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Welcome to Alex
What Alex is, how Invest Hamilton County and the Indiana Business Research Center are working together on this session, headline figures for Indiana's traded economy, and the order of the eight pages that follow.
What Alex is
Alex is Invest Hamilton County's data intelligence platform for Hamilton County, Indiana. It is named for Alexander Hamilton, the county's namesake.
Alex combines free federal data (the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Census Bureau, the Bureau of Economic Analysis, O*NET), licensed data where the licence allows aggregate use, and Invest Hamilton County's own research. It was built to answer workforce and economic questions with the source and vintage attached to every figure, so that a council, an employer, a school or a funder can check the number before acting on it.
Alex is organised by who is asking: Alex for Workforce (a person pricing their own skills), Alex for Business (an employer hiring, paying and retaining), Alex for Nonprofits, Alex for Schools, and Alex for Cities. The front door is alexhamiltoncounty.com.
Description: Invest Hamilton County, Alex platform documentation and the suite front door at alexhamiltoncounty.com, read 2026-10-01.
The collaboration with the Indiana Business Research Center
The Indiana Business Research Center (IBRC) was established in 1925 and is a unit of the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University. In its own words, its mission is "to empower communities and their leadership to build equitable and thriving regions through strategic insights, data and practical research." The IBRC has developed a Productivity Metrics dashboard that hones in on Indiana's driver industries by region (Economic Growth Regions and READI regions) as well as county.
This session is a collaboration between Invest Hamilton County and IBRC: a joint presentation, and joint research and projects that join IBRC's industry data to Invest Hamilton County's occupational and skills work. Each side brings a different half.
What IBRC brings: the industry spine
IBRC's Productivity Metrics Dashboard identifies the industries that drive productivity and prosperity across Indiana's regions and counties, with a focus on "driver industries," industries with high relative employment that bring outside dollars into a regional economy.
- Jobs, average wages and gross regional product (GRP) by six-digit industry, 2019 to 2025
- Location quotient, and a traded-driver flag (traded, with a location quotient of 1.4 or higher)
- GRP per worker, and a shift-share decomposition of job change (national, industry mix, regional share)
- For all 92 counties, the 15 READI 2.0 regions, the 11 Economic Growth Regions, and the state
IBRC, Productivity Metrics Dashboard page on Hoosiers by the Numbers, read 2026-10-01; IBRC Productivity Metrics v4 workbook, ingested 2026-09-20 (119 geographies in the extract).
What Invest Hamilton County brings: the occupation and skills layer
IBRC's productivity dashboard has no occupation dimension. Invest Hamilton County adds the drill from each industry to the occupations it employs, to the skills those occupations require, and to what the work pays.
- Staffing patterns from industry to detailed occupation: a statewide pattern applied to local jobs, so a modeled estimate, never a headcount
- O*NET skill levels by occupation, and the nine skills whose price per level survives occupation-clustered standard errors
- Annual openings, related educational completions and active apprenticeships by occupation, so the training reach of each occupation is visible
Invest Hamilton County, Indiana workforce dataset built 2026-09-20 from Lightcast Analyst exports (aggregate use), O*NET 30.2 and BLS OES May 2025. Methods on pages 3 and 4.
Indiana's economy and its traded drivers, headline figures for 2025
Six figures from IBRC's industry data for the state as a whole. A traded driver is an industry that sells outside the region and has a location quotient of 1.4 or higher.
How to read the two industry counts. The state file flags 199 industries as traded drivers for Indiana as a whole. A further 385 are traded drivers in some county but not statewide, which is why a county's priority list and the state's are different lists. Page 2 lets you pick any county or region and see its own.
How this presentation is organized
Eight pages, in this order.
- WelcomeThis page: what Alex is, the collaboration with IBRC, and Indiana's headline figures.
- IBRC Productivity Metrics, interactiveIBRC's industry data for any county, region or the state, with a drill from each industry to the occupations it employs, the skills they require, and the pay value of the nine priced skills.
- IBRC methodology and further visualizationsHow IBRC defines driver industries, location quotient, GRP per worker and shift-share, with additional views of the data.
- The problem: how do you decide a community's capacity to upskill into driver-industry rolesWhy industry data alone cannot answer the question, and what has to be added to it.
- The webIndiana occupations and industries arranged by the capabilities the work calls for.
- Traded-industry occupationsWhat traded-driver jobs pay, how often they open each year, and which an education program or apprenticeship reaches.
- What Hamilton County is doing with this dataAlex for Workforce, Alex for Business and the other Alex products, and where they meet Invest Hamilton County's programs.
- How this way of using data could change Indiana, and how to engageA grounded view of what changes when every county can see this, and the path to a working session on your own county's workforce plan.