Jan. 10, 2011, 12:01 a.m. EST
Where the jobs are in 2011
By Ruth Mantell, MarketWatch
WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — A good job is still hard to find, though recent labor-market data indicate the employment situation is slowly improving.
While the economy is adding jobs at lower levels than workers would like, analysts expect some growth in a wide range of service jobs this year — including retail, information technology, professional, scientific and technical jobs — and continuing growth in health care. Read more about the job market’s lost decade. Read more about unemployment rate drops to 9.4%. “Primary job generation will be across a wide range of private service areas,” said Nigel Gault, chief U.S. economist at IHS Global Insight, an economic consulting firm in Lexington, Mass.
With the aging population, health care remains a primary field for job growth, experts say. “Health care is always adding jobs. That will clearly continue,” said Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a Washington think tank.
Among the positions expected to have greater demand in coming years: nurses, medical scientists, physician assistants, skin-care specialists and dental hygienists.
Information-technology also will add jobs, because companies that have been sitting on cash will upgrade their technology to gain a competitive edge as the economy emerges from the recession, said John Challenger, chief executive of outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, in Chicago.
“A lot of companies over the last couple of years have cut down their spending on IT,” Challenger said. “But, as we know, technology takes quantum leaps every few years. So there is technology that companies are buying, and they will need people who can come in and implement it, customize it, teach people how to use it, provide technical support.”
Gault said there also could be room for growth in financial-services jobs. “Lending activity should pick up,” he said. “There will be more deal making. Companies will be raising more capital and they will need more assistance from the financial sector.”
He added that professional, scientific and technical jobs could pick up as well. “Companies will want to start to pick up research-and-development spending,” Gault said, “so their need for more highly skilled workers will increase.”
Revenue generators
Another area expected to get a hiring boost: any positions that represent revenue generators for a company, according to a survey of more than 2,400 hiring managers and human-resource professionals conducted in November and December for jobs website CareerBuilder.com.
Among firms that expect to increase full-time, permanent workers in 2011, here are the top areas, by function, according to the survey: sales, information technology, customer service, engineering, technology, administrative, business development, marketing, research/development and accounting/finance.
Workers in sales and marketing positions help “drive top-line growth for an organization,” said Jennifer Grasz, a spokeswoman for CareerBuilder.com.
Still, many companies remain cautious about taking on more full-time staff, so analysts expect to see continued growth in the hiring of temporary workers. Temp workers allow companies to fill needed positions without taking on the cost of a full-time worker.
“Employers don’t want to pick up costs like health care, they don’t want to pick up overhead costs,” Baker said. According to CareerBuilder.com, many health-care, financial services, and professional-and business-services firms plan to hire temporary or contract workers.
And it may be a while before companies turn temp positions into permanent ones. “The labor market is still going to be very, very weak, so there’s not a huge incentive for companies to convert these workers into full-time workers,” Gault said.
According to the CareerBuilder.com survey, 34% of hiring managers said they will hire contract or temporary workers in 2011, up from 30% in 2010 and 28% in 2009.
Government work? Better look elsewhere
One place you won’t find job growth: the public sector.
Cities and states are expected to cut staff in 2011, Challenger said. Many municipal and state budgets face the axe as federal aid dwindles. And, Baker said, there won’t be much hiring on the federal level, either.“The public sector is going into recession from a jobs standpoint,” Challenger said. “It will lose jobs in 2011 as the country comes to terms with the deficits that are out there. There will be some places where they have no choice but to cut workers, library personnel, teachers.”
Cuts could also affect nonprofits that do business with the government, said Timothy Bartik, senior economist at the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research in Kalamazoo, Mich.
“We expect to see some weakening in state and local government,” Bartik said. “A lot of state and local areas will have to make cutbacks, and that will have an impact on nonprofit agencies that contract with state and local governments.”
Ruth Mantell is a MarketWatch reporter based in Washington.
