Gassing Up: Why America’s Future Job Growth Lies In Traditional Energy Industries
29th September 2011
Joel Kotkin lays it out.
My colleagues at Praxis Strategy Groupand I have looked over data for the period after the economy started to weaken in 2006. Using stats from EMSI, based on data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, we compared sectors by growth, and then by average salary.
Not surprisingly “recession-proof” fields such as health care and education expanded some 11% over the past five years. More inexplicably, given its role in detonating the Great Recession, the financial sector expanded some 10%.
Considering the number of government bailouts of firms ‘too big to fail’, it certainly doesn’t surprise me.
But the biggest growth by far has taken place in the mining, oil and natural gas industries, where jobs expanded by 60%, creating a total of 500,000 new jobs. While that number is not as large as those generated by health care or education, the quality of these jobs are far higher. The average job in conventional energy pays about $100,000 annually — about $20,000 more than finance or professional services pay. The wages are more than twice as high as those in either health or education.