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A labour board hopes its new website that provides labour market information will stimulate job growth in the city.

The North Superior Workforce Planning Board added more polish to its labour market information website Wednesday. The website was developed six months ago and has gone through a series of tweaks to get it running more smoothly.

Steven Bill, project co-ordinator for North Superior Workforce Planning Board, said he saw a need to have a website that featured up-to-date job statistics. The site will also include opportunities for open dialogue on social networks such as Twitter and Facebook.

The idea behind the website started through a series of consultations with various local and regional communities. The consensus was that there wasn’t a great deal of labour market information available.

Hearing those concerns, Bill said they wanted to put together a website to fill that void.
"We put together a website that could accommodate (the community) and put all that labour market information and sources that we have on one site," Bill said. "We wanted people to not just look at the website and go away, but actually have dialogue and interact with it."

The Workforce Planning Board hopes the website will attract employees seeking more job information and investors wanting to know more about what demands are in the Thunder Bay area.

Bill said when he put together the website he wanted to focus on keeping the information provided as relevant to the Thunder Bay district as possible.

Marg Scott, executive director with North Superior Workforce, said Thunder Bay needs to take steps to compete in a global market and the website should help to achieve that goal.