The Booming Services Industry.

• Author: BONHAM, NICOLE A.

Under what circumstances would you group a movie projectionist with an engineer? A watch repairman with a hotel housekeeper? An accountant with a masseuse?

If you were a labor-market economist, you'd group such eclectic jobs under one overall category, that of the often misunderstood and wildly dynamic Services industry.

As Alaskans survive the fluctuations of coy and flirtatious oil and construction economies, the Services industry often takes the hit. Its continued strong growth is seen as double edged and sometimes looked upon with wariness. After all, while more and more jobs may stem from the Services sector, they are seen as lower paying, perhaps indicative of a reluctant shift in Alaska's economic makeup from resource-based to services-based.

Still, the Services industry is fast becoming the backbone of Alaska's economy--and that of the nation as a whole. And while it certainly includes many lower-wage jobs, it also holds labor fields that represent the core of community and commerce.

Narrowly Defined Broad Swath

To pin down exactly who falls under the Services sector, first consider that economists initially break down the labor market into goods-producing jobs and service-producing jobs. Categories under the goods-producing label are mining, manufacturing and construction in nature. The rest is considered to be service-producing.

And there's still a further breakdown. Under the service-producing heading, there are categories for Retail, Finance, Real Estate, Government and also the narrowly defined Services industry--considered the fastest-growing dynamic of Alaska's economy, showing 38 percent growth during the 1990s.

So when someone says they work in the Services industry, what exactly do they do?

It could be anything from an auto mechanic to an advertising executive to a dry cleaner.

Because the Services industry is so broad, economists--being detail-minded folk--further classify the sector into a number of subsets to better understand who goes where. From these narrow job categories, researchers can monitor the growth and boom of this elusive labor sector that, by its very breadth, is difficult to track.

Within the subsets lies perhaps the state's most interesting growth factor--the Health-care industry.

Baby Boomer Boom?

The number of Health-care jobs in Alaska grew 50 percent since 1990, says Neal Fried, a state labor economist with the Alaska Department of Labor and Workforce Development in Anchorage.

"It's not only the...