California has one of the nation’s largest concentrations of “advanced industry” workers, but a new study points out that the state still faces big challenges in Stockton, Fresno, the Inland Empire and elsewhere.
The study from the Brookings Institution zeros in on clusters of high-skill industries such as those in Silicon Valley, saying they are critical to raising the standard of living and attracting wealth in major cities. They offer better pay for workers and create products that can be sold across the world — not just down the street.
The distribution of such high-value jobs — which pay an average of $90,000, nearly twice that of other industries — varies widely across the state.
The San Francisco, San Jose and San Diego metropolitan areas, for example, had some of the largest shares of technically skilled workers in the country — all ranking in the top 10 of the largest 100 U.S. metro areas.
The state also figured prominently at the bottom of the list in places including Fresno and the Inland Empire, the study found. Los Angeles and Orange County fell right in the middle. They were ahead of Chicago and New York City, but far behind cities such as Boston.
The analysis defined “advanced industries” as those that spend a significant amount on research and development, and employ workers with higher-than-average skills in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. It encompasses a wide array of professions, from management consulting to computer systems design to aircraft parts manufacturing.
The sector is responsible for 60% of U.S. exports and has led the way in job creation since the Great Recession, expanding at nearly twice the rate of all other sectors combined since 2010.
But the growth is happening in far fewer areas than in the past. Only 23 large U.S. metropolitan areas have more than 10% of their workforce in advanced industries, compared with 59 in 1980.
The changes can perhaps best be seen locally in the differences in the ways that Los Angeles and San Diego have developed over the last few decades.
In 1980 the Los Angeles metropolitan area, which includes Orange County, was one of the nation’s leading hubs for high-tech production, led by aerospace manufacturing. At the time, more than 16% of the area’s workforce was employed in industries involving engineering, science and research.
Since then, as the center of gravity for aerospace and military shifted to the nation’s capital, the Los Angeles area’s share of advanced workers has dipped to 9%.
“The resilience of the economy depends on finding new industry jobs to replace those old ones,” said William Yu, an economist with the UCLA Anderson Forecast who specializes in the Los Angeles economy. “But we didn’t achieve that. So a lot of people just leave. They had high skills, high education, and they leave for another place, or they retire.”
San Diego, by contrast, has moved in the opposite direction, expanding its share of skilled workers over the last three decades by building one of the nation’s largest research and development centers specializing in life sciences and biotechnology.
“Even with the Internet and Twitter and all these tools we have, people like to be in close proximity to work on projects, start new companies and commercialize new technologies,” said Greg McKee, the chief executive at Connect. “The base principle of it is that you need to have a critical mass of people around certain types of activities to make all this go.”
In Los Angeles, experts said, there hasn’t been the same kind of density in technical professions such as science and engineering.
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-advanced-industries-20150205-story.html#page=1