The rebound: Growth is in the forecast – will you be ready?

It was good news, sorta, kinda, the notation from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that the unemployment rate in Virginia didn’t go up yet again in April, and instead remained unchanged from March at 6.8 percent.

Forgive Janelle Davis if she didn’t feel all that celebratory. “With the market taking the toll that it did, it was just dramatic how quickly everything happened,” said Davis, of Stuarts Draft, who lost an early casualty of the downturn, and is now embarking on the next phase of her life as a college student. 

Davis had attended college after high school but dropped out 53 credits short of her degree. After working in a quality-assurance job in a local manufacturing facility, she moved into real estate at the height of the housing bubble, only to fall victim when the bubble burst. 

A cousin was helping Davis update her resume when a question arose as to what she might be able to do to finish her undergraduate education. “With the job market being the way it is, it just makes sense to go back and do this. Especially because I’d been thinking about going back and doing it in the back of my mind anyway,” said Davis, who will take classes at Blue Ridge Community College in Weyers Cave this summer and then move into the adult-degree program at Mary Baldwin College in Staunton in the fall.

The plan is to finish up her degree work at the latest by the fall of 2010. “I can see it. It’s closer than what I’d ever thought now. Mary Baldwin is a great opportunity for me. It’s hard to work so much and try to go to school, too. I can balance this and get this done in a year and a half, and then we’ll see what happens,” Davis said.

By all accounts, the job market of the fall of 2010 should be a different one altogether than what we have right now. Even with the good news in the short term about unemployment holding steady in April, we are likely to see a bit more pain in the market before things start to get noticeably better. William Mezger, the chief economist at the Virginia Employment Commission, is forecasting increases in the state unemployment rate when data for May and June are released in the next couple of months.

Economists and analysts across the spectrum seem to be in agreement that the economy will rebound from the recession that started in December 2007 to growth by the fourth quarter of this year, but there is not agreement on how soon the return to growth will impact on the jobs picture.

“We’re going to see continued job losses into the fall, and then we’re going to see the tide turn. You’re already seeing the tide turn in terms of the number of jobs lost,” said Shafiq Lokhandwala, the CEO of the Wilmington, Mass.,-based NuView Systems, a human-resources software developer, who sees job growth coinciding with the end of the recession forecast later this year.

“Demand is going to pick up as people who have been holding back a bit in anticipation of the economy starting to improve, and once that happens, you’re going to start seeing the job market improve, if you don’t see companies start adding more people in anticipation of demand picking up,” Lokhandwala said.
Figuring out where the jobs will be is not what you could call an exact science. Lokhandwala is among those who foresee the bulk of the job growth that will come in the retail, service and health-care sectors. Davis is preparing herself with that thought in mind, focusing her attention on business-administration and -management classes with an eye toward enhancing her resume and skill set honed by years of work in manufacturing and real estate.

“I’ve just got to pray and see what guides me,” Davis said. “From when I started school out of high school years ago, everything has changed now. Things that you thought you could do that was more lucrative, it’s not the same now. You’ve got to keep on top of things because things are constantly changing.”

“We’re seeing more activity, and a lot more calls and interest is being generated, and I definitely feel that the interest is due to the economy,” said Joan Henry at the Adult Degree Completion Program at Eastern Mennonite University in Harrisonburg, which has had to add a summer offering to its schedule to accommodate the increase in demand from the local community for the 15-month program for people who want to finish work toward their bachelor’s degree.

Some of that demand is coming from people who have lost jobs in the current economic downturn. Others, Catherine Ferris McPherson, a business-administration professor at Mary Baldwin College in Staunton, has noticed, are motivated by the desire to “better compete for a new job, should they be laid off or their company closes, or to keep the job they already have should lay offs occur.”

“I don’t get too many saying they need to refocus their efforts into another career direction because they feel their field has become obsolete – it’s more that they want to secure the place they already have,” McPherson said.

John Downey, the vice president for instruction and student services at Blue Ridge Community College in Weyers Cave, attributes part of the 10 percent of the growth in enrollment at the college in the past year to people currently employed who are “looking at improving or upgrading their skill sets.”

Pressure to that end is also coming from local manufacturing plant managers, Downey said. “What we’re hearing from industry is that despite high unemployment, they still can’t find the type of people that are technically trained that can go right out and work in industry,” Downey said.

It’s definitely not the best time to be graduating from college.

“Each decade seems to have its period of really bad employment,” said Sherry Talbott, the director of career services at Bridgewater College, observing that there tends to be a year or two each decade where college grads enter a job market constricted by an economic retraction of one degree or another.

The Class of 2009, Talbott said, “is going to need to be more savvy” in its approach to the current down job market, maybe taking the opportunity to start graduate school to add to their skill sets, maybe upping their Internet skills “not just to access job-search engines, but to research companies and to find different ways to find where the jobs are.”

“That said, what I’ve noticed about this class is that they seem to be calmer about things than I would have expected. They seem to be focused on doing what they need to do to get through this the best they can,” Talbott said.

- Story by Chris Graham

Time to regroup

Back to school