Economic Outlook ‘96 Workers Facing Fluid Job Market New Opportunities Emerge, But Most Require Special Skills, Flexibility

Will the economy betray the next generation?

Mike Page, a high school teacher in the Nine-Mile Falls school district, said that question is on the minds of young people as they prepare to step into the world of work.

“My students, and not even just the thoughtful ones, hear a lot of gloomsayers out there saying that these students will be the first American generation to be less well off than their parents.”

Page asked the economists and analysts gathered at The Spokesman-Review economic forum just what kind of economic realities his students will be facing.

Underlying that question is an old perception that Spokane doesn’t provide its children career opportunities - that a high school or college graduate has to move away in order to get a good job.

Relatively recently, the economists say, that perception was reality. But in light of the region’s recent economic growth and a restructuring of the work force nationwide, there may be more opportunities than many people think. You just have to know where to look.

Gary Smith, an economist with the Washington State University School of Agriculture and Home Economics, told Page that during the gray economic days of the 1980s, Spokane’s economy did have trouble supplying a lot of people with adequate jobs.

“When things were going to hell in a handbasket,” Smith said, “our wages and earnings went south as well.”

But the robust economy of the 1990s has created thousands of jobs each year in the Inland Northwest.

That means that wealth being generated here in these good economic times is being plowed back into the local economy, according to Phil Kuharski of Prudential Securities, a longtime Spokane economic analyst.

And job creation in an expanding economy produces opportunities for people just entering the job market.

“We wouldn’t have created, over the last three or four years, 4,500 to 5,000 jobs per year unless capital was staying here,” Kuharski said.

And, Kuharski says, local jobs generally pay enough for workers to live here.

“We are not having out-migration,” he said. “We are not having major increases in unemployment. All of these indicators tell us that we have basically a healthy economy with wages being paid at a sufficiently high level to keep people here.”

But young people seeking to participate in Spokane’s economy, or the nation’s economy for that matter, will have to go about it in a different fashion than previous generations.

“The situation where you go to college for four years, you get a degree in business and you automatically get this $30,000 or $40,000-a-year job at a bank or something, well, it just doesn’t exist anymore,” said Meri Berberet, a local economic analyst.

Something else that doesn’t exist anymore is the right-out-of-high-school, blue-collar job that pays a middle-class wage.

The days that a high school graduate could go to work for Kaiser Aluminum or in the mines and make a career of it are long gone. Even production line jobs at Kaiser require specific technical degrees in the manufacturing field, and usually manufacturing experience.

Now, many of the best jobs are at less visible companies. And the list of opportunities is fluid, changing from year to year.

“We’re going to see a lot more focus on the two-year technical degree out of a community college than a four-year degree out of the typical university,” said Berberet, “because a lot of companies are looking for people who are really specifically trained.”

Neither the training nor the work it provides will last a lifetime, the economists said. Young people entering the work force now will have to be highly adaptable. They will have to be flexible enough to retrain every few years as the jobs they hold evolve with new technology.

“I am very positive about the outlook for the young people today and their opportunity,” said Kuharski. “It’s just going to be a little bit different world.”

That was the primary theme of panelists’ comments.

“I think the opportunities are incredible,” said John Mitchell, senior vice president and chief economist at Portland-based U.S. Bancorp. “But the critical thing is to get the right skills - to learn how to learn stuff.

“I have great faith in people responding to incentive,” Mitchell added. “As people see where the opportunities are, and where the wages are, you’ll see their training move in that direction.”

Shaun O’L. Higgins, The Spokesman-Review’s director of marketing and sales, said young people will have to focus more on “work” and less on a job.

Higgins defined work as something that makes a direct contribution to creating wealth and customers, as opposed to a job, which is an activity that merely generates a paycheck.

“There’s a lot of opportunity and potential for those who understand that,” Higgins said. “I think there will be a very brave world of work tomorrow, but it’s a very different world than the traditional job structure we’ve seen. That change can be very discomforting.”

, DataTimes