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New England's prospects hinge an the supply of scientific, engineering and Information technology workers <
New England has experienced extraordinary change in its labor markets since the end of the regional economic recession of 1989-1992. Massive job losses in the early 1990s left the region with high unemployment rates, declining real family incomes and net outmigration of population. Over the next several years, New England entered a period of slow recovery gradually adding jobs lost during the economic decline and reducing overall unemployment rates. Like the expansion of the 1980s, the recovery of the 1990s was led in New England by an array of high-technology industries whose common characteristic was heavy reliance on scientific, engineering and information technology (SEIT) workers.
Industries like biotechnology, medical devices, engineering and architectural services, telecommunications, software services and Internet services-all intensive employers of SEIT workers-have led the region's economic recovery. Moreover, traditional industries like financial services and large parts of the manufacturing sector have become increasingly dependent on sophisticated production technologies, particularly those related to information processing technologies. Consequently, the staffing of these organizations also has shifted toward SEIT employment in recent years.
The high demand for technologically sophisticated workers is not unique to New England. In fact, the demand for SEIT workers nationally is growing at unprecedented rates. National employment forecasts suggest that while overall U.S. employment will increase by about 14 percent in the next decade, jobs in scientific and engineering occupations will grow at a rate equal to 1.2 to 1.8 times that. Employment in the computer/information technology related fields is expected to more than double through 2008.
The challenges posed by such strong SEIT growth are compounded in New England by two factors. First, an above average share of all New England employment is in high-technology fields that depend heavily on highly skilled labor. Second, unlike most other regions in the nation, the size of the New England labor force has remained essentially unchanged over the past decade.
Much of New England's economic prosperity has been the result of technological innovation and discovery creating new products and new production methods.
To the extent that SEIT workers hold the keys to this process, they are the single most important component of labor supply in New...