Employment numbers healthy

The Knoxville metropolitan area continues to enjoy a steady and diverse employment base despite the fact manufacturing jobs continue to decline.

To some extent the Knoxville Metropolitan Statistical Area is insulated from economic and employment shifts due to a significant governmental presence.

That presence includes the Department of Energy facilities in Oak Ridge, TVA and the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.

Mix that in with an increasing services employment base in Knoxville, and the area has maintained an unemployment percentage of just around 5 percent.

"It is a very stable employment base within Knox County itself, and that stability is brought about by the federal government," said Matt Murray, a UT economist. "Public sector employment is quite high," he said.

In December 2006, the unemployment rate for the Knoxville metro area was 3.1 percent. For the state that same month it was 4.4 percent, according to the Tennessee Department of Labor and Workforce Development.

Knox County is very service oriented and draws customers from surrounding counties to buy cars, eat at restaurants and seek health care, Murray added.

Knox County has less manufacturing than some outlying counties, where such industry continues to decline like it does across the country.

For example, Knox County has about 218,000 employees with just over 17,000 of those in manufacturing.

But significantly, Murray said, productivity continues to increase, and that is due in large part to improvements in technology.

"The value of what we are producing continues to grow," he said.

Bill Fox, director of the University of Tennessee Center for Business and Economic Research, said there are basically two industries that "are really important" to Knox County and the surrounding area.

One is government and the other is the services/retail trade.

The federal installations in Oak Ridge have about 12,000 employees, the University of Tennessee has about 8,500 and the state of Tennessee has about 3,700 employees in the metro area.

And the area has some notable corporate headquarters, including Clayton Homes, Pilot Corp., Brunswick Boat Group, Bush Brothers & Co., DeRoyal Industries, Goody's Family Clothing, The H.T. Hackney Co., Regal Corp. and Ruby Tuesday Inc.

Health care services also play a large roll in employment, with Covenant Health as the area's second largest employer with more than 8,600 employees.

The state Department of Labor and Workforce Development, provided projections for job growth in the metro area through 2014:

  • Jobs for medical assistants will increase 3.4 percent a year.
  • There will be 140 annual openings for retail salespeople a year, or a 1.6 percent annual increase.
  • Openings for registered nurses will run about 2 percent a year.
  • Pre-school teaching positions will increase 2.4 percent a year.
  • Demand for telephone operators will drop more than 5 percent a year.
  • Annual demand for mail clerks and mail machine operators will drop nearly 6 percent a year.
  • Positions for credit authorizers, checkers and clerks will drop nearly 5 percent a year.
  • The need for computer operators will drop 4.5 percent per year.

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