In an article published in the October issue of Alaska Economic Trends, economists Paul Olson and Brynn Keith provided a 10-year occupational forecast for the state's job market through 2012. The study period extends from 2002 to 2012.
An estimated 43,000 jobs may be created between those dates, pushing the state's work force to more than 356,000, the economists said. Their study looked at 700 wage, salary and self-employed occupations and divided the economy into service-providing and goods-producing jobs.
According to the authors, the share of the overall job market held by mining, construction, manufacturing and logging fell during the past 10 years, while the service sector, which includes health care, food services, transportation and trade, experienced rapid growth. By 2002, service sector jobs accounted for 87 percent of employment within the state.
Service jobs are expected to continue their rapid growth.
Meanwhile, "buoyed by a resurgence in metal mining and projected natural gas pipeline construction, the goods-producing sector, with the steep declines in manufacturing largely in the past, will be likely to contribute positive growth nearly apace with the economy overall," Olson and Keith said.
"In doing so, it should maintain its 13-percent share of employment through 2012." That is, they will hold their own, the authors predicted.
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