Oregon Public Broadcasting

Oregon's job market is still hurting. The unemployment rate was stuck at about 10.6 percent for March and April — the latest figures available.

Businesses added about four thousand jobs in April. But so many workers are still idle that those hires didn't make a dent in the state's unemployment rate.

Today OPB begins a series of stories on Oregonians getting back to work. We'll look at some of the formidable challenges for anyone trying to fit themselves back into a puzzling work world.

We kick off our series with a profile of Oregon's workforce.

Laura Davidson's cubicle sits a long way from the chic, high-tech firms she used to recruit for.

When Davidson goes to work these days, she's doing a volunteer job at Multnomah County's Department of Community Corrections.

Laura Davidson: "What can I help with?"

Gina Clanton:   "Can you fill out a custody/detain sheet for…."

Davidson is one of the thousands of Oregonians who aren't working right now. She came to Oregon in another recession, fall of 2001, to downsize her go-go San Francisco life.

The first few years she flourished. She found local recruiting work and took some classes in criminal justice. But as the economy buckled, layoffs hit the small firm where she worked.

At first, it wasn't hard to find steady contract jobs. But now she's been without a regular gig since April 2009. So her ideas about work have changed a lot.

Laura Davidson: "I went from selling a person to an organization, based on their attributes and their skill set, Now I'm kind of matching people with the services and level of supervision they might need."

Davidson says this volunteer job has taught her a lot. It keeps her busy, and helps build skills for her resume. All told, it hasn't been an unnatural transition.

Laura Davidson: "It is very much the same, you're keeping a file, you're updating it."

In the course of her work as a recruiter, Davidson noticed a few things about Oregon's work force – at both high and low ends. And she says she noticed differences between Oregon and San Francisco.

Laura Davidson: "In the Bay Area, if you had a prestigious company on our resume and a good school, you were probably going to get an interview. Because they don't want to pass up intense brainpower."

Here in Oregon, Davidson says she sees workers having to rely more heavily on personal relationships and social networks.

She also noticed something else that makes a difference in how people view their work here – the Oregon lifestyle.

Laura Davidson: "And I don't want it to sound any other way than how I intend it. People really appreciate what they have here. If it's sunny, they don't need to make any excuses for leaving at four. Everyone gets it."

Davidson's observations aren't easy to track. But state statistics can tell us Oregon's unemployed workforce is mostly male, trending young – except for rural areas, where older workers have been hit especially hard by layoffs.

Education levels vary, depending on geography.

John Sahlberg is with Boise Cascade, the wood-products giant with operations in Medford and LaGrande.

A few positions with the company are opening here and there. The company's trying to fill them by recalling laid-off workers.

But Sahlberg says these are not your father's mill jobs, and local workers don't always walk in with skills that fit the company's needs.

John Sahlberg: "Our production means have changed considerably over the year, it's become much more computerized and technical, less physical. What we look for a higher skilled level of employee that has some computer knowledge and expertise and also strong math quantitative abilities. Difficult in rural areas to find those skill sets."

Sahlberg says Boise always tried to hire local first, but it's not easy, given that few people outside big cities have the chance to get those technical skills.

In the state's urban labor markets, job competitors have exactly the opposite problem.

Christian Kaylor: "The 2008 census numbers just came out for the city of Portland, and 42% of adult population has a college degree. That may not sound huge, but it is."

Christian Kaylor is a workforce analyst at the Oregon Employment Department.

Kaylor says people have been going back to school in vast numbers, even before the recession hit. While getting a degree may seem like a great way to ride out the slump, Kaylor says it's not the asset it used to be.

Christian Kaylor: "It used to be a generation or two ago, a degree made you an elite. You were more likely to get a job just on the basis of having a college degree."

A lot of that benefit, he says, has been erased. Metro-area employers faced with a deluge of applications aren't just picking out degreed candidates to interview. That means workers at all levels have to re-think their expectations.

That's certainly true for a worker who applied successfully to one of the Oregon job market's brightest spots.

Gail Brunker: " I checked SolarWorld's website, I mean, three times a week." 

Gail Brunker, from Albany, is one of the newest hires at SolarWorld USA, the German-based photovoltaic panel maker that's adding about 350 jobs by the end of the year.

Brunker took a substantial pay cut, he says, to work at Solarworld, but that's a compromise he was willing to make. His prior job lasted twenty-five years. He says he knew he wasn't going to enjoy the same pay.

Ben Santarris: "If you can imagine it, in March, this space was 100% empty.

Ben Santarris is with SolarWorld USA. He gestures to the production floor that was bare just three months ago.

Ben Santarris: "Now here we are in late May, and most of the floor is covered with highly automated assembly tools that will begin production in just a couple more months."

Automation is everywhere in this factory. Spidery black robots scoot cell wafers along through a digital test, moving tens of thousands per day.

Brunker, the recent SolarWorld hire, used to work in a semi-conductor clean room, but got laid off last year. SolarWorld appeals to him because it's in an industry that he believes has a bright future.

Gail Brunker: "I was hesitant about going back into manufacturing… but never say never. One of the areas I thought, if I was going to get back into it, I wanted to be in the green technologies."

Bryan Fix is an HR manager at Solarworld.

He says the workers applying now are very high caliber. But in some ways, the prospect of stacks and stacks of resumes from people laid off from mature industries can be – well, a little scary.

Bryan Fix:  "We're one place in a much larger population, and  we're getting inundated with all these people who are looking for jobs that are affected ad there's no possible way one company could absorb all of that demand, of quite frankly, over-trained and overqualified people for what we need to put in place. We need a portion of them, and we're very happy they're here."

But Fix says it's a real problem sorting through so many candidates.

Laura Davidson, the former high-tech recruiter, remembers what that was like.

Laura Davidson: "I saw so many resumes coming in, and so many people calling me back, desperately, constantly to see if they got an interview. The days I was weeding through other people, I just thought, 'Why do I have a job?' So I was amazed I had a job, and then when it went away, I wasn't amazed at all!"

Davidson says she's still amazed at everything Oregon has to offer, even though she's had to reinvent herself in ways she wasn't expecting. And she's building the social networks that might unlock a job – and she knows it just might take time.

This story was reported and produced by April Baer, and engineered by Steven Vaughn Kray. Tomorrow, our "Getting Back to Work" series continues with a look at one option for finding work: create your own job.