The numbers say it all. Illinois, with only 4.4 percent unemployment (the national average is 4.7 percent), 5.8 million residents working, and thousands of new jobs opening up each year, is a hot job market. And the job picture should remain rosy.
“Illinois and the Midwest are strong right now and will continue to be strong for the next several years,” says Michael Evans, a professor of economics at the J.L.Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University. Although the state’s manufacturing base has declined, new jobs in financial services and high technology have more than offset such losses, Evans says.
Newly released statistics from the Illinois Information Coordinating Committee prove Evans’ point.
According to the report, “Illinois Job Outlook In Brief,” thousands of new jobs will be available each year through 2005, from those requiring short term, on-the job training, to those requiring advanced degrees. The hottest jobs are those in each category which will have the most openings in the next seven years, and which provide higher than average salaries for their education or training levels.
In Illinois, as in the rest of the country, many of the best jobs are in technology. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of jobs in computer-related fields is expected to grow by over 90 percent between 1994 and 2005, with openings in the Midwest remaining high.
“We’re becoming known as the Silicon Prairie here,” says Evans. Demand for computer programmers, especially those who can program in Java, or who have Internet skills, will remain high, as will the need for production and assembly and line workers in local semiconductor plants.
Illinois’ status, as the location of both the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the Chicago Board of Trade, and as the headquarters of scores of Fortune 1000 companies, also places accountants, auditors and financial managers at the top of the hot jobs chart, with starting salaries of almost $30,000 for candidates with college degrees.
Other `hot’ jobs are in categories which were recently at the bottom of employment lists. When the Cold War ended just a few years ago, area telecommunications and electronics companies cut back on their research and development efforts and released thousands of electrical and other engineers.
Because there were so many unemployed engineers in the marketplace, college students avoided engineering programs and headed for business school and other majors.
Now that the economy’s expanded again, there’s a shortage of engineers. The state’s Job Outlook reports that Illinois companies will hire more than 3,000 engineers each year until 2005, at starting salaries of $40,000 or more.
Similar cycles of oversupply, followed by fewer candidates going into the field, have affected the demand for nurses and teachers. The report predicts job openings for 4,746 new teachers each year until 2005 and for 3,585 more registered nurses and 1,146 licensed practical nurses.
The demand for secretaries is so high that the occupation tops the state’s postsecondary vocational training category, with 3,876 more secretaries needed yearly. Although the state’s average salary range for these jobs is $17,000 to over $28,000, Chicago-area secretaries with special skills, such as legal or medical, can earn much more, according to David Roush, the Wheeling-based area vice president of AccuStaff, a leading temporary staffing company.
Jobs with high demand and high pay which require vocational or on-the-job training include auto mechanics, who can earn over $35,000 a year, carpenters, who can make over $50,000, production line supervisors, and utility repairers.
“As the labor market shrinks, we are expanding our worker training programs, so that we have candidates to fill job gaps,” says Rolf Kleiner, senior vice president and general manager of Kelly Scientific Resources, a unit of Kelly Services, Inc. Kleiner, who oversees his company’s regional office in Downers Grove from Troy, Mich., adds, that once the trained workers are in place, they are often offered permanent jobs.
No matter how they land those hot jobs, Illinois workers will have to face one disappointment — raises in 1998 will be no larger than they were in 1997.
According to Buck Consultants, a New York-based human resources consulting firm, merit increases for exempt (white collar) employees will average 4 percent in the Midwest next year, and 3.9 percent for hourly workers, a fraction below national averages. More than nine out of 10 Fortune 1000 companies polled by the firm do plan to reward their executives with bonuses, which will average over 38 percent of their base salaries. Bonuses are lower, and less frequent, for lower level exempt workers, although 73 percent of the companies in the survey will award bonuses of about 14 percent of pay to their non-sales white collar employees.
Almost 40 percent of the companies have formal bonus plans for their hourly employees, although those awards will average only 5.6 percent of their base pay.
