The city government and immigrant populations can be divisive issues. But on the other hand, amongst those seeking San Francisco jobs you may be hard pressed to find someone who doesn’t find some aspects of the Bay Area attractive.
The aforementioned city government has raised the minimum wage to over $9 per hour (nearly double the current federal rate) and employment is beginning to drop below the 4 percent mark. Other unique perks of a generous welfare scheme include being able to have your sex change paid for as an employee health benefit (transgender health legislation was passed in 2001). Joking aside, with job growth up nearly 2 percent to 14.75 percent last year, San Francisco’s jobs market is certainly expansive.
Employment in San Francisco is undoubtedly dominated by the two technologies: high tech and biotech. The latter has been especially boosted by having the headquarters for California’s $3 billion stem cell research program based in San Francisco, but biotech was strong before that, and continues to be so due to large, continued investment. In what is often considered by economists as a recession-proof industry – as the population ages, demand for healthcare will increase – there has been strong growth in the past years, especially in the areas surrounding the city.
The Bay Area is home to over 580 bioscience companies, employing more than 85,000 people directly and there is extensive financial and legislative support for research creating more and more jobs in San Francisco. With the average age of a nurse around 50 in California, and the baby-boom generation not getting any younger – the manufacture of medicines and treatments, and also trained healthcare professionals, will be much in demand in the near future.
The high-tech industry can be split into two parts. On the one hand, giants of the industry such as Google, Oracle and Apple are all based in the nearby Silicon Valley and are increasingly looking to tap into specific city talent in software engineering and web development/design. The activities of Microsoft, who have just moved into a new 500,000 sq ft campus in Silicon Valley, are quite typical. Whilst the majority of their employees are based there, the company is also seeking a bigger presence in the city and has employment opportunities in sales, product support and account management as well as those that are more industry specific.
The city of San Francisco itself is home to the other side of the high-tech industry – Web 2.0 start-ups. This is the second wave of web based communities and hosted services, the first being the dot-com boom of the 1990s. High end technical and analytical skills are in high demand here and these Web 2.0 businesses may go some way to explaining why small businesses with fewer than 10 employees and self employed firms make up 85% of city establishments.
Abbey Snay is the director of Jewish Vocational Services – a non-profit organization that provides employment counseling to the general public (not just the Jewish Community) in the area. I spoke to her about San Francisco’s employment prospects and she described the area as having an “hourglass economy,” with plenty of jobs right at the top – managers, executives etc. and also plenty at the bottom – waiters, shop assistants etc.
One of the main problems, she explained, was the gap in skills with some of the prospective workforce; a problem heightened by the move offshore of the garment industry, leaving many immigrant workers stranded in the jobs market by poor English.
Big brands ranging from Del-Monte to Levi-Strauss and Co. are all based here, giving credence to San Fran’s claim to being the HQ city, and opening up further jobs in marketing and administration, as well as compliance jobs. Perhaps the best way to find out what jobs/skills are in demand right now is through one such company.
Craigslist, the classified advertisement internet site started as one San Francisco man’s (Craig Newmark) idea and now receives over 5 billion pageviews and 500,000 job listings a month. Searches for biotech/science, computing and healthcare jobs revealed up to 80 job advertisements posted in one day alone. This Web site along with its contents certainly gives a positive outlook to employment in San Francisco.
And don’t forget that sex change.