Where To Find The Best Jobs

In the United States, the jobs that are available and where to find them have changed since Covid.

Labor Demand

Through Liberty Street Economics, the NY Fed compared pre-and post-COVID job listings. Their goal was to see how labor demand has changed by looking at millions of job listings gathered from sources that included “company career sites, national and local job boards, and listing aggregators such as Indeed.”

The results displayed major shifts. People moved out of central cities to rural regions, smaller cities, and the “fringe” of larger urban areas. Where they went, the job listings increased. For example, the percent of pre-and post-pandemic job listings in New York City and Los Angeles fell from approximately 46% to 38%.

Below, comparing three time periods, you can see large metros had increasingly fewer job listings:

At the same time, the kinds of jobs changed. Reflecting slightly more than one half of all listings, a snapshot of six major occupation groups displays the shift to healthcare. At the same time, the number of business, financial, computer, and math occupational listings declined:

Liberty Street Economics hypothesizes that remote work could have been the change agent. The high skilled workers in large metro areas no longer had to live there. Meanwhile, with migration away from central cities, the need for healthcare workers accelerated in less populated areas. They also suggest that these changes in economic activity could be permanent.

Our Bottom Line: the Circular Flow Model

In a circular flow model of the market system, goods and services move between businesses and households in the upper loop. At the same time, in the lower loop, you can see that labor leaves households. Then, in return, they take wages and salaries back home.

A process rather than a place, factor markets composed of land, labor, and capital are “where” labor and businesses determine who will be hired and how much they will get paid:

Showing the impact of the Covid pandemic on labor in different places, we could draw a before and after model. Then, we would need to illustrate the geographical shift away from dense metro areas and the boost elsewhere in healthcare occupations.

It all happens in the lower loop.

My sources and more: Always interesting, the NY Fed’s Liberty Street Economics, here and here, provided today’s facts. Then, a possible complement is this econlife post.