Finding work: new career pathways in an evolving labor market.

• Author: Slaper, Timothy F.

The manufacturing sector, and the automobile industry in particular, was under stress well before the advent of the Great Recession. But as the Great Recession took hold, the manufacturing sector hemorrhaged middle-class jobs at a staggering rate.

In 2009, automotive sales were only 10.4 million units--the worst year for the market in almost 30 years. The economies of Indiana, Michigan and Ohio depend heavily on automotive and parts production, accounting for nearly 47 percent of all U.S. production in 2010. As a result, the automotive crisis and broader economic recession hit our three-state region particularly hard.

Already, many automotive manufacturing and supplier plants had been shuttered, and communities were dealing with the impact of thousands of workers who had been bought out, retired or laid off. For many workers, their jobs were gone and they weren't ever coming back. For talented younger workers who might have considered an automotive career, the instability of the industry led them to look elsewhere.

The Indiana Department of Workforce Development (IDWD) and the Indiana Business Research Center (IBRC), together with partners in Michigan and Ohio, collaborated on a research project called Driving Change.1 The goal of the Driving Change tristate research consortium was to understand the specific nature of the auto industry transformation and skills relevant to efficient and renewable vehicle technologies and other career opportunities in the broader economy. This article highlights two of the project's objectives:

* Finding alternative career path opportunities for dislocated workers for jobs in demand with an emphasis on jobs in the green economy

* Identifying the current and projected skills gaps of the workforce and the required training needed to compete for jobs in demand and green job opportunities

This article first highlights the occupations that are in demand today and those with the brightest prospects for the future. The data are organized around the Driving Change research themes of jobs in the automobile sector and the green economy.

Second, the article moves on to the concept of "pathway clusters." Simply put a pathway cluster provides a set of occupational options that are well aligned with a worker's knowledge, skill set and personal traits. Pathway clusters are not typical because they are not organized around a particular industry like health care or functions like business administration. Instead, pathway clusters are organized around broad similarities and differences between occupations.

Third, the article considers the time commitment and the relative difficulty of transitioning from one's original occupation to a different occupation. The goal was to boil down the complex components of a worker's skills, an occupation's needs and the mechanisms needed to move from one job to another into one dimension. That dimension is time. The research team developed a time to transition measure--"trip time"--that could inform a worker's decision about which career pathway to follow.

Finally, for the dislocated worker the question of how to move from Point A to Point B is far from academic. Training dollars are of little use in workforce development efforts if they fail to move an individual closer to re-employment in a career with a future. This new pathway cluster analysis and use of trip time as a simple measure to gauge the ease or difficulty of career alternatives will help these dislocated workers make decisions about which transitions are the most feasible.

Jobs for the Future

Structural and cyclical economic forces have had a devastating effect on the labor force across the entire economy and the auto sector especially. Where will these displaced workers find jobs?

Many economists, workforce analysts and policymakers across the nation have asserted that the burgeoning green economy may provide new job opportunities. There is great interest in obtaining information about the quantity and characteristics of jobs produced by the green economy, but traditional sources of information on industries and occupations are not specific enough to accurately measure the number of green jobs in the economy. As a result, IDWD and the IBRC conducted a green jobs survey.2

There were four important survey findings:

1. Indiana has a significant number of green jobs. Indiana has an estimated 46,879 direct green jobs or about 1.7 percent of the workforce.

2. Because they are concentrated in industries that are cyclical, green jobs in Indiana are more sensitive to economic cycles.

3. Employers stated that most green jobs simply required on-the-job training. Production green jobs, for the most part, did not require special skills, but jobs like engineering did.

4. The occupations that are in demand today and poised for high growth in the future are those requiring expanded skill sets and higher levels of education and training.

While the green jobs surveys asked employers about their green jobs hiring expectations in the next two years, the research team needed a richer and more complete data set to assess the future of green and growing jobs. To analyze current job opportunities in the green economy, the research team used the Help Wanted Online (HWOL) database from The Conference Board to get a snapshot of current hiring activity. The research team used BLS and 0*NET data to assess long-term occupational prospects in the tristate region.

Green and Growing Occupations

What career opportunities exist in the green economy?3 Table 1 presents the top 15 green occupation vacancy postings from HWOL in the fourth quarter of 2010 in the tri-state consortium region. To understand the relative strength of current demand for an occupation, the research team calculated the ratio of HWOL postings to the average 2009 employment in that occupation.4

For example, in the fourth quarter of 2010, there was one posting for one aerospace engineer currently employed in the state. This indicates high demand for aerospace engineers, in contrast to...