Job growth high, not pay
Getting a job in the Tampa Bay area won't be tough in 2006, unless you are looking for a good-paying, career-oriented one.
By TOM ZUCCO, Times Staff Writer
Published January 10, 2006
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Recent reports out of Tallahassee paint a rosy picture of the job market in the Tampa Bay area. Like the rest of the state, the area has near-record low unemployment coupled with near-record growth.
"This is probably a good year to be looking for a job," said Bill Dobson, an economic analyst with the Florida Agency for Workforce Innovation.
But what kind of jobs are they? When wages and benefits are factored in, the overall quality of those jobs ranks among the poorest in the nation.
And therein lies the dilemma.
The state is trying to address job quality, but to some, help can't come fast enough.
Suzanne Block, 22, graduated last month from the University of South Florida with a bachelor's degree in bio-medical science and a minor in psychology. She started looking for a job last fall. Of the 10 resumes she sent out, she got one response.
"They seemed positive," she said of the company that contacted her. "Then they asked what experience I had. I told them that so far, my experience is academic. I haven't heard back from them."
With student loans to pay off, Block returns to the classifieds and the Internet each day, searching for a job with an environmental lab or a pharmaceutical company.
"But a lot of them don't want entry-level positions," she said. "So it's a classic Catch-22. How can you get experience if you can't get a job?"
She graduated with a 3.75 GPA, and although she has a fairly specific field of study, "It's not like I went to mortuary school," she said, "where there's only one place where I can work."
If her situation doesn't improve soon, Block said, she may have to go back to working as a server or a cashier. "I'm just hoping someone will take a chance on me," she said.
The odds of getting a well-paying job depend on what's hot, and that hasn't changed much in the past several years.
For people in the Tampa Bay area looking for work in the education, health care, computer or construction fields, 2006 should be a very good year according to state projections.
It's not a good time to look for work as a telephone operator, word processor or typist, travel agent or in the commercial fishing industry.
Despite efforts to bring new industry into the area, much of the growth in new jobs is tied to the same two traditional elements.
"Although we try to diversify," Dobson said, "a lot of our job growth is still driven by population growth and tourism."
That growing population is also rapidly aging. Roughly a quarter of Tampa Bay's population are baby boomers, people born between 1946 and 1964, and as they start to retire, they'll need to be replaced.
"However," Dobson said, "because the next generation of workers to follow the baby boomers is the X generation (born 1965-1980) and is a much smaller number of people, there could possibly be a shortage of workers in some career fields."
One of the hottest jobs in the area right now is engineering, especially civil engineering.
Among recent college graduates, those majoring in education, accounting, nursing and physical therapy are also in high demand, said Dr. Drema Howard, director of USF's Career Center. "We're also starting to see a demand for technology majors, and that's a shift from the last three years."
Howard said she saw a drop in the overall job market over the past several years, but that trend is starting to reverse.
"For students graduating in 2005 or 2006, it's a much stronger market than in the last three or four years," she said. "The last study we saw indicated employers expected to hire 14 percent more college grads than last year."
There are always jobs out there, she added. "But it's a job in and of itself to get a job."
--Tom Zucco can be reached at tzucco@sptimes.com or 727 893-8247.
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