By Pete Carey
pcarey@mercurynews.com
Posted: 04/15/2011 05:09:10 PM PDT
Updated: 04/15/2011 08:29:24 PM PDT
A technology-led recovery in Silicon Valley is slowly spreading throughout the local economy, as every major industry except construction added jobs in March, according to a state report released Friday.
In a sign of the recovery’s strength, the valley’s job growth was tops among the state’s 10 largest metro areas, the state Employment Development Department said in its monthly report on California employment.
But Santa Clara County’s unemployment rate remained unchanged at 10.3 percent in March, while San Mateo County maintained the third-lowest unemployment rate in the state at 8.4 percent, up slightly from February. Job gains don’t always cut the unemployment rate, which also factors in how many people are looking for work.
“This is a recovery led by tech,” said Stephen Levy of the Center for Continuing Study of the California Economy, “pushed partly by social networking companies like Facebook and Internet and search giants like Google (GOOG).”
The valley gained 3,300 nonfarm jobs, with 1,400 added in important tech areas and 900 in educational and health services. The figures are unadjusted for seasonal variations.
California’s unemployment rate was 12 percent, down from 12.1 percent in February, the EDD said. Still,
the state lost nearly 12,000 jobs between February and March, ending five months of consecutive gains.
The state captured a record 51.2 percent of U.S. venture capital funding, Levy said. Silicon Valley snagged 40 percent of that funding, which supports the growth of startups that leads to hiring.
The economic recovery is being driven by national trends that don’t necessarily add up to a lot of jobs elsewhere, said Brad Kemp of Beacon Economics. “They are not investing in labor,” he said. “They are investing in efficiency and automation, and Silicon Valley and San Francisco benefit from that focus. Hardware and software are going to feel that effect.”
Ballooning demand for mobile devices of greater and greater power is also pushing job growth.
Brian Balut, vice president of networks at semiconductor maker TriQuint, said the Hillsboro, Ore.-based company is adding 40 jobs in San Jose to help meet demand for its mobile communications technology.
Smartphones began using more data than cellphones last year, Balut said. “The smartphone boom and all the talk of 4G is what’s driving this massive data demand in the network,” he said.
Job sector figures were not available for San Mateo County, but the combined area of San Mateo, San Francisco and Marin counties added 6,300 jobs, 2,100 of them in professional and business services, twice the average gain for the month, the EDD said.
The San Jose metropolitan region, which is the combined Santa Clara and largely agricultural San Benito counties, has now gained back more than 20,000 jobs since hiring reached its nadir in July 2009. In March, the valley led the state’s top 10 metro areas in percentage gain of jobs compared with 2010, while it placed second, behind San Diego, in terms of the number of jobs added.
But a long recovery is likely for the valley, where 95,500 people are actively seeking work, and thousands more are forced to work part time or have temporarily abandoned job searches.
“There’s too many of us out there,” said Gloria Bulhoes, who was one of a group at the NOVA employment and training center in Sunnyvale for a weekly meeting.
Employers are demanding and looking for exact matches to their openings, said Bulhoes, a former attorney and recruiting specialist.
“There used to be 10 things on an employer’s wish list, and you had to have six or seven of them. Now you have to have 12 or 13 out of the 10,” she said.
Maria Ward, a public relations specialist, said she’s seeing “a tremendous number of jobs being listed on job boards.”
But Greg Gaedke, a high-tech manufacturing scheduler who lost a full-time job 28 months ago and had a contract job end last fall, said it’s a tough job market. Asked to rank it on a scale of 1 to 10, he replied: “Without a job? Zero.”
