The job market, while slowly improving, is clearly still painful. It could take five years to return to ruddy health. However, two sectors stand out and Atlanta is positioned to benefit from them.
The education industry is expanding. The baby boomers’ children, the “echo boomers,” are entering undergraduate and graduate programs. The older echo boomers are having kids, to such an extent that the United States is seeing near record births. This will boost the need for elementary school teachers.
Meanwhile, the 76 million baby boomers, as we age, are purchasing more health care services. (When I would hurt my shoulder playing basketball in high school, I would put ice on it. Now, it means six months at the physical therapist.) Job opportunities, as the economy recovers, will be numerous – for nurses, doctors, pharmacists, lab technicians, etc.
The upshot is that U.S. employment in both the health care industry and the education industry has grown every month in the past decade. This is exceptional, when you consider that during the financial crisis of late 2008, total U.S. jobs fell by 800,000 monthly. When you are young, you have to go to school; and when you are really ill, you have to go to a doctor or nurse.
U.S. employment in each of these industries has grown cumulatively by about 30 percent since January 2001. The question is, will Atlanta be successful in these growing sectors?
The key, in a world of intense competition in every industry, is to have a strategy: identify the best areas to specialize in and pursue them.
The Metro Atlanta Chamber has done just that.
In a recent study, working with Bain Consulting and industry leaders, its “New Economy Task Force” identified five industry clusters where Atlanta should focus.
The criteria were wise ones. Chamber president Sam A. Williams explains: “First, we studied Atlanta’s relative strengths. What features of Atlanta can make us more competitive than other cities in some industries? Second, what are industries of the future? No sense investing in shrinking industries, so our strategy is to focus on industries which are projected to grow significantly, and in which Atlanta can uniquely position itself to compete.”
An example of a chamber cluster is health IT. Atlanta leads the nation in the number of firms in this field, with many of our 150 firms being entrepreneurial ventures which benefit from our outstanding universities.
The Atlanta region has 57 colleges and universities, enrolling over 250,000 students. This is more than the other major sunbelt cities we compete with to attract businesses: Houston, Phoenix and Dallas. Our growth continues, as Georgia Gwinnett College exemplifies. Under the leadership of President Daniel Kaufman, this new four-year public college will enroll 8,000 students this August: 750 jobs have been created at a college that did not exist in 2005.
Further, Georgia State University and the Atlanta University center illustrate that we benefit from the diversity of our universities in terms of their specialties, and of their students — we are third in the nation in African-American university students.
College graduates fuel our new businesses and educating them is a generator of many jobs. Our job creation in the education industry and the health industry reinforce each other.
Cutting-edge research leads to good jobs, so it is heartening that Atlanta ranks fifth among all metro areas in University research expenditures.
In the health IT cluster, metro Atlanta benefits from the world leader, McKesson Technology Solutions; it employs thousands of people here. Rapid growth stems from many start-ups that rely on the research and graduates of our universities.
A second example of the Metro Atlanta Chamber’s strategic clusters for economic development is supply chain. This may not sound glamorous, as it involves such sectors as transportation, logistics and distribution services. However, supply chain is a massive growth area as business becomes more global.
The opportunity for Atlanta to become a world leader in this growth industry makes sense, as the Georgia Tech Supply Chain Institute creates a superb talent pool of graduates.
Atlanta’s leadership in health care is highlighted by Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, the Shepherd Center and the roughly 11,000 employees in the Emory system of health care.
Including all aspects of education and health services, Georgia employs half a million people. This total can grow significantly, as the talent pool broadens and deepens. For example, the state’s 26 technical colleges comprise 190,000 students.
Overall job market may still be moribund, but two sectors stand out: education and health care. Both Georgia and metro Atlanta are poised for success in these strategic sectors.
