Enhancing Economic Mobility and Opportunity for Licensed Occupations in Nevada
Although occupational licensing is intended to protect public safety, health, and welfare by ensuring practitioner competence, it increasingly poses significant barriers to entry for many workers. These barriers can restrict labor market participation and undermine a state’s economic growth, making data-informed reform a critical priority for workforce and economic development.
Researching State-Wide and Interstate Occupational Licensing Requirements
The Nevada Governor’s Office of Workforce Innovation (OWINN) partnered with AIR to reexamine the occupational licensing requirements for the state with a focus on efforts to better serve dislocated workers, transitioning service members, and veterans.
AIR collected and analyzed existing occupational licensing requirements and compared these requirements with those in other states. AIR staff also examined the extent to which occupational licensing policies and practices may create unnecessary barriers in Nevada’s labor market and developed actionable recommendations to remove barriers.
To provide a comprehensive overview of occupational licensing challenges, AIR identified key data elements that contribute to the difficulty of obtaining and maintaining a license in each state and leveraged these to develop occupational licensing difficulty scores.
Interactive occupational licensing difficulty visualizations—which include difficulty scores alongside salary data for occupations in Nevada—offer valuable insight for policymakers and workforce stakeholders.
Removing Unnecessary Barriers to Support Nevada’s Workforce
Insights from this work reveal how legislative and regulatory changes can remove unnecessary burdens and barriers to the labor market. AIR also created an action plan that aimed to expand access to attaining and maintaining a licensing in the state of Nevada, improve the portability for licensed professionals, and reciprocity for select licensed professions.
