The Labor G ap

Businesses in Washington can’t find enough qualified job candidates, and schools aren’t turning them out. Meanwhile, thousands of people remain unemployed.

By Steve Reno | July 2010 | FROM THE PRINT EDITION

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