Where the Jobs Are

OK, I admit it. Maybe I've been too pessimistic. I know I've said the ranks of the long-term jobless continue to grow. I've also noted the fact that, based on past history, high levels of unemployment tend to linger for quite awhile in the wake of financial crisis-linked downturns. Moreover, I've pointed out that many employers are seeking to boost their bottom lines by squeezing more out of current employees rather than taking on new staff.

But that's not the whole story. There are jobs out there for individuals with plenty of experience. There are opportunities for Americans with skills and training that might have cost tens of thousands of dollars and required many, many hours to acquire. There are ways for unemployed professionals and white-collar workers to be productive again. In "Census Staff's Cream of Crop," the Cincinnati Enquirer tells us all about it.

The U.S. Census Bureau suddenly is finding itself with the most highly skilled, highly educated workforce in its 220-year history - thanks in part to a struggling economy that's produced millions of jobless people eager to work.

Locally, the bureau already has recruited engineers, former corporate vice presidents, college professors and radio disc jockeys to help manage the 2010 census, which will attempt to count everyone in the country beginning in March.

"The horrible recession has benefited us in an indirect way - our applicant pool contains a set of people with experience and background and training that is unprecedentedly rich," said Robert Groves, director of the Census Bureau.

"If you visit our local census offices that are being staffed right now, you'll see people with skills and teamwork experience that we will benefit from, the country will benefit from in the decennial census. So the high unemployment rate has helped us."

Take Eleanor Hicks, who's helping the census bureau count immigrant communities.

Hicks, 66, of North Avondale, has a Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University. She speaks French, Arabic, Thai, Spanish, Italian and German.

In her career at the U.S. State Department, she was tapped at age 29 to run the American consulate in Nice, France - gaining diplomatic celebrity as she dined with Princess Grace of Monaco and had a side career as a recording artist.

She's a former University of Cincinnati political science professor, and the scholarship that goes to the top female graduate student in arts and sciences bears her name. She ran the Cincinnati office of the Federal Reserve Bank, chaired the region's transit authority and now owns an international multicultural consulting business whose clients have included Procter & Gamble and Delphi Automotive.

Now, she's working as a partnership associate for the U.S. Census Bureau - a temporary, part-time job in which she gets paid by the hour to work with minority groups, immigrant communities and neighborhood leaders to educate them on the importance of the 2010 census.

Is she over-qualified?

"I don't think of it in those terms," she said. "If I was looking for a career, that's a separate thing. But it's a temporary job. It serves a civic duty."

The economy, she said, was just one factor.

"It was primarily the flexibility. It was an additional source of income without having to make a choice with my primary source of income," she said.

Advanced degrees

Hicks is not typical, but she does represent what census officials say is a clear trend: More applicants, especially for the office jobs, have advanced degrees, a corporate background and a history of accomplished careers in the private sector.

But hiring overqualified people has its drawbacks, too. Highly skilled applicants for temporary census jobs are more likely to leave if a permanent job comes along.

Two weeks ago, census officials pointed to the manager of the Covington office as an example of the kind of highly educated talent the bureau was able to recruit for this census. Days later, the man left the government for a full-time job as a civil engineer. The office is now run by Holly Black, 39, of Taylor Mill, who came to the census bureau as a recruiter in 2008 after being laid off as a human resources associate.

Still, the turnover so far has been less than the Census Bureau anticipated.

Todd J. Zinser, the inspector general of the U.S. Department of Commerce and a Price Hill native, reported last month that the Census Bureau had an $88 million cost overrun last year in its address canvassing operation - an overrun partly explained, he said, by a less-than-anticipated employee turnover rate. The Census Bureau expected workers to leave for better jobs - but they didn't.

"We saw things we never saw before," said Wendy Button, the chief of decennial recruiting for the Census Bureau. "The acceptance rate of positions was much higher. The people who showed up for training - that number was way higher than expected."

"We've never had to recruit - or entered into a census - where we've had the record high unemployment rates like we have now," she said.

Younger, jobless

In decades past, the enumerators - field workers whose main job is to follow up with households that haven't mailed back their forms - tended to be older. Many were retired, or worked part time and took a census job to supplement their income.

Now, they're more likely to be younger and jobless, increasingly common as the local unemployment rate hovers around 10 percent. Local census officials say they're also seeing stay-at-home moms returning to the workforce, retirees looking to replenish their decimated savings, and college students who need money for rising tuition.

After four days of paid training, they'll work mostly afternoons, evenings and weekends - since that's when people are most likely to be home. Pay depends on the local market, ranging from a starting wage of $12.25 an hour in southeastern Indiana to $16 in the city of Cincinnati.

The qualifications for that job are minimal: Enumerators must have a valid driver's license, have a clean criminal record (generally, no felonies), and pass a 26-question basic skills test demonstrating an ability to read a map and follow procedures.

After that, the most important factor in getting a census job is where you live.

The Census Bureau's philosophy is this: people are more likely to answer questions from someone who lives in their neighborhood. So field workers are assigned to work in the same community - and often the same census tract - where they live.

Extra income

Rob Ervin took a temporary census job as operations manager in the West Chester office to supplement an income from freelance writing and substitute teaching. He had been producer of the Gary Burbank Show on WLW for 12 years before losing that job when Burbank retired in 2007.

Ervin never foresaw the beating the economy would take when he left radio. If he had known, he said, "I would have spent more time trying to figure out my future in a post-Burbank life."

Last year, he got hired as an address canvasser, verifying addresses to mail census surveys to.

Now, he manages "a mountain of paper" that comes through the West Chester office - a good job, Ervin said, that will last only until the office packs up by the end of summer.

"There's two sides to the census," said Ervin, 44, of Hamilton. "You have the cold, statistical, counting numbers paperwork side. Then you have the other side of it, which is, let's go into the neighborhoods and meet our neighbors. I'm getting to do both."

It's a much different role than he had on the Burbank show. There, one of his many duties was to help write questions for the "Senseless Survey" - a bit in which an officious-sounding "Riley Girt" would call unsuspecting people to ask a series of increasingly bizarre "census" questions.

"People are asking me about that a lot," Ervin said. "There's 10 questions on the census this year, and I don't think any of them are, 'Who put the bop in the bop-she-bop?'"

Comments

[Dave Narby]

This is awesome.

Speaking as someone who worked for the census (briefly), this means some of the best and brightest will be faced with the reality of what a total unmitigated make-work goatfuck that is our federal government.

Once they absorb that, I expect them to be *truly* pissed off... And shortly again unemployed. With plenty of time on their hands...

I now have hope we'll actually get change!

...Just not the change the government expected.

[Matt]

In my area I see a lot of jobs for experienced people. No jobs for recent grads.

[Walter Antoniotti]

Friday Jan.8th USA today reported "Outlook for job market is grim"

The following statement was buried in the story and should have been the headline.

More than two-thirds of new jobs won't require any education past high school.

For years we have been graduating too many college graduates, most in majors that would not provide much, if any, economic return. After reporting "around the issue" for many years, the Bureau of Labor Statistics finally corrected the situation. Here is how.

The BLS recently changed the definition of "a new Job" from a activity, skill, or profession that did not previously exist to what most people thought it was, any newly created position. Under the older definition, the BLS would report that 70 plus percent of the "new jobs"require a college education.
That's because to qualify as new, something like a new programming language or kind of a computer software application had to be invented and many of these kinds of positions required an education.

Under the new definition, as you reported correctly "More than two-thirds of new jobs won't require any education past high school." This is extremely important. Our public perception of the economic returns from investing in education has been wrong! So now you have a responsibility to take our primary and secondary educational systems away from academic elitist and return it to educators interested in helping our young people prepare for an attainable career opportunity.

Walter Antoniotti
www.textbooksfree.org

[Soviet of Washington]

Dave...yup. My wife worked for the Census last spring and spent hours dealing with issues that would have taken minutes to decide in the private sector. One of the problems was that military veterans were given extra points on the qualifying exams which resulted in a lot of them in first and second level management. They were nice guys, but couldn't really handle the challenges of managing the uncertainties and general government snafus of a once-every-ten-year project.

[John]

You are being sarcastic right?

[Michael Panzner]

I resemble that remark! -- Groucho Marx