If the great recession taught us anything, it’s that the national economy isn’t very national. With the failure of the housing markets and the explosion of user level technology comes a remarkable change in the culture. Only 50% of college graduates from the past Seven years have been able to find work, Their parents are not faring much better.
The result is a shift in the way things work.
The south is growing. The Northeast and the Midwest are shrinking. The West is hanging on.
New Orleans has the fastest percentage growth in college graduates. Tech centers are sprouting anywhere you can cram desks close together. Young people are flocking to the big cities but the jobs aren’t there.
This week’s Five Links will give you a quick look at the question with loss of data to chew on.
- Metropolitan Jobs Recovery? Not Yet
While the economy is picking up steam, it is not evenly spread around the country. In particular, cities are getting a slower start. “61 of the 100 largest U.S. metro areas are still below pre-recession peak jobs levels as of the end of 2013.” Until the cities latch on to the momentum, it isn’t really a recovery (since the majority of the population live in those cities) - Special Report: Metropolitan Area Population Estimates
The country’s demographics are shifting. The South is where immigrants head. The North and Midwest have birthrates at a level that caused Denmark to run a campaign encouraging reproduction. Nearly 785,000 more people moved to the major metropolitan areas of the South from other parts of the country than left. A much smaller 170,000 net domestic migrants moved to major metropolitan areas in the West. At the same time the Northeast lost 485,000 net domestic migrants and the Midwest lost 280,000. - The New Geography of Jobs
This is Enrico Moretti’s website for the increasingly influential book. While the digital age was supposed to make geography irrelevant, the surprise is that it’s more important than ever. “A new map is being drawn and it’s not about red versus blue or rich versus poor. The rise of American brain hubs is causing huge geographic disparities in education, income, life expectancy, family stability, and political engagement. Dealing with this split—encouraging growth in the hubs while arresting the decline elsewhere—will be the challenge of the century, and The New Geography of Jobs lights the way.” - Good Jobs Often Not a Matter of Degrees
Barely half of the people who graduated from college since 2006 have jobs. Meanwhile, by 2020 the nation could face a shortfall of about 875,000 machinists, welders, industrial-machinery operators and other highly skilled manufacturing professionals. Whatever it is that’s happening, it’s regional and won’t respond to national solutions that deliver ‘more’ education. - America’s New Brainpower Cities
People are not going where they used to go. New Orleans is the city with the fastest percentage growth in college graduates in the past 5 years. “For $65,000 a year in San Francisco you get a shared apartment and no car,” says long-time New Orleans tech entrepreneur Chris Reed. ”Here, you get great restaurants and clubs, and you get to have a car and your own nice apartment. It’s a no-brainer.”
Bonus Link
- Motivational Wave
This 20 minute video about creating behavior change in the health care market (i.e., how do you get people to go to the gym 4 times/week?) has real value in the user adoption conversation. BJ Fogg explains what he calls the “Motivation Wave.” In short, there are windows of motivation that you have to capitalize on to achieve hard objectives. So, getting users to embrace a new piece of software is partly design of the tool and partly design of the implementation. This matters significantly in SaaS applications. Today, the practice is to assume that design solves the entire problem.,
Upcoming Events (I’ll be there)
- PeopleMatter Collaborate ’14 – Charleston – May 8-9, 2014 Single stack talent tools for Hospitality and Retail
- Solid Conference – San Francisco – May 21-22, 2014 – The internet of things means that hardware and software are merging. This OReilly conference is the first to cover it. Amazing selection of front end thinkers.
- iRecruit – Amsterdam – June 5-6, 2014
- JobG8 Job Board Summit – Orlando – June 26-27, 2014
HRExaminer Radio Shows: live Fridays @1100 am Pacific (200 PM ET), recorded on the website and iTunes
- Archives
- April 11, 2014: Felix Wetzel: Director of Strategy, Evenbase
- April 18, 2014: Danielle Weinblatt: CEO, TakeTheInterview
- April 25, 2014: Kathryn Minshew: Founder and CEO, The Muse