S.C. open jobs, jobless often don’t match up

There were nearly 40,000 job vacancies in South Carolina last month and more than 200,000 people who were unemployed in the state.
Why can’t at least some of those jobless workers be matched with the open jobs?
Gov. Mark Sanford has asked that question repeatedly as he has warred with the S.C. Employment Security Commission, saying he should have control of the state’s jobs agency.
“It makes no sense to have an unemployment rate that is higher than we all would like while at the same time there are ... unfilled job postings across the state,” Sanford said during his State of the State speech.
Sanford argues the state’s high unemployment rate — 9.5 percent in January and expected to be higher when the latest numbers are released Friday — could be lowered if the state employment agency did a better job of placing people in jobs.
Others say the state’s unemployment problem is not a black-and-white numbers issue. Instead, they say it is complicated by other problems, including:
• Too many untrained workers who lack the skills wanted by employers who are hiring
• Too few jobs in rural areas
• And, some Sanford critics say, the state’s failure to attract enough new jobs
The task of putting the jobless to work is complicated by a gap between the skills of jobless workers and the skills wanted by companies that are hiring, said Stephen Marshall, deputy executive director of the S.C. Employment Security Commission.
There also is a geography gap, Marshall said. Many rural areas lack jobs, but many rural South Carolinians are reluctant to move to larger cities to find work.
“We still have two very distinct South Carolinas,” Marshall said. “We have metropolitan areas and the rural areas. Most of the openings are concentrated in the metro areas.”
THE NUMBERS
To understand the debate, it’s important to know where the number of jobs reported as being open comes from.
Each month, The Conference Board, a New York-based nonprofit economics think tank, releases a report on the number of job vacancies in each state.
The report is an estimate. But it is intended to be an indicator of the job market, said June Shelp, a Conference Board vice president. The board collects online job ads and eliminates duplicates to arrive at its number.
Last month, 44,100 jobs were advertised in South Carolina, 7,000 fewer than in December, according to the Conference Board.
That number is not an exact counting of job vacancies, Shelp said. Some openings are not advertised. In other cases, a company may post one job ad but have several openings for that job description. Also, some employers constantly advertise because of high turnover rates, so there may not be actual openings.
Over time, though, the survey presents a fair picture of a state’s job market, Shelp said.
Right now, it’s not a pretty picture.
“For every advertised vacancy online, there were a little over four people looking for work,” she said. “It’s an indication of how difficult the market is.”
The report also breaks down the number of ads by sector.
In January, the largest number of ads posted was for jobs in the professional sector. That sector, which includes teachers, engineers, nurses and financial specialists, showed 16,023 open positions in South Carolina.
The smallest number of openings was in construction and manufacturing. Each category had a little more than 800 jobs available.
Those are the same two categories that are eliminating the most jobs in South Carolina.
In December, the state lost 22,000 jobs — 1,400 in construction and 2,100 in manufacturing. Construction — where an unprecedented boom took place between 2005 and 2007 — has lost jobs for 14 straight months. Manufacturing has lost them for nine consecutive months, the Employment Security Commission reported.
Therein lies part of the problem in filling job vacancies in South Carolina, said Marshall, who oversees job training at the employment commission.
THE SKILLS GAP
There is a skills gap between workers and the jobs that are available, he said.
People who hold the disappearing jobs — construction and manufacturing — are not qualified for many of the jobs that are open.
Or, as the Conference Board’s Shelp said, “Obviously, if someone is looking for a registered nurse and they were kitchen help, they are not qualified.”
Part of the problem is South Carolina’s shift away from a manufacturing economy.
Twenty years ago, people quit high school and earned a decent living by working in their town’s textile mill, Marshall said. Those plants have closed by the dozens during the past decade.
“All of a sudden, they’ve lost their manufacturing job, and the jobs that are there to replace it require an associate’s degree,” he said.
Jack Canter, senior development officer at BlueCross BlueShield of South Carolina, experiences the skills gap firsthand.
At any given time, his company has 70 to 100 openings in information technology. It searches across the country to fill the jobs, he said.
Why?
A laid-off mill worker can’t walk out the factory doors and into BlueCross’ information technology department.
There also are occupations where the differences are more subtle.
For example, BlueCross always is looking for information technology project managers, Canter said. There’s even a Project Management Professional certification that is given to people in all sorts of fields. But someone with that certification who worked as a construction project manager probably won’t fit Canter’s job description.
“They don’t have an aptitude and an understanding of the inner workings of IT,” he said.
HELP WANTED: A BETTER MATCHMAKER?
Joel Sawyer, the governor’s spokesman, says part of the problem is the Employment Security Commission is not doing enough to match job skills with job openings.
“The Employment Security Commission should be using every resource available to marry people with the jobs that are opening out there,” Sawyer said.
He pointed to a six-month report from the commission’s OneStop offices, charged with placing workers in jobs. The report shows the state’s OneStop offices had 35,839 jobs that companies had asked for help in filling. Of those, 14,386 — only 40 percent — were filled through the OneStops.
“Where I come from, 40 percent is an ‘F’ many times over,” Sawyer said.
Sanford has demanded the employment agency hand over information so his staff can figure out why the commission isn’t doing a better job, Sawyer said.
Earl Capps, a board member of the Trident Workforce Development Board in Charleston, which works with OneStop centers in that area, said the governor’s criticisms are wrong.
The centers are a catchall for unemployed people and businesses looking for workers, Capps said. And they operate with limited resources.
“We don’t have the resources to recruit specialized for job openings,” Capps said. “We have people coming in the doors, and we hope we can fit them into a job. Sometimes, it’s fitting a square peg into a round hole.
“The governor’s argument is missing the point.”
And, the jobs agency says, it eventually finds jobs for about 70 percent of the jobless workers who walk in its doors. That’s better than the national average of 67 percent, the agency adds.
... OR A BETTER JOB RECRUITER?
Other say Sanford shares the blame.
Lawmakers, including House Speaker Bobby Harrell, R-Charleston, have said Sanford has not done enough to recruit the right jobs to South Carolina.
When Sanford began his second term in January 2006, there was one state-advertised manufacturing job for every 5.9 unemployed factory workers, according to Employment Security Commission data. For every state-advertised sales job, there were 6.3 unemployed salesmen.
By July 2008, those rates had grown to one job for every 17.8 unemployed factory workers and one job for every 15.7 unemployed salesmen.
(Skilled workers — including those in finance, math, engineering or science — have done better. The rate only increased from one job for every 2.2 unemployed workers in 2006 to one job for every 4.2 unemployed workers in 2008.)
While critics say the state has failed to land enough jobs, the state Commerce Department, which reports to Sanford, says it is has done exactly that.
Commerce has recruited 49,079 jobs to the state over the past three years, said spokeswoman Kara Borie. Of those, 29 percent were in rural parts of the state, she said.
A skills gap does exist, said Peggy Torrey, the Commerce Department’s deputy secretary for work force. But there are plenty of opportunities for people to learn a new craft, she added.
Now is the time, Torrey said, to go back to school, and there are programs that pay for laid-off workers to do that. “We really believe there are some opportunities in this very difficult time.”
Marshall, Torrey’s counterpart at the Employment Security Commission, said his agency has the same goal.
“We want these people to go back to work,” he said.
But, he added, “We want there to be viable openings for them to go back to.”

1. Post your thoughts.
2. What could be done about the growing number of jobless that are not meeting the specifications of the open jobs in South Carolina.