EVERY BEGINNING INVESTOR is told how important it is to diversify. Yet Massachusetts is in danger of concentrating its job growth in highly specialized "boutique" economic sectors that leave out too many workers. That's one conclusion of a major new study by MassINC and the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern. Business and political leaders need to pursue strategies that will diversify the job market, both to broaden opportunity and to protect the state from a downturn in any one industry.
With a few bright exceptions, the study says, job growth in Massachusetts has been anemic over the past five years. This is at least as big a factor as the state's high costs in explaining why 286,000 people moved out of the state since 2000. Massachusetts ranked 49th in overall job creation - ahead of only Michigan, with its collapsing auto sector - and is still down 100,000 jobs from 2001.
More troubling is the uneven distribution of jobs. The greatest declines in employment have been among young adult males, those with only high school degrees, and dropouts, especially in large cities. Massachusetts, the study warns, offers "great rewards for those with the requisite levels of education and skills, and fewer options for everyone else."
The biotech sector is hot in Massachusetts, growing at twice the national average. Still, biotechnology accounts for only 2.4 percent of jobs here. Northeastern economist Andrew Sum, the study's co-author, says it is unwise to put "an undue burden on that sector to bail us out." The state's overreliance on high-tech jobs in the 1990s offers a cautionary tale; when off-shoring and downsizing hit that industry in 2001, job losses were steeper in Massachusetts (23 percent) than nationwide (17 percent).
Healthcare accounts for 12 percent of the state's jobs, and also the greatest share of the 90,000 job vacancies currently going begging. Sum says about half of those vacancies - and not just in healthcare - require no more than a year of college.
Obviously, Massachusetts needs to get smarter about matching residents with the training they need to fill the jobs that are available. But the state's 32 so-called career centers, which are supposed to work with local businesses, community colleges, and training programs to fit unemployed individuals into the types of jobs that are in high demand, have a fairly spotty record, the study found.
The MassINC study is one more voice in a chorus that has been singing the same tune for years. The Boston Foundation, the Crittenton Women's Union, industry groups, and other academic studies all have called for greater integration of the many tributaries of government that touch on employment, from K-12 education to streamlined permitting. What this sobering study adds - or should - is a new urgency to get the job done.
