If you're looking for a job in Jacksonville these days, you're in luck.

Maybe it's not the perfect job, but there's definitely a job available for you somewhere. The unemployment rate in the Jacksonville area has been hovering around 3 percent all year and fell as low as 2.8 percent in April, figures that are rarely seen in the local economy.

"It's pretty much the lowest unemployment rate we've ever had," said Mark Vitner, senior economist at Wachovia Corp.

"It's really quite remarkable that it's this low not only in Jacksonville but in all of Florida," he said.
And the market doesn't seem to be cooling off. A quarterly nationwide survey by Manpower Inc. found that Jacksonville has the eighth best employment outlook in the country, with 53 percent of businesses surveyed planning to add workers this summer and none planning cutbacks.

"We've just got a lot of things going on in Jacksonville," said Lyn Phillips, manager of Manpower's Jacksonville office.
"It's very diverse. It's not any one industry," she said.

Things just seem to be working out here. A month after AOL closes its 820-person call center and Washington Mutual says it will move 550 local jobs to the Philippines, Fidelity Investments last week announced it will open a 1,200-employee call center.

"Employees are in the driver's seat," said Cindy Goodwin, branch manager of recruiting and staffing firm Spherion Corp.'s Jacksonville office.

Goodwin said that businesses that hesitate to make hiring decisions are losing out because job candidates may have several offers to choose from.

"It is a situation where employers need to get together and make that decision in a faster turnaround," she said.
There are a couple of notable exceptions, but according to the latest data from the Florida Agency for Workforce Innovation, just about every industry sector in the Jacksonville area is reporting significant job growth.

Construction is building
The biggest growth by far has been in the construction industry, which added 5,300 jobs from May 2005 through May 2006, a 12 percent growth rate.

"We were in, for the last couple of years, the hottest [construction] market, possibly, ever," said Vince DePorre, North Florida president for homebuilder KB Homes.

John Calle, an employee of sub-contractor March's Drywall, sprays an orange peel texture onto the drywall at a KB Homes construction site in Dunn's Creek Plantation on Jacksonville's northside. The Jacksonville area is experiencing record-low unemployment and strong job growth with construction trades fueling the labor market. RICK WILSON/The Times-Union

According to U.S. Census Bureau data, the total number of building permits in the Jacksonville area jumped by 30 percent in 2005 after growing by 22 percent in 2004.

"The permit growth was unbelievable,' said DePorre. "The last couple of years, probably all of us could have built more homes."
But building permit activity has slowed in 2006. In the first four months of the year, permits issued in the area dropped by 18 percent. Still, with so many permits issued before 2006, DePorre said there is still a lot of activity going on and he doesn't think the demand for construction workers is waning.

"There's still a lot of permits pulled. There's still a lot of homes to be built," he said.

Manpower's quarterly survey projects slight to moderate growth in construction jobs this summer in the Jacksonville area.

Vitner said he doesn't expect a construction slowdown this year, but the rapid building now could mean less demand for new projects in 2007.

"We're overbuilding in Jacksonville," he said.

Boom in banking

Mychelle Ford (left) of Jacksonville hands her resume to CitiStreet representative Machell Chavez after a meeting at The Florida Times-Union Job Expo at the University of North Florida. JON M. FLETCHER/The Times-Union

Much of the job growth in other sectors is related to the recent construction boom in some way. As more homes are being built and more people are moving to Northeast Florida, demand for banking services is also rising.

The banking industry is the second-fastest growing job sector, as employment in banking and related services (such as loan companies) grew by 2,300 jobs in the past year, a 9.3 percent growth rate.

Ben Bishop, chairman of Allen C. Ewing & Co. in Jacksonville and a long-time banking analyst, points out that Jacksonville banks have seen a huge growth in deposits in the last few years. The most recent data available showed that deposits in Jacksonville area banks grew by 23.2 percent to $25.3 billion between June 2003 and June 2005. That was the highest growth rate for any of the 20 largest metropolitan areas in Florida and reflects a strong local economy, Bishop said.
"It's more than population growth. It's business. It's commerce," he said.

One bank rapidly growing in the Jacksonville area is North Carolina-based BB&T Corp., which has gone from one local office four years ago to eight and plans to keep going with four to five new offices a year through 2010. North Florida regional president Jim Daly said BB&T's employment has grown from under 20 four years ago to more than 120 now, and its growth plan will add 40 to 50 new employees a year.

"It's challenging because there's a relatively low level of unemployment," Daly said. "But we've been successful in finding people."

Hospitals hiring

New nurses at Baptist Medical Center are being trained in hospital procedures. RN nurses Fred Thompson and Jennifer Havenar are practicing using a blood-sugar monitoring device. DON BURK/The Times-Union

As more people move into the area, demand for medical services continues to rise. So the hospital industry is another rapidly growing sector, with 1,000 jobs added in the past year, a 5 percent growth rate.

Some of the growth has been quite visible. Baptist Health last year opened its new Baptist Medical Center South in South Jacksonville and also expanded its Southbank facilities by opening an 88-bed hospital just for heart patients.

With those hospitals opening, employment in the Baptist system alone grew from 6,377 at the beginning of 2005 to 7,431 today.
And the hospital industry will continue to grow. Shands Jacksonville this month announced an expansion will add 125 jobs and the Mayo Clinic is building a new 650,000-square-foot hospital adjacent to its outpatient and research facility on San Pablo Road.

Mayo spokeswoman Evelyn Tovar said the hospital is on track to open in April 2008, but Mayo doesn't have figures on how many jobs that will add.

More manufacturing
The construction boom has also helped the local manufacturing industry, which added 1,300 jobs in the past year, a 3.9 percent growth rate.

"We have been in sort of a growth mode for the last five or six years," said Harlan Bost, owner of Florida Custom Marble in Jacksonville.

His company, which makes surfaces for home fixtures, has grown gradually from 12 employees when it started in 1997 to 90 today.

That's typical of manufacturing growth in Jacksonville. There haven't been big companies coming in with hundreds of new hires, but a lot of smaller businesses are growing.

"I think it's generally across the board," said Lad Daniels, president of the First Coast Manufacturers Association.
There should be more growth for companies like REDD Team Manufacturing, a Keystone Heights company that makes wheel chair ramps and other building ramps. REDD is projecting to grow sales from $16.5 million last year to $18.3 million this year.

"We want to grow it in five years to a $30 million business," said plant manager Mark Wortham. That could mean a 25 percent increase in employment, which currently averages between 105 and 110 people, he said.

Information sector underwhelmed

An area AOL call center used to employ thousands, but now stands empty, as many were handed pink slips. Times-Union file

The labor picture in Jacksonville is almost, but not quite, perfect.
The one significant drag on the local economy this year has been the information sector, which lost 300 jobs in the past year, a 2.5 percent decline.

That shouldn't be a surprise after AOL last month closed its Jacksonville call center, putting more than 800 people out of work. But the information sector was losing jobs even before AOL shut its doors.

It's difficult to pin down job losses in the industry because the information sector is actually broadly defined. It includes not only Internet-related businesses like AOL and data processing companies, but also media industries such as newspaper publishing and radio and TV stations.

The outlook in the information technology business is actually quite bright, said Tyra Tutor, senior vice president of corporate development at MPS Group Inc. in Jacksonville. She said demand for IT staffing services through the company's Modis subsidiary continues to grow.

"Our head-count in that area is going up," Tutor said.

Jim Albert, president of MPS's IT consulting subsidiary, Idea Integration, is also seeing strong demand.
"We're growing. It's a great market for IT right now," he said.

In fact, Albert said the biggest challenge is finding qualified employees.
"We could be a bigger company if I could get the people I need," he said.

Food & beverage chains (OK, one in particular)

Winn-Dixie employee Christopher Belcarries sweeps the floor of a Winn-Dixie store in Miami. EMILY BARNES/The Times-Union

A couple of other industry sectors are also showing declines in Jacksonville jobs over the past year, but the outlook for workers in those sectors is actually pretty solid.

One sector is the food and beverage store industry, which showed a net loss of 100 jobs, or 0.7 percent, from May 2005 through May 2006. But food and beverage is just a sub-sector of the retail trade industry, and overall retail jobs have grown by 2,200, or 3 percent.

That food and beverage job loss is easily explained by the Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing by Winn-Dixie Stores Inc. in 2005. The Jacksonville-based supermarket chain cut about 500 of its headquarters jobs last summer as part of its reorganization plan and has closed two of its local stores in the past year.
 
Winn-Dixie said, however, that it has beefed up the staffs of its supermarkets to improve customer service, as part of its business plan to improve operations when it emerges from bankruptcy later this year. And while the in-store jobs likely don't pay as much as the headquarters jobs that were lost, Winn-Dixie said its current employment level, approximately 7,500 people in the Jacksonville area, is about the same as it was a year ago.

The other sector that lost jobs is the insurance industry, which lost 400 jobs in the past year. But insurance is a sub-sector of the finance and insurance industry. And because of the big jump in banking jobs, overall employment in finance and insurance is up by 2,400 jobs, or 4.9 percent.