State revises career outlook

• By GARY PERILLOUX
• Advocate business writer
• Published: Jul 1, 2009 - Page: 1A

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When the current recession ends and the economy revs up, look for registered nurses to continue occupying the driver’s seat when it comes to career choices.

By 2016, more nurses will be needed in Louisiana — 13,500 more of them — than any other vocation. And they’ll command high pay, averaging $55,700 a year.

That’s one conclusion of a new 10-year occupational study released Tuesday by the Louisiana Workforce Commission. Work began in mid-2007 on the project that found many traditional careers — retail salespeople, customer service representatives, waiters and waitresses, and office clerks — growing their ranks by 7,000 or more positions during the decade ending in 2016.

Among professions expected to pay more than $30,000 a year, nurses were joined in the Top 10 high-demand jobs by such roles as elementary school teachers (another 5,220 needed by 2016); maintenance and repair workers (4,200 more needed); welders (3,900 more needed); truck drivers (3,800 more needed); and accountants (3,100 more needed).

From a big-picture view, the Louisiana Workforce Commission didn’t discover any stunning new job trends, said Tim Barfield, the commission’s executive director. But the work did disclose the nature of Louisiana’s job needs with more layers of detail than statistical analyses used in the past.

LSU economists and University of Louisiana at Lafayette researchers reviewed 855 individual job classifications and modified projections for one in five of them based on additional recent data gleaned from businesses in the state.

Every industry employing 50 or more people got that kind of scrutiny, Barfield said. What did surprise, he said, was the scope of some of the job growth. Registered nurses are projected to grow from about 39,000 in 2006 to 52,200 in 2016.

“Boy, that’s a much bigger number than we expected,” Barfield said, and it doesn’t include the demand for licensed practical nurses, projected to grow from 19,000 to nearly 23,000. “There’s a lot of issues behind these numbers that we don’t fully understand yet, and there’s a lot of ways to slice it and dice it that I think will help us tell the complete story. While this is the best report we have to date, it’s still not everything we want it to be going forward.”

The state’s college campuses will use the occupational outlook to tailor curricula, with their funding increasingly reliant on how well they provide solutions to Louisiana’s work force needs.

For the past several years, the state Board of Regents has boosted funding for schools of nursing to enable more students to be trained in that field, said Barbara Moffett, interim dean of the College of Nursing and Health Sciences at Southeastern Louisiana University.

Southeastern has 1,600 declared nursing majors, admits about 200 students per year into clinical nursing courses and has been able to increase its admission rate 20 percent with the added state funding.

The Louisiana State Board of Nursing estimates there are 44,700 registered nurses in the state, but some may practice in other fields or may have moved out of the job market. Some 1,825 candidates — about nine in 10 Louisiana graduates from 2008 — passed licensing examinations for registered nurses last year, according to the state nursing board. That’s nearly enough to meet the projected annual openings of 1,990 positions.

However, community health, school nursing positions and industry health jobs now tug at the supply of registered nurses once claimed almost entirely by hospitals and medical offices, Moffett said.