A lot of you liked this post wherein I shared some data about which industries might be hiring.

So, again, I want to do what I did there and rip off someone else’s chart to give you some data. This time, we’re looking backward. So far in this recession, which industries shed jobs and which industries gained them? Also, where are we in terms of ending this horrible job market?

I think the headline will say it all:

We Lost 8 Million Jobs. Only 1 Million Came Back.

Here is the chart in question:

What is my takeaway from all this?

A few things:

1. Times are good? We lose manufacturing jobs. Times are bad? We lose tons more manufacturing jobs. Basically: do we have any manufacturing jobs left?
2. Construction got socked. We knew that. It was a bubble industry and it popped. But it looks like once those jobs were gone, there wasn’t extended bleeding. Things are returning to normal?
3. If you are in government, you weathered the beginning of the recession well, but you’re getting killed now. State and local govt. especially.
4. Finance is still losing jobs. Not as bad, but still. That sector is not healthy yet.
5. Hospitality lost jobs like they do every recession, but that has bounced back nicely.

Finally, my big takeaway mimics what the headline of the article says: we’re still sitting at the bottom.

What I mean is, we lost all these jobs. All at once. And we’re not losing them as badly. In fact, in some places we’re clawing back. But nowhere, and I mean nowhere, are we recovering the ground we’ve lost. Not in any meaningful way, at least.

In fact, you want a non-silver lining? Look at health care. It’s the only place we were adding jobs early on, and are still adding jobs now. But not as quickly. So what does it say for our economy when the only growth area is slowing down hiring?

If all you can say is that we’re not bleeding anymore, that’s fine. But when do we recover? I see no signs of getting all those jobs we lost back any time soon.

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1. 2008 Crystal Ball- Where The Jobs Ain’t.
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3. Where The Jobs Are- Healthcare Edition

Useful graph from The Washington Independent.

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They’re not in Oregon, apparently. Anyone else got some state-specific numbers?

Oregon’s seasonally adjusted unemployment rate rose to 12.1 percent in March from 10.7 percent (as revised) in February. The state’s unemployment rate has risen rapidly and substantially over the past nine months, from a rate of 5.9 percent in June 2008.

Source article here.

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From the “why has no one thought of this before” file, I have a link you should all visit and bookmark:

http://hotjobs.yahoo.com/HotJobs100

HotJobs has launched the HotJobs100 List.

The HotJobs 100, showcasing many of the top U.S. employers, is a great starting point for job seekers who want to know which companies are experiencing robust hiring activity.

In other words, HotJobs has taken a look at it’s sales data and seen which companies have the most posted job openings, which industries have the the most posted job openings, which cities, etc.

Clearly, this is a valuable resource for job seekers. The idea isn’t to go down their list and immediately send a resume out to the top 10 companies; but getting an overall feel for where the hiring is still happening can help you focus your job search in more fertile fields.

FYI, their current top 10 list of who is hiring is as follows. And I’ll have a breakdown of the data they’re sharing with us after the break:

1. Kaiser Permanente
2. Tenet Healthcare Corp.
3. AT&T
4. Cisco Systems
5. T-Mobile
6. Laboratory Corp. of America Holdings
7. Johnson & Johnson
8. Unitedhealth Group
9. Macy’s
10. Coca-Cola Enterprises

The Truly Valuable Data

Now, as you’ll see if you click through on the link, they offer a wealth of data. The list of top companies can be expanded to show the top 100. Plus, if you click through on a company name, you can go to that company’s profile page and begin to get lists of their most recent openings.

But there are more lists here as well. As you can see to the left, they have a list of the top industries based on posted job openings (expandable to 25). This is probably the most useful list in terms of getting a macro picture of the job search environment.

And this is where the magic happens. Click on, say, the retail category in this list. Boom! You get a pop up list showing which companies have the most retail job openings. You can do the same thing for each category and can of course click through to go to the company profile page.

It gets even better with the list of cities with the most openings. I see that Houston has the 4th most job openings posted. I click on Houston and lo and behold, I get a list of the companies with the most posted Houston openings!

I do have one caveat about this list. Simply put, the biggest cities are going to have the most openings. Houston will always have have more job openings than Wasilla, Alaska. Without weighting to account for city size, this is a meaningless statistic. A better list would be which cities have seen the greatest increase in job openings month over month or quarter over quarter.

And what good is giving us only a few cities? Tell us who has the most openings in each major metro area!

Lists and More Lists

Additionally, they have a list of the top job titles. I don’t know how much value you can get out of this one either. I wouldn’t expect the “top titles” to change very often. There will always be a strong need for “sales reps” “customer service reps” “managers” and the like. Those are just the most common titles in existence.

Still, if you click on, say, “Nurse” you can find out which companies have posted the most openings for nurses. That’s great if you have a job title that falls into the top 25 or so… why not expand this out to the top 100, say?

The final two lists are more interesting.

The Top College Job Companies list promises to tell you which companies are most aggressively seeking recent college grads to recruit. I can’t tell you how valuable that sort of information could be for grads, provided the data is accurate and reliable.

Finally, the Top Part-Time Job Companies could be extremely valuable to, of course, those people looking for that category of work.

Overall, this is some great info. As I say, I can’t believe no on has done something similar in the past (before I get the emails, yes, I know about Indeed’s Job Trends… I just think this is a more valuable and simpler tool). A true holy grail would be to give us more information broken down into finely sliced and diced categories and locales. For example, which companies have the most posted openings for, say, Accountants in Seattle?

And they could tweak the data by showing us percentage increases in some areas. As great as it is to know what industry or city has the most openings, it would be double great to see which industries or cities are growing the most. Cause where the growth is is where you want to gravitate to in your job search.

Some Advice For The Job Boards from TheJobBored

They have the data. They just have to be willing to share it.

So a word of advice to HotJobs (or anyone else, for that matter). Look at the example of Google. If you provide users with a way to parse and organize data, you provide them with a valuable service. All the job boards provide lists of openings. But if you provided a comprehensive set of tools to help a job seeker search the data your have more intelligently… well, you’d certainly stand out as a service.

Let’s say I’m an Architect in South Florida and I know I need to move elsewhere because the housing bust means there’s not a lot of work to be had down south. Which areas of the country, cities, companies etc. have the most openings for Architects? Job Boards: like Google, you’ve got the data in your servers. Let me at it! Don’t just give me lists of openings… give me tools to organize those openings in ways that will allow me to be a more intelligent and efficient job seeker.

Let’s hope they expand this page in the future. In the mean time, take the time to study the lists and glean what job search intelligence you can.

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If you’ve been pounding the pavement locally for a while now and your job search has turned up nothing, I’ve got some simple advice for you:

Go where the jobs are.

No job market is equal. Even in a generally bad job market, there are places where they can’t seem to find enough people to fill their workforce.

I thought of that when I saw this quote in a blog today:

Iowa – you have a problem… You have a too many jobs and not enough qualified people to fill them. Right now, there’s a surplus of roughly 48,000 jobs; that number is expected to go to nearly 200,000 within six years.

So, the implication is, if you can’t get hired where you are, maybe you should consider giving Iowa a try. If the above information is true, they’re dying to hear from you.

Now, I can hear some of you saying, “But Brian, it’s expensive to move someplace… or even to attempt a long-distance job search. I can’t afford it.”

Or maybe you can’t afford not to…

Think of it this way: if you’re out of work and banging your head against the wall, you’re losing time and money. Let’s imagine there’s a place where you could get hired tomorrow. But that place is 3 states away. Every day you don’t consider the job in that other state is another day you’re not getting paid. It’s another day you’re out of work. Every day you don’t consider broadening your job search horizons you are costing yourself money.

To be honest, the internet has made the long distance job search more reasonable than ever. And yeah, you may have to shell out for a plane ticket for an interview (sometimes the employer might pay your way) and moving expenses (really eager employers will pay those too). But again, think of those costs as an investment.

If you are considering a long-distance job search, you can read my previous advice on the topic here.

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I’ve written before that I’m worried people chained to underwater mortgages will upset the supply and demand balance in the job market.

One of the unique things about the American job landscape is the ability of workers to easily go to where the jobs are. If you can’t find decent work in New Jersey, you can up and move to Washington State (the equivalent distance of moving from England to Syria) if that’s where they’re hiring.

Think about it. Do you currently work in the town (or even state) you were born in? What about the town or state your parents were born in? Or your grandparents? American workers are very mobile and flexible workers.

Maybe not so much anymore.

[D]epressed sales and sinking home prices in many parts of the country are complicating relocations and transfers for thousands of workers … A survey last year by Worldwide ERC, a nonprofit association that represents relocation specialists, found that depressed home values emerged as the No. 1 reason for resisting job transfers for the first time in more than 10 years.

Of the member organizations that reported employee reluctance to move, 71 percent cited the sluggish real estate market as an impediment to a job-related move, up from 16 percent last year.

As the blog Calculated Risk points out…

There are probably close to 10 million households currently with zero or negative equity in the U.S. For these homeowners, it will be very difficult to accept a job transfer to a different county or state.

Definition: Negative Equity: a homeowner owes more than their home is worth.

To size the problem: According to the Census Bureau, from 2005 to 2006 (the most recent data), approximately 1.7 million owner-occupied households, moved to a different county or state. If approximately 1 in 8 households (the same proportion as with negative equity) will not accept a transfer now because of depressed home values that would be about 200,000 households per year that will be reluctant to accept job transfers.

This is clearly a bad thing for the overall job market and economy. The most obvious problem is that companies might not be able to get their hands on the qualified workers they need.

But let’s look at this from the worker’s point of view as well. If you’re restricted to your current geographical area, your job choices are limited to say the least. And if, say, you get laid off from the factory in your home town, you have no ability to go to the next factory over because you are a mortgage prisoner.

This can also affect the forward trajectory of your career. White collar careers now mean a great deal of travel and moving as you climb the corporate ladder in that multinational corporation. What happens when you’re offered that promotion to regional manager… but it’s in Atlanta? You can’t move to Atlanta because you can’t sell your house!

I heard about a client we had recently who was a scientist… a cancer researcher. As the story was relayed to me, the research facility in his hometown of 15 years was closed because the company he worked for was downsizing and reorganizing all research to the east coast. But he figured he couldn’t make the move and hold on to his job because his house was now worth about $90,000 less than what he had paid for it. That came to about one year’s salary. He couldn’t just swallow that sort of loss. This cancer researcher was considering leaving the industry altogether and trying a new career field because he thought he had to stay where he was.

Fortunately for him, his employer was a deep-pocketed Fortune 500 company which agreed to pay the difference on his mortgage and sell the house on his behalf. I’m glad, since he was a friggin cancer researcher, that things worked out for him. But I don’t think everyone can be so lucky.

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[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfBnt65-rNE]

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As we all know, even in a recession, not all areas of the economy suffer equally… or at all. As I said before, 2002 would have been a bad year to work in computer programming, but would have been a great year to be hired as a programmer at Google.

And this is true for geography as well. Not all areas of the country are struggling. This article from ABC News (h/t SavvySugar) points out that there are opportunities out there:

According to a January report by Moody’s Economy.com, 30 states still showed signs of economic expansion, 15 were at risk of sliding into recession, and five had already entered a downturn. The five states already in recession – Arizona, California, Florida, Michigan, and Nevada (…) Some of the states that are still growing are in agricultural areas, benefiting from soaring wheat, corn, and soybean prices. This includes Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, and Indiana.

More tidbits of good news?

North Dakota is one of only three states to gain manufacturing jobs, he says. Behind that gain is a push to export – up 34 percent in 2007 over 2006, the fastest rate of growth of any state in the United States. The state has also seen a big rise in energy investments in coal, oil, natural gas, and renewables. On top of that, North Dakota merchants are profiting from Canadian tourists, who are crossing the border to shop with their strong currency.

The state’s unemployment rate is hovering around 3 percent. This has prompted state officials to host job fairs in Minneapolis and Denver.

“We don’t see any sign of recession in our economy,” says Shane Goettle, commissioner of North Dakota’s Department of Commerce.

And the weakness of the dollar means that outsourcing jobs overseas now means jobs are coming our way for a change.

Some cities are attracting foreign investors who want to build in the US, in part because of the weak dollar. Take the giant German steel manufacturer ThyssenKrupp, which decided to build a $3.7 billion steel mill in Mobile, Ala.

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1. Where The Jobs Aren’t… April 2009 Edition
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This week’s BusinessWeek has the first solid statistics I’ve seen that prove that health care is the new plastics. (The Graduate reference) By that I mean, health care is finally fulfilling its promise as THE growth industry of the next 50 years.

For about 15 years now, prognosticators have sworn up and down that, for population and actuarial reasons, health care would be the single greatest career path for the foreseeable future. What with the BabyBoomers aging and the continuing growth of health care spending like a cancer on our country’s GDP, health care would be the place where most new jobs would be created.

Well, finally the prognosticators have been proven right.

Since the last U.S. downturn began in March, 2001, the private sector has added a total of 4 million positions—and about 2 million of them, or 49%, are in health care. That’s big. In the previous two business cycles—from the start of one recession to the start of the next—health care accounted for only 14% of private-sector job growth.

To put this in simpler terms, over the entire Bush era, one out of every two new jobs created was in the health care sector. Health care now makes up roughly 50% of the job growth in this country.

Will it continue? No reason to think otherwise. I say this for the reasons I gave above (population, actuarial, etc.) and also with my fingers crossed hoping we can get some form of universal health care from the next administration.

The data even seems to suggest that we might be entering a period of time where the ONLY industry that will be seeing job creation will be health care.

Since December, 2007, the sector has added roughly 60,000 jobs, while the rest of the private sector has lost 190,000.

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Back in January I pointed out some data that seemed to suggest where in the country the job market was still holding up.

In this weekend’s New York Times, there was the usual hand wringing article suggesting that maybe the job market has turned nasty.

But right next to the article (if you follow the link, scroll down, you’ll see a graphic on the left under the category MULTIMEDIA… the link is called Job Gaines, Job Losses) there was a nifty map of the US with a graphical representation of those areas of the country that have seen job growth, versus those that have seen job shrinkage.

The conclusion to draw from the graphic?

It looks like job growth is continuing strongly in some parts of the Sunbelt (Florida) and most of the southwest and mountain west. If you’re in the Rustbelt or the Midwest, things are dire indeed.

But here’s my question. The Sunbelt… the Southwest… Colorado… Those locales are exactly the same places the have been ground zero for the worst of the housing bubble bursting. If these are the areas of the country hardest hit by the coming recession, are these really the best areas to look for jobs?

I have family in Florida. Not only are restaurants closing up, office spaces going vacant (not to mention entire subdivisions) but the job market is so bad, Mexican immigrants are actually returning home. No joke. The sudden out flux of people is so severe that the school district my nephews attend went from planning 8 new school construction projects to a complete building moratorium. This is unheard of in a growth state like Florida.

My point is… if the economy indeed worsens, I wonder if going to where the bubble has burst hardest is really a good idea if you’re looking for a job.

Related posts:

1. 2008 Crystal Ball- Where The Jobs Ain’t.
2. Where The Jobs Are- Look Next Door
3. Where The Jobs Are- Healthcare Edition