Whether your business is considering entering the engineering staffing arena for the first time, looking to open additional branches or just seeking to expand a sales focus to buyers in a new region, the decision of which geographic locations to target can be complex.

To help in this endeavour, SIA recently published its 2019 US Geographic Opportunity Atlas. It is designed to help staffing firms identify temporary staffing markets for potential expansion. The tool enables staffing companies to compute their local market share and benchmark their firm against local market metrics. Additionally, the tool provides these other features:

Area selector. Provides data (temporary employment, number of branches, payroll) that firms can use for benchmarking purposes at the state, metro, and county levels.

Market size estimates. Temporary staffing (including temporary engineering staffing) market size estimates, cut by major occupational skill segments. Market size estimates are provided at the state and metro level.

Rankings by opportunity score. Identify temporary staffing market opportunities. Scores are calculated based on several temporary staffing metrics in each area.

Interactive map: Visualization for comparing temporary staffing metrics by state.

The data shows that California is the largest engineering temporary staffing market (according to 2018 data), followed by Texas, Michigan, Florida and Illinois. The tool includes market size estimates for all 50 states for each of eight staffing sectors (office/clerical, industrial, IT, healthcare, finance/accounting, engineering/design, life sciences and marketing/creative).

The five largest engineering temporary staffing markets by state, in US currency, are:

• California, $1.197 billion

• Texas, $823 million

• Michigan, $449 million

• Florida, $375 million

• Illinois, $359 million

Additionally, the tool highlights the largest temporary engineering staffing markets by metro with over 500 metro areas profiled. The top five, in US currency, are: 

• Detroit-Warren-Dearborn, MI, $391 million

• Los Angeles-Long beach-Anaheim, CA, $385 million

• Houston-The Woodlands-Sugar Land, TX, $354 million

• Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN-WI, $315 million

• Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington, PA-NJ-DE-MD, $261 million

Engineering staffing firms can use this report as well as SIA’s wider research portfolio to inform and guide expansion strategy. The tool is available for corporate members here.