By DANA TIMS/YachatsNews.com
Erik Knoder did a double take when compiling a report detailing projected coastal job and occupational trends for the coming decade.
What Knoder, a regional economist for the Oregon Employment Department, expected to see was job growth running at just under 1 percent a year from 2020 to 2030. For decades, after all, that number has remained remarkably reliable.
When the 10-year figure instead popped up as 16 percent, he was both startled and stumped.
“Then it all made sense,” Knoder said. “I’d completely forgotten that our base year of 2020 was a recession year. We lost a lot of employment and just getting back to scratch will entail a fair amount of growth.”
The pandemic-led plunge in jobs last year is still not back to pre-recession levels, he said, although it is forecast to vigorously bounce back by 2023. From there through the end of the decade, the reliable figure of .8 percent job growth annually is expected to hold.
“We do expect a regional recovery,” Knoder said. “It’s just going to take a little longer than we initially thought.”
The projections are important because they are one tool to help local and regional leaders make decision on everything from job training to housing to expanding or cutting services, or help business owners understand where their industry may be headed.
Chart shows projected growth in various categories of jobs the next 10 years for Lincoln, Benton, Tillamook, Clatsop and Columbia counties.
All of the figures Knoder plugs into his forecasts come from the five-county area of Lincoln, Benton, Clatsop, Columbia and Tillamook counties.
Not surprisingly, the coast’s allure as a retirement mecca is expected to continue. Jobs in the health services sector that are used heavily by senior citizens, for instance, are forecast to increase by nearly 20 percent.
Jobs in leisure and hospitality, which accommodate throngs of tourists, have been slower to rebound than Knoder initially thought, but are still expected to climb by 44 percent through 2030.
A subset of that category – food services and drinking places – is anticipated to grow by 47 percent.
Jobs in food manufacturing, a category reflecting the public’s growing demand for unique and healthy food offerings, are expected to grow by 22 percent.
Conversely, occupations in mining and logging, wood products manufacturing and paper manufacturing are all expected to decline over the coming decade, according to Knoder’s report.
“A lot of that makes sense,” he said. “Logging, for instance, has gotten much more machine dependent in harvesting. And as demand has shifted elsewhere, we have also lost some paper mills. So while we don’t know the future, that’s certainly been the trend.”
The assumptions Knoder works with come from numbers produced by economists working at the national level. Those projections are then passed down to state economists, who plug in information unique to their own areas.
From there, they are fine-tuned around smaller, multi-county clumps. Individual county data are not produced simply because those numbers are considered too small to be statistically meaningful.
“Any one county may have a big expansion in one sector or a big cutback in another, such as mill closing,” Knoder said. “That’s the reason we don’t make county-level projections.”
Still, in summing up current and projected economic trends, the coast and the larger economy as a whole, is in better shape than many may believe, he said.
“It was naïve thinking on my part that we would get back to pre-pandemic job levels far faster than we have,” Knoder said. “But I’m not at all a pessimist about the economy. It’s not all roses, obviously, but it’s not in horrible shape, either.”
- Dana Tims is an Oregon freelance writer who contributes regularly to YachatsNews.com. He can be reached at DanaTims24@gmail.com