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WHEELING - Pam Wilson has a joke at the ready concerning her pivot from medical office manager to bus driver.
"I call it my midlife crisis," Wilson said. "But, instead of a blonde and a Ferrari, I got a CDL and a bus."
If Wilson's actually laughing, it's likely to be in delight these days. A newly minted driver for the Ohio Valley Regional Transit Authority/East Ohio Regional Transit Authority, she is happy a strong worker's market kicked into overdrive by COVID made it possible for her to make such a dramatic shift.
"I was just stagnating," Wilson said of coping with a triple whammy that included the closure of the office she managed at the shuttered Ohio Valley Medical Center, COVID's ever-evolving impact on daily life and the fact her family nest is rapidly emptying. "I needed to do something, but I didn't want to go back to the medical field."
Enter a worker's market of epic proportions - state unemployment is 3.7% while federal jobs data shows 7% (10.7 million) jobs are open nationally - and the wheels started turning, Wilson said. She began systematically looking through the types of jobs available in the Wheeling area and imagining herself in them.
With the medical sector already ruled out, she considered absolutely everything with fresh eyes — retail, food service, secretarial. Nothing felt like a good fit until news coverage of the labor market drew her attention in a surprising direction.
"I saw this thing on TV about the supply chain and the lack of drivers," Wilson said of having a why-not moment about trucking. "The timing was right."
That timing included a willingness to challenge herself in a big-rig kind of way, she noted.
"I thought, if I can drive a standard, maybe I can drive (a truck)," she said, noting her personal vehicle is a mini-van that she refers to as a "mom-mobile."
Wilson started monitoring truck-related job postings and realized there were not only lots of openings for drivers, there was a wide variety of work. That was a good match for her.
She knew she didn't want to do OTR (over the road) trucking because such jobs can involve being away from home for a week or more and she still has teen sons at home.
"I needed a job where I was home daily," said Wilson, who also decided she didn't want to have to physically haul stuff in and out of a truck.
Such parameters already forming in her mind, Wilson started a commercial drivers license class at West Virginia Northern Community College in late February. She said she was the youngest of the four students in the class and the only woman.
About eight weeks later, she was licensed up to the point she is now qualified to drive not only passenger buses but tractor-trailers, double trucks and tankers. Because, she added, you never know.
NOT ONE OF A KIND
While Wilson's pivot was a dramatic one, data from multiple sources confirm many workers are on the move one way or another. The numbers are staggering.
In an August release of Job Openings and Labor Turnover Statistics jobs data, information collected in June by the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor showed the Great Resignation associated with COVID hasn't necessarily stopped. Nearly 3% of American workers quit their job that month.
JOLTS also showed that 7% of America's jobs were wide open in June. That's 10.7 million jobs.
West Virginia-specific data from JOLTS suggests it will continue to be difficult to fill those jobs. The state unemployment rate - which measures only people who are actively looking for work - is 3.7%. That means more than 96 out of every 100 Mountaineers who desire employment already have it.
To put that in perspective, the unemployment rate was hovering around an already low 5% from 2017 until COVID briefly spiked the rate to 15.5% in spring 2020. Except for the COVID cliff, a worker's market has been building for years.
Brian Lego, a research assistant professor and economic forecaster for the Bureau of Business and Economic Research at West Virginia University, added some analysis.
Lego said the state is now at more than 98% of its pre-pandemic level of employment. But, that's an overall number. Some sectors (such as manufacturing, construction and business services) now have more jobs than they did in early 2020.
Adding that robust-and-then-some recovery to a tight supply of labor equals about 20,000 open jobs, he said.
"The causes for these unfilled job openings cannot be boiled down to one explanation and are affecting industries in a significantly different way," Lego noted. "Leisure and hospitality (restaurants, hotels, etc.) and healthcare face historically high rates of job openings."
Lego said that the worker's market is pushing up wages, but not consistently. He noted wages are less likely to have increased in sectors that are facing a higher cost of doing business given supply chain irregularities. And, Lego added, "wages themselves tend to be 'sticky,' meaning they tend to adjust slowly compared to the economic conditions at a given time."
Workers like Wilson may be most likely to benefit, he explained. "Those seeing the largest wage gains over the past year or so (are) workers who have changed jobs."