuality of Life & Housing
Quality of Life Impact Report
Where Hamilton County ranks among 292 large U.S. counties, and why.
DownloadCommunity-Essential Quality of Life Framework
The one-page framework behind our Quality of Life work.
DownloadBenefits Intelligence
Hamilton County Benefits Landscape
What employers here actually offer, benchmarked against the nation.
DownloadBenefits Intelligence Methodology
How we measure benefits without ever exposing a single employer.
Download