The Labor G ap

After a year of working as a receptionist under an abusive boss at a physical therapy office, Hannah Hurvitz decided to quit and look for something better. Unfortunately, the year was 2008, and job opportunities were disappearing rapidly. She applied for more than 160 receptionist jobs, but received only a few interviews and no offers.

One thing she knew was that even in the midst of the recession there were always jobs available for nurses. Hurvitz began taking prerequisite courses for the nursing program at North Seattle Community College, which she completed in June. Only one major obstacle remains: admission to the nursing program, which received 230 applications this year but accepted just 64 students.

“If you are not at the top of the class, you’re not going to get selected,” she says.

Hurvitz’s dilemma is increasingly common among residents of Washington state. Although there are always thousands of jobs available—there were about 32,000 job openings in Washington during 2009 even in the middle of the recession—most of those jobs either do not pay enough to support someone in a major metropolitan area or demand skill sets not available among the state’s hundreds of thousands of unemployed.

Almost half of the jobs available at any given time are positions such as cashiers, waitstaff and customer service representatives, jobs that pay little and have high turnover. Another 25 percent of the vacancies offer a median wage of $24 an hour, but are in fields such as health care, computer science, engineering and management, for which there is a shortage of talent. In part, this situation is the result of a lack of interest among K-12 students in what teachers call the STEM pipeline: science, technology, engineering and mathematics. But another key obstacle is the lack of capacity in the higher education system that prevents state residents from getting the training they need to fill those positions.

The current supply of people trained for these science-based jobs does not meet the demand, and this leads to an employment gap, says John Lederer, director of policy planning and research at the Washington State Higher Education Coordinating Board (HECB). “There’s no reason to believe that when the economy picks up again, those gaps won’t be every bit as large as they were before the recession.”

In a 2009 report by the Washington State Employment Security Department listing occupations with the most vacancies, registered nurses took the lead with 2,278. A study by the University of Washington estimated that the number of graduating registered nurses will have to increase by at

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