The Lehigh Valley Economic Development Corporation (LVEDC) recently unveiled a new three-year strategic plan, which includes 22 specific initiatives that will define the organization’s efforts to advance economic growth and job creation in the region.

Those initiatives fall into four categories: recruitment; marketing & communications; retention, resources & regional strategies; and advocacy and leadership.

Each week, the LVEDC blog and newsletter will highlight a different set of initiatives from the new strategic plan.

Click here to download the LVEDC Strategic Plan 2017-2020.

This week, we share the organization’s recruitment initiatives, which will assist LVEDC in executing on its newly redefined mission to market the economic assets of the Lehigh Valley and to create partnerships to lead the recruitment, growth, and retention of employers.

The initiatives are:

1) Target recruitment activity in four high-value industry sectors to benefit all areas of the Lehigh Valley and a wide range of workers by attracting companies that employ people with a variety of skill and education levels. Those sectors, as defined in the Garner Economics Blueprint 2.0, are high performance manufacturing, high value business services, life science research and manufacturing, and food and beverage processing.

2) Develop targeted plans to recruit professional office, industrial users and manufacturers to our downtown and urban areas as part of a continuing redevelopment and reuse effort.

3) Develop and execute a more sophisticated process for lead generation to target companies for possible recruitment in key sectors with the possible use of outside support to develop a targeting and implementation plan.

4) Work with companies inside and outside of the Lehigh Valley to understand and leverage their supply chain and related operations for outreach, marketing and recruitment.

5) Continue relationship building with site selectors, location advisors and industrial and commercial real estate brokers by utilizing market familiarization tours and attending their gatherings while adding more outreach and relationship building with key corporate leaders.

6) Develop “knowledge partners” by engaging and training key people in the Lehigh Valley, such as educational representatives, workforce specialists, existing company leaders and economic development and government partners, to enhance response and regional engagement to support prospect recruitments or retention projects.

7) Increase engagement in international business development through recruitment visits, marketing Foreign Trade Zone incentives and the development of an International Business Council to broaden a network of communication and support for the recruitment of international companies.

These initiatives were identified as a result of several consultant studies commissioned by LVEDC to ensure the organization’s strategies are focused on the highest-quality growth and job creation possible for the Lehigh Valley.

Those studies included an economic development analysis by the Atlanta-based Garner Economics; the by New-York based Development Counsellors International; and the global firm Investment Consulting Associates.