The 2026 Oregon Talent Assessment comes at a critical moment for Oregon’s workforce and economy. Job growth is expected to slow over the next decade, demographic change is reshaping labor supply, and new technologies are changing how work gets done. At the same time, employers across sectors continue to report difficulty finding and retaining workers with the skills they need.
These pressures make workforce planning more urgent and more complex. Oregon’s population is aging, increasing demand for health care, caregiving, and other services while accelerating retirements in key occupations. Industry sectors across Oregon face different but related challenges. Some need more workers with technical credentials, while others seek better worker retention or clearer pathways from training into employment.
The Assessment creates a flexible, repeatable methodology for identifying in-demand sectors and priority occupations. The work offers a shared foundation for state, regional, education, workforce, and employer partners to focus investments, strengthen alignment, and help more Oregonians access stable, advancing careers. It also provides a starting point for supporting Workforce Pell implementation, which will require Oregon to identify indemand sectors and high-skill, high-wage, in-demand occupations on a recurring basis.
The Assessment uses a multi-step methodology to identify in-demand sectors, priority occupations, and potential gaps between workforce demand and training supply. The methodology was designed to be transparent, repeatable, and flexible, for ongoing improvement in future biennial Assessments.
The work began with a review of national and state approaches to identifying priority industries and occupations. These approaches typically use multiple indicators, including industry size, concentration, wages, recent and projected growth, projected openings, and employer validation. The scan confirmed that Oregon should avoid relying on a single measure: industry sectors and occupations may matter because they support traded-sector growth, provide essential services, anchor regional economies, create access to good jobs, or play a critical role in supporting an in-demand sector.
The Assessment’s methodology identifies in-demand sectors by synthesizing existing state and regional priority-sector lists, including sources from Business Oregon, Future Ready Oregon, Oregon Workforce Partnership, regional comprehensive economic development strategies, regional workforce boards, and prior Talent Assessments. The following step uses sector definitions and available data, including statewide and regional location quotients, to assess whether the list is reasonable and comprehensive.
The methodology identifies priority occupations using five criteria: in-demand, high-skill, high-wage, growth potential, and industry-critical. The priority occupation list includes occupations that meet the demand and skill criteria and either the wage or growth-potential criteria, plus occupations identified as industry-critical. The methodology also applies an equity and regional lens, using data from the Oregon Employment Department, the U.S. Census American Community Survey, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the National Center for Education Statistics, federal apprenticeship data, and interviews with employers and workforce partners to validate findings and identify issues not fully visible in public data.