Prior to milestone 4, I noticed that my residential demand was low and my commercial and industrial demand was medium. Of course, my gut instinct says that I simply have more people than jobs so I need more businesses, both factories and shops, to create those jobs. The first port of call is always the population tab:



This tells us some useful information about our population, such as its make-up in terms of ages groups etc but most importantly, I think, it tells you the size of your working population. Your workforce is made up of adults and young adults - unless they are attending University but more on that much later. From the population panel, we can see that our city is 49% adults and 2% young adults. We know that we have a total population of 2126 CIMs which means we have a total available workforce of 1084. We can also see that there are a total of 1115 available jobs yet only 996 people are employed: I have a 10% unemployment rate (accurate enough accounting for rounding).

What gives? Why are my people not working. Let's see if we can find out ...

The first test was to simply let the game run. Let all the zones fill out, all the people move in, settle down, have a cup of tea and decide where they're working. Then reassess and see if it's made a difference.

The answer? No.



My population has risen by about 400, 300 of whom are eligible for work and yet less than 100 of them found a job. Those last 100 jobs just won't go away. The number of people employed and the number of jobs available have stagnated now. Something else is causing these people to have no work. it's also worth mentioning that none of my businesses are complaining about a lack of workforce.

Maybe it's something to do with education? My entire population is uneducated after all. Let's check some buildings. A quick look at a cross section of a load of buildings show they are all fully manned and with the correct employees.




What could it be then? A quick look at the service buildings doesn't yield any information. The power station, police stations and garbage dump all have a workforce but the game UI doesn't show it :-\ To the asset editor Batman!

Ah hah ... there's no educated workforce required at the dump but what about the power station and police stations? intuitively you might imagine one would need an education for many posts at places like that:



And there you go. both require educated workers! The coal plant requires 16 educated workers and 4 well educated workers and the police station requires 16 educated workers, 8 well educated workers and 2 highly educated workers. And there's three of those bad boys. That makes ... erm ... 96 total jobs I cannot possibly fill. And how many jobs can't I account for? About that many and that, as they say, is that.

Conclusion

Whilst it may be mildly confusing, not having any educated workers means that you cannot fulfil many of the jobs in some services and this will lead to unexplained unemployment. This is no problem however, since you can create jobs by zoning more commercial and industrial. Problem solved. What's odd is that a police station requires a total of 40 workers, only 14 of whom are to be uneducated, the other26 require an education of some kind. However, a police station with only 14 uneducated people working at it and effectively nobody running the place is equally as efficient as one with full employment. I have just checked and indeed the police stations in this small, uneducated city, when running at 100% budget, have 75 police, an effect radius of 75 and 10 patrol cars. In my biggest and oldest city, with a highly educated workforce and the same 100% budget, the numbers are identical.

Sooooo there's only thickos running the cop shop, drooling all over the desk and probably working traffic and yet they're as effective as the most highly educated and trained cops money can buy :-D