Skills gap is impacting La Porte County's economy, Purdue economist says

“So we’ve been going a long time with just estimates,” he said. “So that’s why I don’t want to focus so much on the unemployment number. I’m going to focus on where the jobs really are – at the ground level.”

Sindone spoke Tuesday morning during the Economic Outlook La Porte County event at Purdue University-North Central. Hosted by the Greater La Porte and Michigan City area chambers of commerce, and the PNC College of Business, the event focused on national and local economic trends, and what the future held for the county.

At the event Sindone said the real story wasn’t the numbers of unemployed workers, but rather the skills gap between those unemployed and those jobs left unfilled.

For instance, using figures from the Indiana Department of Workforce Development, Sindone said between December of 2013 and January of 2015 there was a monthly average of 450 truck driving positions open in La Porte County, with only 46 workers being hired each month to fill those open slots.

“(Companies) are looking for people,” he said. “They’re desperate.”

And those jobs paid up to $85,000 a year.

And for the city of La Porte in January, there were 462 unique posts for registered nurses, but only 76 were hired. The problem, Sindone said, was local workers lacking the necessary skills, or being unable pass the drug tests.

He did applaud the new Ivy Tech campus in La Porte for offering certification programs for some of these disciplines and helping to narrow the skills gap in the county.

During the economic outlook portion of the presentation, Derek Bjonback, associate professor of economics at PNC, said the nation’s economy was actually looking pretty good. He said it was down to only 5.5 percent unemployment as of March, and experienced a third quarter burst in the gross domestic product by 5 percent in 2014.

He said this comeback for the nation was late, having taken seven years, whereas recessions prior to the 1990s usually took only 24 months to get back to pre-recession economic figures.

Part of this was due to the loss of a certain type of job.

“What has happened in the labor market after the downturn is a reduction in employment in the mid skill level,” he said.

For example, he said shoe manufacturing, once an important part of the economy in certain areas of the U.S., has now largely gone to Asia. And those jobs won’t be coming back.

He said workers in those positions have had to migrate toward higher-skilled jobs to stay employed.

And the labor force has been decreasing on top of that. He said the participation in the labor force has decreased by 3 percent since 2007, amounting to a loss of some 270,000 workers a year.

He ascribed this mainly to retiring baby boomers and a younger generation more hesitant at joining the work force.

But he said there was one particular bright spot in the economy. Farm earnings had increased by 21.3 percent.

Speaking on the agricultural trends in the area, Mary Foell, extension educator on economic & community development, and 4-H youth development, said farming has been having an extensive economic impact on the county

She said the profit of all farms in La Porte County accounted for a yearly average of $75 million, with the average profit per farm at $103,000.

But she said the number of farms in La Porte County has actually diminished from a high of 1,000 in 1978 to 731 today. And this decrease has been happening despite the money farms brought.

For instance, adding a farm with 500 head of beef cattle equaled a regional output of $2.3 million, an income of $338,109, and the employment of 11 people. For an egg producing farm containing 2 million birds, the numbers would increase to $99.1 million in regional output, $15.4 million in additional income, and the employment of 447 people.

“There would be a benefit to bringing new farms into this region,” she said.