Where The Jobs Are 2008:
Modest
economic growth and a wave of
retirements will create employment
opportunities this year. Financial
services and healthcare are growing, and
job-seekers with technical skills are in
great demand.
Ed Lightsey
Published January 2008
 Georgia Commissioner of Labor Michael
Thurmond, sitting in the conference room
of his Atlanta office discussing the job
market for 2008, zeroes in on a key
development." The first baby boomer
[has] qualified for Social Security," he
says. Thurmond is referring to an
announcement that the Social Security
Administration, in late 2007, identified
a woman as the nation's first boomer to
be eligible for retirement benefits in
2008. "Eighty million of us are in that
boomer category, "Thurmond says,
including himself in the group of
individuals born between 1945 and 1964.
The flood of retirements that begin
this year will dramatically affect
Georgia’s job market, say Thurmond and
other job analysts. "We are seeing an
inordinate number of highly skilled
people leaving the workforce," Thurmond
says. "We are concerned about where the
people will come from to fill the
positions being vacated by that retiring
generation."
Even though economic forecasts for
2008 are cautious, Thurmond and others
on the frontlines of Georgia's job
market say this could be a year of
growth, with bright prospects for
job-seekers who have the technology
education and skills required by today's
employers.
In fact, technology is looking like a
real growth area. Many tech job-seekers
can all but walk from their graduation
ceremonies directly into "premium" jobs,
those that pay $45,000 a year or more.
Even the most cautious forecasters see
Georgia gaining some 13,000 of these
coveted technical positions, a projected
increase of nearly 50 percent over 2007.
 Overall, the greatest demand for
employees will come from restaurants,
school boards, hospitals, financial
services businesses and other industries
with a strong technological component.
From bartenders to X-ray technicians,
the jobs are there, analysts say.
In education services, for instance,
Georgia will need to fill 19,190
positions, 7,250 of them created by
departing employees, many of whom are
retiring, according to data from the
Georgia Department of Labor (DOL). The
DOL workforce trend trackers estimate
that 108,000 job openings will be
created in 2008 by Georgia workers who
retire, die, switch careers or otherwise
leave their present employers.
Significantly affected will be the
white-collar classes of employees, says
Georgia DOL workforce analyst John
Lawrence. "In the white collar area, the
better paying jobs are going to be those
for the higher skilled workers that
require more education, training and
experience," says Lawrence, deputy
director of DOL's Workforce Information
and Analysis department. Such employees
are short in numbers and high in demand,
an equation that equals higher pay.
"You're talking about accounting,
finance and sales," Lawrence says.
"Business will need better trained
managers who think strategically."
Experts such as Lawrence cite
Atlanta’s role as a financial center and
its Hartsfield-Jackson International
Airport, as well as easy access across
the state to the ports of Savannah and
Brunswick, as assets that position the
state for growing global trade and the
jobs to sustain it.
 All white-collar jobs are going to
require familiarity with current
technology, Lawrence says. "Technology
is the commodity of the new economy and
that is changing the way we do
business," he says.
According to the DOL, Georgia
employers will need 6,000 middle- and
upper-level managers in 2008. But the
corporate stars of 2008 may be found in
a narrow niche among the estimated 1,040
jobs opening up for accountants and
auditors. Some of the better-paid
numbers-crunchers may owe their jobs to
an act of Congress, if they fit the
bill.
"One of the things we're seeing
universally is a large need for finance
and accounting people," says Allen
Tansil, managing partner for Handler and
Associates, a 30-year-old Atlanta-based
executive search firm retained by
corporations. "With Sarbanes-Oxley
compliance issues, these are very, very
hot jobs."
Sarbanes-Oxley, or SOX as it is known
in corporate America, refers to the 2002
measure passed by Congress in the wake
of the Enron and other corporate
scandals centered on accounting misdeeds
that marked the end of the
1990s."Sarbanes-Oxley says you cannot
use your same [internal] audit company
to do your compliance," Tansil says. SOX
is so new, he adds, that finding
accountants with SOX experience is
difficult, though the financial rewards
for possessing such knowledge can be
quite high.
"What's happened is a lot of smaller
accounting firms are growing like weeds
because they're coming in and providing
this compliance audit work that
[company] auditors cannot do." In
addition, corporations are also looking
for directors of compliance, a job
description tailor-made for an
accountant. Tansil's firm specializes in
finding executives in the six-figure and
up salary range.
Healthy Prospects:
 In healthcare, the age factor is
depleting the state's nursing corps just
at the point nurses will be most in
demand, says Ron Jackson, interim
commissioner of the Georgia Department
of Technical and Adult Education (DTAE),
whose 85 main and satellite campuses
placed 26,000 students into the
workforce in 2006.
"The nursing workforce is aging and
that's a challenge for us at a time when
our population is aging and going to
need healthcare," Jackson says. As a
result, nursing and other healthcare
professionals can just about write their
own ticket in Georgia's 2008 job market.
"One hundred percent of our graduates
found employment last year," says Teresa
Teasley, director of nursing for
Albany's Darton College. "Our new
graduates are making $40,000 to $60,000
in annual salary and they are all
offered many job opportunities."
Nursing graduates also have a voice
in work schedules, with many opting for
four-and even three-day work weeks,
Teasley says. The growing number of
retiring nurses has prompted Darton to
open nursing programs on four satellite
campuses across South Georgia and offer
nursing students core curriculum courses
online. At the same time, the Georgia
DOL is working with the Georgia Nurses
Association in the administration of
federal grants to be used in
underwriting portions of nursing
students'' education costs.
Experts say the state's logistics and
distribution businesses and industries
are thriving, though the 2007 housing
slump could dampen growth in 2008.
Still, there remains a demand for
workers at every step in the movement of
goods. "Logistics and transportation are
huge areas for jobs," says the DTAE's
Jackson. "The distribution centers you
find in Georgia are important
geographically. And that's because they
tend to locate in the rural areas that
need jobs.”
"Atlanta is home to the largest
logistics companies in the world," says
Brett Stevens, president of
Kennesaw-based Search Logix Group, a
firm that matches job candidates with
companies that need them, primarily in
manufacturing and logistics. "We have
Home Depot here and they have a massive
logistics department. We have the UPS
supply chain here, which is probably the
largest in the world. Ryder [truck
leasing] is headquartered in Miami, but
they have a huge facility here as well."
Logix Group specializes in finding
middle managers for logistics and
manufacturing, Stevens says, "usually in
the $80,000 to $100,000 [annual salary]
range."
Stevens is seeing downstate demands
for his manufacturing candidates. "Sure,
Atlanta and the surrounding area are hot
markets right now," he says. "But I'm
also seeing a lot of companies hiring
people, like, in Tifton, Valdosta and
Macon, where some of our offshoot
companies have an office for
manufacturing plants."
Still, he says, Atlanta is the draw
for his management level clients. "They
call Atlanta the executive graveyard,"
Stevens says. "Someone comes here, works
for a couple of years and then their
company wants them to move and they're
like, "I'm not moving." Atlanta is just
a great place to run a business; it’s
affordable; it's climate-friendly; it's
predominantly nonunion; there is a high
quality of living; and the people here
are just nicer."
Hiring Hotspot:
 The most dramatic regional demand for
new employees in 2008 will be along the
43-mile I-185 corridor linking Fort
Benning to a new auto manufacturer in
Troup County.
"The hotspot for 2008 will be West
Georgia between Columbus and LaGrange,"
Thurmond says. "With the decision [by
the Pentagon] to expand the mission of
Fort Benning and the new Kia plant that
could begin hiring in '08, I can't think
of a geographic location with more [job]
opportunities than that one. The
positive economic ferment is
unprecedented."
One reason for the Kia auto
manufacturer's presence in Georgia is
the job training programs the state can
offer. "If you go out there to Kia, and
you look at the training center the
state has built for Kia and that we will
be training in, there will be all the
robots and things that will be putting
the cars together on the floor of that
training center; and we're going to
train these people on that equipment,"
says the DTAE's Jackson. "It's great
serendipity when you have a major auto
manufacturing company that locates in
your state and you can deliver for them
a workforce of 3,000 people within a
12-month period."
More quietly for the West Georgia
region, vendors to and suppliers for Kia
are already announcing their own plant
construction plans, generating even more
jobs there. But manufacturing jobs
require specific skills and education in
a state with an abysmal dropout rate.
"It's not just the 2,500 to 3,000
employees that Kia will hire initially,
but it's the thousands of people to be
hired by Kia and their suppliers there
for the next half century," Thurmond
says. "We are working to build a
workforce that, frankly, is not there
today. The workforce of tomorrow is
sitting somewhere in a classroom today."
If the manufacturing workforce is to
be ready for the growing jobs in West
Georgia and around the state, new and
more specific skills will be required.
"They are going to be highly technically
skilled individuals who keep the robots
working."
Jackson says. "You can go from
factory to factory in Georgia [visiting
companies] that are competing in the
global marketplace and you will find
that they are highly mechanized and
highly computerized."
The technical skill requirements for
automobile manufacturing jobs are
equally in demand in aviation, a sector
that will exhibit a growing hunger for
new employees in 2008. "We’re creating
and expanding our programs in the
aviation area in Augusta, Savannah, Rome
and Americus," Jackson says. "We've got
2,100 students enrolled in those
aviation programs across the state. And
every one of them has a job waiting for
them."
The DTAE recently transferred its
Georgia Aviation Technical College over
to Middle Georgia College in Cochran to
marry the tech college with a four-year
institution, making it one of just a few
in the nation to have such a campus.
"Every graduate that we have at the
Aviation College at Middle Georgia
College is grabbed up the day they walk
out with their diploma or certificate,"
Jackson says. "There is an industry-wide
demand across Georgia. Atlanta, with
Hartsfield-Jackson Airport, middle
Georgia with Warner Robins Air Force
Base, and Gulfstream over on the coast
tend to be the hubs for aerospace jobs."
Aircraft mechanics and service
technicians have an average salary of
$28 an hour.
Despite the rosy take on the 2008 job
prospects, Labor Commissioner Michael
Thurmond was still worried about two
events that were spilling over from 2007
into the new year. "What is sitting on
my mind right now," he says, "is the
housing recession, as well as the
drought, and how those two events - one
man-made, one God made - will impact the
Georgia economy and employment prospects
for the year 2008."
Bye-bye, boomers:
Georgia Commissioner of Labor Michael
Thurmond says a flood of retirements
will impact the state's job market.
Wayne Parham
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