53.7 F
San Diego
Thursday, Mar 28, 2024
-Advertisement-

Employment Key job ‘clusters’ expected to rebound

Despite job cuts most severely felt in the area’s tourism industry, San Diego’s economy is expected to recover and generate nearly 42,000 new jobs in 10 key cluster sectors next year, according to a survey done for the San Diego Workforce Partnership.

Cluster is the buzzword used by human resource experts to identify the industries expected to generate the most new jobs, the highest wages and wage growth for the region. All totaled, the top clusters now employ about 376,460 people but that number should exceed 418,000 within a year, according to the survey done for the Workforce Partnership, the city-county regional job-training agency.

One thing to know about surveys: they are snapshots of data at a given time, and since this one was done in May and June, the results may be quite different today.

Certainly for the visitor industry and the entertainment and amusement industry, two of the top 10 clusters, things have changed dramatically and both of these sectors have suffered major layoffs, not job expansion in recent months.

In its most recent survey of local employers, Manpower Inc. found only 29 percent expect to increase their payrolls in the first quarter of 2002, while 21 percent said they were likely to reduce their staff. Forty-eight percent said they intend to keep their payrolls at the current level, and 2 percent were undecided.

The findings are a dramatic turn from a year ago when 71 percent of local companies surveyed by Manpower said they planned to add new workers.

The harsh reality is that the ripple effects from the Sept. 11 attacks have been felt in all manner of places, including government where tax revenues will be lower this year, and hiring freezes were mandated.

And yet, economist Marney Cox of the San Diego Association of Governments said over the long term, these impacts probably won’t be felt as much here as in other parts of the nation.

In fact, Cox said the region should reap benefits in the form of new technology development surrounding improved surveillance, information-gathering and communications technology.

Besides the expected defense funding for these technologies is the anticipated convergence of defense work with biotech and software industries, two clusters which have already generated considerable job growth, Cox said.

“In the long run, the San Diego area is well-positioned to take advantage of these events,” he said.

Of the 10 clusters, the one that shines the brightest is business services. The cluster includes an array of different jobs ranging from attorneys to legal secretaries and architects to account collectors.

Employers in this group said they planned to add 20,782 new jobs over the year, or 21 percent better than the current business service employment the survey pegged at 98,698.

That increase was about half of all the new top cluster growth projected for the year.

Other top growing clusters were software and computer services, expected to add 3,687 new jobs; biotechnology, 3,359 new jobs; and entertainment and amusements, 2,633 new jobs.

Rounding out the 10 surveyed clusters and their expected job increases are communications, 1,972; computer and electronics manufacturing, 1,820; visitor services, 6,052; medical services, 1,018; defense and transportation manufacturing, 287; and biomedical products, 129.

Cox said the current economic downturn has yet to show evidence it will match the depth of job dislocation and pain that was suffered by most of the state in the early 1990s. Over a four year period from 1990 to 1994, the San Diego region saw its per capita income decline by 14 percent, or seven times what the area sustained in the previous recession of the early 1980s, he said.

By getting a better understanding of the region’s driving job clusters, elected officials and other key decision makers are better able to make the types of changes to support these growing job sectors, he said.

The survey, which was done for the Workforce Partnership by Godbe Research & Analysis of Carlsbad for $260,000, also obtained other information from employers including wages, difficulty finding new employees, the use of H-1B visas for immigrant workers, and skill requirements.

The project involved producing a separate report for each of the 10 clusters plus a summary. The survey results are available by contacting the Partnership or via the agency’s Web site at (www. SanDiegoAtWork.com).

-Advertisement-

Featured Articles

-Advertisement-
-Advertisement-

Related Articles

-Advertisement-
-Advertisement-
-Advertisement-