Stats that the DailyBeast used (taken from the article):

But which metro areas will have the most job growth? To get at this, my Martin Prosperity Institute team applied the detailed employment projections of the BLS to U.S. metro regions. The BLS forecasts job trends across 22 major occupational groups, which include more than 822 specific job categories for the decade 2008 through 2018. My MPI team used these BLS national forecasts to generate similar estimates for each of America's 392 metro regions. We used the BLS overall estimations to predict job growth in each region based on its current mix of jobs.

I celebrated these numbers earlier today before I knew they existed.

I'd like to see where these jobs are.  My husband was laid off 1-1/2 years ago -- skilled scientist can't even get a manual labor job in Duluth.  We are doing everything thing we can to stay in Duluth, but Duluth employers would rather hire a 19-year-old college student than a man in his 30s that wants to stay in this town.

The result?  Duluth is losing another family to the Cities.  Our tax dollars can go help another city that has jobs.

I am all in favor of letting go of the defeatism and pessimism, but I agree, the bare numbers are misleading. If the question was about careers rather than "jobs" something tells me the results would have been very different.

If they chose the definition of 'metro area' which goes by county, their stats would be including all of St. Louis County. If that's the case some of this might be them picking up on the rebound in iron range taconite industry jobs that's occurred this year as an indirect consequence of relatively tight demand for iron elsewhere on the planet.  Might be where the "mills" in that "manufacturing and mills" sentence came from.  

Of course a lot of the recent job growth in that field is just people returning to work who were laid off in '08 and '09, but there does appear to be a decent chance at long-term solidity and maybe growth up on the Range with things like Magnetation, the iron nugget operation, Essar's would-be-revolutionary steel mill, and precious non-ferrous metal mining (depending on how environmental issues are or are not satisfactorily addressed).

So, basically, the statistics must be wrong because everyone knows Duluth sucks. 

Good lord people.

From the perspective of a health care professional, I have to say there are not many appealing nursing jobs in Duluth.  Of course, I am at the top of my field here in Rochester.  That being said, when it comes time to move (a year or two) we will probably be looking to Portland, Oregon, where nursing and labor (Mrs. Lojasmo) jobs are plentiful.

@rollergirl:  Kim?

Lojasmo=Jason.

I agree the celebratory beer was too much in reaction to an undocumented study.  In my defense it was 5:30 on Friday afternoon after a very long week.  I would have celebrated successfully closing my office door, if I didn't have something else to point to.

Here's a few things were doing to promote quality jobs:
-  Investing in Workforce Development
-  First new zoning code in 50 years
-  One stop shop for developers (reform of permitting process)
-  Private sector leaders on DEDA
-  Reclaiming brownfields (Atlas Cement, US Steel Plant site, Bayfront, 43rd - 45th W, Clyde) to ready for development
-  Supporting start-up companies like GeaCom

We all have a role in local job creation - it's about supporting local employers and promoting Duluth as a good place to live and work.  We tend to self define Duluth as a bad place to do business and project pessimism about our ability to compete and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.  We've got to give folks a reason to feel optimistic about Duluth's future in order to take the risk necessary to start a business and hire employees.

The big picture is that Duluth's economy is much better than it used to be. And there's a brighter future than we've had in a long time. 

The job situation right now is tough. Really tough. But the future for this area is good. And we have dozens of good employers who have done really interesting things that have staying power, whether they are Loll Designs, LHB, or Compudyne.

Here are some notes on the numbers in the Daily Beast report:

The original data is from the U.S. Department of Labor's 10-year occupation predictions. Florida's folks then transformed the data to see how each metropolitan statistical area would do. Yes, I've worked with Florida's folks and have mixed feelings about them, but there's nothing in this study that's really surprising if you've worked with predictions for what's going to happen. A fair number of studies have shown that this area has a really good mix of base industries for the future, whether it's in housing, jobs or culture.

Some notes on the data:
--It covers the Duluth-Superior Metro Area, which is all of St. Louis County, all of Carlton County, and all of Douglas County Wisconsin. It's one of the oddest MSA's because of the amount of rural landscape, and the mining. It includes a big chunk of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area and Voyageurs National Park. Using a census bureau measurement, just 0.7% of the Duluth-Superior Metro is "urbanized", though that number goes up to 1% if you don't count our lakes. A more typical Metro area is 30% or more urbanized.
--48% of the Metro area's jobs were in Duluth in 2009.
--Our big growth areas: Health care, higher education, and professional and technical services (especially architecture, engineering, and information systems design).
--The predictions don't count the jobs we've lost, and in some cases regained, during the recession. So all of the miners who have come back to work don't figure into this. The long-term prediction for mining included in this study actually shows employment there going down (We can argue about jobs from Polymet another time, but they're not included in this study). 
--Yes, there are a lot of non-living-wage jobs in the area. They're everywhere. But a lot of our predicted growth is in professions like architecture and engineering.
--A lot of the good jobs are going to require some kind of advanced technical training. And if the company goes south or you don't mesh with the management, there may not be an equivalent job in town. Much of our job market is going to be far more unstable moving forward, but that applies everywhere.
--Is there uncertainty? Absolutely. Architecture and Engineering is a good example. Between 2003 and 2008, the field grew by 49% in Northeast Minnesota, higher in Duluth. The recession has been a really rocky ride for the field. Some projects have been really, really good, but some jobs are gone. We've got really smart folks running some of those firms and they found ways to sell their services in a huge geographic range. It's not going to be easy, but I think they're going to do well in the long run.
--Health Care has big challenges ahead of it, from the hospitals to the hundreds of long-term care homes. In Duluth in 2009, more than 30% of every dollar taken home by workers in Duluth came from health care in one way or another. There isn't a major part of health care that isn't going through some tough restructuring. And for every good job, there are two or three not so pleasant jobs in the field.
--Higher Education faces not just big budget cuts from the state. But one of the primary sources for the growth in students, fresh out of high school types from the suburbs, is on the decline. Can the colleges here retool and become more welcoming for non-traditional students and students of color? And don't forget that the MnSCU schools in the region, like Lake Superior College, have done a really good job of attracting students from around the state. They have a good reputation as places to get a degree that leads to a job. 

All of that said, though the glass is half-full. Probably three-quarters full. There's a lot of work to be done. Yes, we all have friends who can't find a job. But let's celebrate that things are better here than in a lot of other places right now. And our future looks good.