To be sure, Mount Airy is struggling after huge employment losses when textile and apparel plants closed. But the area’s short-term retraining provider, Surry Community College, has been creative in helping getting local residents re-employed.

One of the recent bright spots: Surry CC’s viticulture and enology program. That’s right — the community college is helping displaced manufacturing workers transition into North Carolina’s burgeoning winemaking industry.

USA Today does a nice job outlining the issues in this story.

North Carolina’s entrepreneurs have been planting vineyards to replace tobacco fields and starting wineries to draw tourists. Across the state, the acreage set aside for vineyards has more than doubled since 2000. North Carolina is now No. 10 nationwide in growing grapes and No. 7 in making wine.

Surry Community College is turning out graduates who can grow grapes, apply pesticides, make wine and market vintages. The college has a 4-acre vineyard and sells wines under its Surry Cellars label. Graduates of its viticulture and enology program can find work in vineyards for up to $17 an hour and as winemakers for up to $70,000 a year.

What other fields are showing promise in the region and might be good targets for retraining? Here’s a table of high-growth industries projected out to 2011 put together in EMSI’s labor market research tool. We filtered out industries that pay less than $25,000 per year.

And using EMSI’s regionalized staffing patterns, here are the fastest-changing occupations for the above industries.

If you’re interested in seeing this data for your region, please contact Josh Wright (jwright@economicmodeling.com).

Illustration by Mark Beauchamp

An outstanding news story from today’s “Morning Edition” on NPR highlighted the struggle that faces many community colleges and workforce boards: Companies want new workers but can’t find people with the right skills, and lots of people are looking for new careers but aren’t qualified for the jobs that exist. The solution seems simple — just get the unemployed people into the new jobs. …

However, as the story pointed out, it’s not really that easy.

In most cases, the primary hurdle that jobseekers, the workforce system, and companies face is that of skill gaps. Former manufacturing workers who have lost their jobs in places like GM plants are quickly realizing new jobs require a lot more training while employers generally expect workers to be proficient in a variety of tasks. Many of the skill sets associated with modern domestic manufacturing require the level of training found in the information technology sector.

>> For more on this, check out this article on mechatronics by Scott Sheely of the Lancaster County Workforce Investment Board.

As a result, workers trying to re-enter the workforce are often in need of heavy retraining, which is a dreaded concept because it means having to “go back to school.” Workers in their 30s or 40s, accustomed to the higher wages and benefits of a GM or Chrysler, will quickly grasp the implications. They have to figure out how to pay the mortgage, support the family, and go back to school all at the same time. It is a very exhausting reality to face, and many workers have either dropped out of the system or become too intimidated to contact colleges or the workforce community for help.

At EMSI, we want to help colleges and workforce boards break through this wall to encourage and support these workers so they can be retrained and re-employed. We have two services that are great starting points for understanding local employment and helping people connect to meaningful careers:

1. First, we have designed a powerful research and planning tool to let your college unlock local employment data in order to better understand local skills needs and the characteristics of local industries and occupations. This information is so key because it helps you communicate with local companies about what sort of skills and training they look for so you can make sure your programs are hitting the target.
2. Second, we are currently developing a new tool that can be placed directly into your college’s website so jobseekers can easily browse and understand local jobs (wages, trends, and openings) and find related training at your college. In this tool we will directly link occupations to your college’s specific departments and training programs so jobseekers can get in touch with the right training. Be sure to check back soon for more.

For more information on how EMSI can help, please contact Rob Sentz (rob@economicmodeling.com).

First, the Labor Department released the latest state-by-state unemployment rates, and 31 states added jobs in January. The biggest percentage decline in the jobless rate came in Michigan, which went from 14.5% to 14.3% — still the highest in the country, however, by 1.3% over Nevada.

Meanwhile, Mississippi had the biggest jump in percentage, from 10.5% to 10.9%.

Click here to see a neat WSJ graphic.

Second, Casey Mulligan from the University of Chicago looks at the effect of the federal minimum wage increase on part-time jobs. Mulligan’s conclusion:

With all of this recession’s significant labor market problems, and the expensive federal efforts to offset them, it’s too bad that the minimum-wage law added so many people to the list of those who today cannot find jobs.

On the other end of the spectrum, art, entertainment, and recreation (0.9%) and construction (1.1%) have the fewest job openings, compared to a percentage of total existing and open jobs. Catherine Rampell explains more here.

For more detail, here’s an informative table from the JOLTS report:

A quick survey of data in EMSI’s Job Aggregator tool confirms these numbers. For example, below are the top jobs over the last week by openings for New York, based on Indeed.com’s database. The tool combines the postings for any region and filters them by SOC code and education level.

Five of the 10 top occupations are in the health care industry, while physical therapist assistants is closely associated.

For more on EMSI’s Job Aggregator, reach us at 866.999.3674 or rob@economicmodeling.com.

The following graph is from his blog — his analysis showed that more than 100 economists were hired in 2009.

If you’re even more curious, here are the top industries that staff economists. This chart also comes from EMSI’s labor market tools. There were 112 net new economist jobs in 2009, but everyone of the top industries — except for the federal government — shed a small percentage.

From January to February, the jobless rate increased for those with a high school diploma (from 11.5% to 11.9%) and those with less than a high school education (17.6% to 17.9%). But for those with an associate’s or bachelor’s degree, the rates went down — and they were pretty low in the first place.

Here’s a chart that went along with Murray’s post:

Federal employees make 20% more than a private-sector workers in the same occupation, the newspaper discovered. Federal workers out-earn their counterparts in more than eight of 10 occupations. The articles includes some great detail, including a long table comparing wages of specific occupations:

In other news today, the February BLS jobs report is out and the unemployment rate held steady at 9.7%. Job losses are starting to peter out but check out this graph from Economix on employment declines in recent recessions. Startling to the say the least.

“Potential saviors of the economy.”

That comes from University Business, which has a lengthy look at community colleges in its latest edition. The article hits on renewed attention from lawmakers that has put two-year training providers in the spotlight.

The attention partly explains why full-time enrollment at community colleges nationwide has increased 24% in the last two years, according to the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC).

“Never in my life would I have expected community colleges to be called potential saviors of the economy,” says George Boggs, president of the American Association of Community Colleges. “When the downturn started and people were being laid off, community colleges sent teams into companies to talk to workers about their options,” he explains. The importance of community colleges progressed from there.

As the recession drags on and more people turn to higher ed as a way to weather the storm, community colleges are increasingly in demand. “I think we are going to drive this economy back to where it needs to be,” says Mary Spangler, president of Houston Community College.

The articles also tackles the funding and budget issues facing community colleges, as well as the importance of articulation agreements to ensure community college students can move on to get bachelor degrees — and beyond.

Articulation agreements are also needed because long-term economic recovery will require them. “As the economy recovers, the demand over the next several years for BA and higher degrees will be pretty robust,” says Tony Carnevale, director of the Center on Education and the Workforce at Georgetown University (D.C.). According to CEW projections, there will be around 13 million job openings for people with certificates or AA degrees and 17 million for holders of a BA and higher from 2008 to 2018.

“When employers start hiring again, it will be across the entire economy,” says Tony Pals, director of public information for the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities. He highlights information from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showing that 2009 unemployment rates among people who hold BA and higher degrees are lower than those with associate degrees. Although, AA holders have faired better than those without any college education. “For the nation’s economic well being, we need to increase the number of workers who complete some form of postsecondary study,” Pals says.

Why have community colleges proven to be so valuable? Well, here’s just one example: Valencia Community College in Florida, an EMSI client, has partnered with a local high school to offer a program that lets students formally work toward a college degree at a full-fledged Valencia campus next door to their high school.

According to the Orlando Sentinel story, “An added bonus for students who shoot for an associate degree: “If kids stay on track, they can save thousands of dollars,” (Principal Rob) Anderson said.

If you’re a Facebook user like so many out there, be sure to check out EMSI’s new Facebook page and become a fan. We’ll keep it filled with the latest news updates and tidbits we find on issues pertaining to higher education, workforce development, and economic development — as well as anything else of interest.

We’d love to hear what you think in the comments section below any new Facebook entry. And if you have any suggestions for our blog or anything else, feel free to email Rob Sentz.

Oregon Representative Peter DeFazio took exception to the estimate and wrote a letter to Kai Ryssdal, host of Marketplace. You can listen to the segment or read the transcript here. (The topic comes up at around 20:45 of the audio stream.)

Here’s the essence of it from the transcript:

Finally, an object lesson in the perils of covering the American economy. A couple of Fridays ago, Felix Salmon, one of the regulars in our Weekly Wrap, said this as a part of a conversation about how the president can create new jobs.

FELIX SALMON: Of course, infrastructure investment is extremely expensive way of creating jobs. It costs a good $200,000 per job.

Couple of days later we got a letter from a listener, someone who’s been on the show a couple of times, actually. Representative Peter DeFazio, Democrat of Oregon.

The congressman took issue with Felix’s $200,000 a job figure. He says the number’s really closer to $92,000 a job. That’s according to the President’s Council of Economic Advisors, Mr. DeFazio told us. Felix got his estimate from a private consulting firm, called Economic Modeling Specialists, Incorporated.

So, what is the object lesson here? That what you believe about business and the economy depends in very great measure on who you talk to and what economists you read. That is why we’ve put links to the studies and economic models both Felix and Congressman DeFazio quoted on our Web site, so you can have a look and maybe decide for yourselves.

The next day, Salmon posted DeFazio’s letter in full on his blog and wrote a scathing response on how the government “fudges” job statistics. Salmon’s lengthy post and the dozens of comments below make for some fascinating reading — he distinguishes between “dollars per job created” and the “job-years” that DeFazio refers to.

Salmon especially nails it in this section:

The fact is that if you move away from vague country-level statistics and start drilling down to the actual number of jobs created by actual infrastructure projects, you never get anywhere near $92,000 per job. For instance, have a look at the job-creation statistics on this page.

A 5-mile stretch of highway, costing $50 million, creates a total of 79 jobs. That’s over $600,000 per job. Even if you divide that by two on the grounds that it’s a two-year project, that’s still $300,000 per job-year. In railways, a $15 million investment creates 12 jobs — that’s $1.25 million per job, and it’s a one-year project.

I’ve seen similar numbers surrounding hospitals, and higher numbers surrounding nuclear power stations — basically, infrastructure investment is an incredibly inefficient way of creating jobs.

If you have any questions on EMSI’s series of green jobs papers, please contact Rob Sentz at rob@economicmodeling.com.