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.

Our house is still for sale though so hopefully some of these new jobs will enable someone to buy our house. We still love the area and have visited a few time times since our move in May.

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.

I know this is a sensitive subject for me now. Ugh! I didn’t mean to fire on Ness so harshly, but I did think it was an insensitive comment considering many are still unemployed in the area and finding a “career” position in Duluth IS difficult.

I am still unsure whether or not the study can even be found to be positive. I don’t know what jobs are used to create the data, but it seems like we should know that before stating it means something significant to the region.

I would still like to know if anybody is willing to donate info about what Duluth is currently doing to attract “career” type employment to the Northland and how/where an individual can donate time to help the cause.

And nobody said Duluth sucks! It is quite the contrary Duluth rocks! That is why I would like to WORK and LIVE here.

@rollergirl: Kim?

Lojasmo=Jason.

“Wondering where the jobs of the future are going to be? Richard Florida crunched the numbers to create a list of the American cities with the fastest-growing job markets, from New York to Durham to Bethesda.”

A few years ago, Florida was ostensibly involved [1] in a Knight Foundation project intended to jumpstart Duluth’s growth as a center of the “creative class” that he talks about all the time. That was before he changed his mind and decided you couldn’t entice/create a creative class out in flyover-land. This seems a little inconsistent to me.

[1] Apparently he really wasn’t very involved, according to local participants in the Duluth project.

Good lord people.

We have a lot of great “off the norm” companies here, like Epicurian/Loll and Alakef (there are a fistfull more, but those are the two that spring to mind) which retain their employees well and pay above the norm for the region … but those jobs are few and their turnover rates are extremely low.