Labor Market Blueprint gives North Shore jobs perspective

LYNN – The North Shore Workforce Investment Board (WIB) has released its annual Labor Market Blueprint, a study which gathers information from regional business and community leaders, educators and labor specialists to provide a glimpse of existing conditions.The document also contains a regional “snapshot” created by a different researcher, but with similar results.The data, harvested in spring and summer 2010, focuses on eight key business clusters: bio-technology, clean energy, construction, creative economy, financial services, health care, manufacturing and tourism.”Health care dominated the interviews with positive indications from all sectors interviewed,” said Bill Luster, executive director of the North Shore Alliance for Economic Development, which compiled the snapshot.Real estate professionals, builders, bankers and government officials all ranked heath care as the lead sector.”O. Steven Quimby, an economic development consultant hired by WIB to craft the blueprint, arrived at a nearly identical conclusion.”The snapshot and the blueprint research were done independently of each other, yet they came up with similar findings,” said WIB Executive Director Mary Sarris.”The labor market data can be six months to a year behind, which is information that is still part of the recession. So we we also needed somebody to talk to people who can look into the future, which is why we did the snapshot.”Unlike the blueprint, the snapshot “speaks to the continued excitement about health care as well as life sciences, and somewhat to the stability of financial services on the North Shore,” she said.Sarris noted that the North Shore has community banks rather than large commercial institutions, and most have survived the recession without layoffs or downsizing.”We know the construction industry has had a delayed recovery, and that has to do with the slowdown in housing starts. But manufacturing is strong. We have over 800 small shops manufacturing here, plus the larger companies like GE and Analogic,” she said. “Bill talked to the bankers and real estate brokers. Steve looked at the labor market data, where we see a leveling off and some places like Varian going back up, hiring again.”Luster said his findings “reconcile comfortably” with the leading occupational growth information, which suggests that health care occupations will dominate the North Shore job market over the next 10 years. The strength of area hospitals contributes to this growth, he said.The health care sector was closely followed by life sciences and the manufacturing of durable goods. Financial services placed third.Obtaining capital, keeping growing companies from moving out, employee readiness and access to Cambridge and Boston research hospitals and universities were mentioned in survey responses as obstacles to the North Shore life sciences sector.On the manufacturing side, the North Shore economy consists of 850-900 businesses, of which over 50 percent have less than nine employees.Salem attorney William Tinti, chairman of the North Shore WIB, said GE Chairman Jeffrey Immelt has been reiterating the need to boost manufacturing in the United States.”We cannot be a nation that does not produce anything,” said Tinti. “That’s the message Immelt has been trying to get out, and it’s critical for Lynn, which is home to a GE plant and a number of smaller manufacturers. The future of this country is dependent upon manufacturing.”Tinti said the twin research contained in the report shows that manufacturing on the North Shore has stopped declining, leveled off, and positioned to grow.”GE is doing what’s called advanced manufacturing. In most people’s mind, manufacturing has negative connotations, like assembly lines and dirty buildings,” Tinti said. “But if you go to GE in Lynn or to Magellan Aerospace, or the bio-tech sector, you are going into an amazingly clean environment. And the kind of knowledge base necessary for that kind of manufacturing requires a high degree