DEED’S Summer of Jobs Campaign Visits Duluth
DULUTH, Minn. – The second stop of the Summer of Jobs tour started at Essentia where discussion pertained to the need for health care workers, followed by a job shadow of a sterile processing technician, and ended with a roundtable at City Hall to talk about untapped labor markets.
“This is a time when we have the fifth tightest market in the entire country, there are 214 thousand open jobs. One of the things we’ve done here at City Hall is talk about workers that are over 55. I think a lot of employers have a certain ageism or bias towards older workers. Reality is, older workers bring some of the best experience, loyalty, and dependability of any worker in the market,” said Commissioner Steve Grove of the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development.
To help push employers to take interest in the 55 and older market, the state runs programs like SCSEP which provides older workers the opportunity to have some wage subsidies at a job that’s volunteer based for a while to build up experience that will translate into another field.
“One of the things we saw during the pandemic is about 60 thousand Minnesotans retired earlier than they would’ve otherwise just because of the environment around COVID. About 30 thousand of them have come back so people are coming back into the market, but we need more people to do that,” said Grove.
According to Commissioner Grove, right now, there are 2.7 open jobs in Minnesota for every one person searching for one.
“One of the things that I think is unique to Duluth is that you just have a really great partnership between the city, between businesses, and between local non-profits who are all working together. This has as a market, one of the tightest labor markets in the entire state. The unemployment rate in Duluth is 1.5 percent. There is only about 660 workers total that are even looking for jobs in Duluth right now,” said Grove.
As far as next steps, DEED is asking the legislature to invest more dollars into workforce.
“It’s a time of urgency in our states economy. If we are going to really increase our productivity long term, we’ve got to get more people in jobs. We got to promote Minnesota as a safe place to come and live as well. We are really trying hard to be a more assertive and aggressive marketer of our state, part of the work we are doing right now is to get people who are here to find jobs. We’ve also got to get our migration numbers up. That’s been a long standing challenge not just for Minnesota but for the entire Midwest. This is not a time to sit back and rest on our laurels as an economy. We’ve got a great economy but we’ve got to be really aggressive on promoting it,” said Grove.
The tour will continue across the Minnesota this summer highlighting different professions and the most in demand jobs across the state.
