Jobs seem to be all we talk about these days.
Well, jobs and celebrity nonsense – whether the celebrity itself is real (Katy Perry) or imagined (anyone named Kardashian).
Even the GOP primary battle royale continues to buzz around jobs, except for when those headline-grabbing sex scandals crash the party. Who cares if Herman Cain doesn't know where Israel is, but now we hear he cheated on his wife…and that's grounds for dismissal.
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But I digress. Jobs are the news of the day. And we're staring at a radically different job market from as little as five to 10 years ago. Manufacturing's all but disappeared. Dot-com gigs are more up and down than their parent company IPOs. Even the once-reliable call center jobs that had seen something of a recent revival – at least in the Midwest – are being packed up and shipped overseas as well.
But if there's one constant among all this uncertainty, it's that health care jobs are not only here to stay, they've become a growth industry, emerging as one of the brighter spots (again) in the latest Labor department jobs report last week http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm.
While the overall jobless rate dipped to 8.6 percent – a three-year low – the health care industry piled on 17,000 jobs in November, with hospitals adding 9,000, more than half the total. The industry's been adding 27,000 a month (on average) over the last 12 months, according to the report.
This trend has nowhere to go but up. We're getting older as a whole, boosting demand, driving up prices and, of course, increasing a protracted labor surge in that sector, as well.
Oddly enough, this trend will almost certainly continue regardless of how the Supreme Court rules on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Talk about a recession-proof business…
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