Changing economy has many changing jobs

Allison Linn Senior writer • Profile • E-mail

Growing up in a small town in Michigan, Alan Swank’s career path was clearly laid out for him: Attend vocational classes at the local high school, graduate and take a well-paying factory job.

Swank, now 49, did attend those classes, and, after an eight-year stint in the military, he did start working in manufacturing.

But now, at an age when many might be looking toward retirement, he’s embarking on a new career as an academic.

This summer, Swank hopes to complete his Ph.D. in organizational management and leadership, shutter the metalworking shop he has run for 20 years and, if things go according to plan, take a teaching job.

The change in careers will be the culmination of years of schooling that began in 2001, after Swank started to see stiffer competition from Chinese manufacturers.

“I said, ‘Things are going to change drastically. I need to prepare for this,’” he recalled. “I knew a change had to be made.”

The deep recession that began in 2007 is doing more than costing millions of jobs. It is transforming the economy and forcing many workers to seek entirely new careers. For many, that will mean moving away from blue-collar jobs and toward white-collar work, perhaps with a trip back into the classroom on the way.

“The jobs that are opening up … are not physical labor jobs. They’re jobs requiring education, skills, math ability, probably computer literacy,” said Nigel Gault, chief U.S. economist with IHS Global Insight.

The country has lost a net 4.4 million jobs since the recession began in December 2007, led by sectors such as manufacturing and construction. Yet at the same time a few areas have been continuing to add jobs, including fields such as health care, and social assistance jobs such as social workers and mental health counselors.

In a fast-changing economy, experts say job seekers need to be flexible because it’s hard to say where the new growth fields might be in the next 10 or 20 years.

“Very often the jobs that will get generated in the future may be in places that we haven’t even thought of, that don’t exist yet,” Gault said.

A million lost jobs
The manufacturing sector has shed more than 1.2 million jobs over the past year, extending the long decline of that industry, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The construction industry also has been badly bruised and has lost 1.1 million jobs since its peak two years ago amid a steep drop in residential construction and slowdown in nonresidential building.

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Other fields also have suffered badly in the current downturn, including the retail industry, which has lost 608,000 jobs since the recession began, and the truck transportation industry, which has lost 138,000.

Meanwhile the health care industry has added more then 350,000 jobs over the past year as as demand for nurses and other workers continues to outpace the available work force.

“I’ve been saying this for 30 years: You can’t go wrong being a nurse or a health care practitioner,” said David Resler, chief U.S. economist with Nomura Securities.

Banking on a career in nursing
Bob Duggan of Jacksonville, Fla., agrees. Like Swank, Duggan figured he had his life path worked out for him when he graduated from college in the late 1970s with a business degree.

But after 20 years in the banking industry, Duggan said he began to worry that corporate America wouldn’t be as kind to him as he got older, more expensive and perhaps more expendable. Duggan, 54, dabbled in real estate for a while before enrolling in nursing school a few years ago, and that’s where he found his new calling.

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