Jobs Round Up: White House Banks Investing to Fuel Economic Activity

Several developments in the job market spell good things for the millions of workers in the economic doldrums. The unemployment rate dropped to 9 percent, shedding .4 percentage points from the December 2010 report. Separately, the Department of Labor introduced a new website to help guide budding workers into more vibrant sectors of the economy, and the White House unveiled an innovation report that stresses greater funding for new technologies.

Manufacturing (+49,000), retail and wholesale trade (+36,700), and professional and business services (+31,000) led the charge in increased private sector hiring; while state governments shed jobs, private sector employers tacked on an additional 50,000 jobs in January. In total 38,000 jobs were added in the most recent month, since the construction, transportation, and finance sectors took hits. Adjustments to the months of November and December pushed the original figures of added jobs higher, meaning nearly 300,000 people returned to work in the last three months. However, that’s the number of jobs that should be added per month if the country is to keep up with population growth. Keeping that up over a six year period should yield roughly 10 million jobs; by comparison, the eight years under the Clinton administration added20 million jobs.

Some slices of the private sector perform much better than others in terms of total employment. According to household data, which is different from December’s use of payroll data, chiefly white collar sectors of the economy had low unemployment figures, even compared to pre-2007 numbers. Management, professional, and related occupations are treading at a rate of 4.7 percent, with over a third of the workforce affiliated with these types of jobs (51.9 million workers out of 137.6 million nationwide). At the other end, the unemployment rate associated with natural resources, construction, and maintenance occupations is 17.7 percent, according to household data. However, fewer jobs exist in these categories, with 12.2 million people employed. Low hiring trends in construction, fishing, and farming contribute to the high unemployment number, while maintenance and installation occupations suffer a much lower 8.3 percent.

In a conference call yesterday with reporters, Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis introduced a new career tool through the Department of Labor. Called My Next Move, the website offers a snapshot of 900 different occupations, providing information like salary ranges, job openings, and educational grants associated with the new occupations. “By leveraging technology in a user-friendly tool, My Next Move will help those seeking career guidance learn more about work opportunities in fields that are of interest to them,” said Solis,  “and that are likely to have job openings today and well into the future."

The website allows a job seeker to input personal information and preferences into the "O*NET Interest Profiler," which asks 60 questions to help steer the user into a suitable and compatible occupation. This is an improvement on the paper form that has been available since 2001, which asked 180 questions. Using survey results from incumbent workers, My Next Move offers a general look at the work expected in a specific field and the steps necessary to land a related job. Occupational and career information will be updated annually. This service is a supplement to last year’s "mySkills myFuture", a guide for more seasoned workers to find comparable jobs or new careers that are built on their previous experience. Since its launch on Labor Day, “mySkills myFuture” has had 400,000 unique visitors, according to Solis, and a million more views in follow-ups.

My Next Move is a career builder first, and a jobs search engine second, thought it does link to national job boards across the country. The Department is working on a bilingual site, as well. Solis hopes the new jobs tool will be particularly helpful in connecting young and returning workers to developing industries, green jobs, and Registered Apprenticeship programs.

Solis also says the December tax deal signed by the president would result in 3 million new jobs in 2011, according to private economists.

The White House released a study today that proposes new guidelines and goals for increasing funding for innovation, which officials say will lead to more jobs. An associated fact sheet states that “[t]o win the future, America must out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world.” It emphasies innovation can expand businesses, lower overhead, and increase the standard of living for working Americans.

One of the initiatives discussed in the report includes expanded wireless technology, called the Wireless Initiative. It’s designed to help businesses provide high-speed wi-fi access to 98 percent of the population in five years. A chief priority is to expand the national spectrum and avoid the ‘spectrum crunch’ a result of too many companies using the country’s limited wireless capability. ABC News reportsthe administration hopes to sell off the government-owned spectrum, potentially creating large revenues that can be re-invested into better air traffic control, an energy smart grid, and high-speed transportation.

A reform to the patents system is on the table too, with the White House eager to cut the time a patent is approved from 35 months to 20 months. Rounding things off is a FY2012 budget proposal to increase funding for energy research through the government’s ARPA-E program, adding 100,000 science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) teachers over a ten year period, creating an ARPA-ED to help coordinate the increase in STEM teachers, and a start-up fund of $2 billion dollars that the government will use to help prop up entrepreneurs and emerging businesses.

Mikhail Zinshteyn is a staff writer for Campus Progress. You can e-mail him at mzinshteyn@googlemail.com.

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