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Shortage circuit
Not every industry is saturated with employees — try a field that’s looking for labor
BY DAVID VALDES GREENWOOD

Where to find them

Nursing

• Quincy College, (617) 984-1710; e-mail newstudent@quincycollege.edu.

• Boston College School of Nursing, (617) 552-2230; e-mail soninfo@bc.edu.

Imaging technologists

• Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences, (800) 225-5506; e-mail admissions@mcp.edu.

• Bunker Hill Community College, (617) 228-2422; e-mail enrollment@bhcc.mass.edu.

Dentistry

• Tufts University, (617) 636-6639; e-mail DenAdmissions@tufts.edu.

• Boston University, (617) 638-4787; e-mail toledano@bu.edu.

Math/science teachers

• University of Massachusetts Boston, (617) 287-5000; online info-request form at www.umb.edu.

• Brandeis University, (781) 736-2002; e-mail mlevenson@brandeis.edu.

Special educators

• Wheelock College, (617) 879-2206; e-mail undergrad@wheelock.edu.

• Lesley College, (877) 4LESLEY; e-mail info@lesley.edu.

Librarians

• Simmons College, (617) 521-2800; e-mail gslis@simmons.edu.

• Cambridge College, (888) 868-1002; e-mail jangelo@cambridgecollege.edu.

Construction

• George W. Gould Construction Institute, (781) 270-9990; e-mail information@gwgci.org.

• Wentworth Institute of Technology, (800) 556-0610; online info-request form at www.wit.edu.

Electrical engineering

• MIT, (617) 253-4791; online info-request form at www.mit.edu.

• Northeastern University, (617) 373-4159; e-mail undergrad-admissions@neu.edu or grad-eng@coe.neu.edu.

Information technology

• Katharine Gibbs School, (617) 578-7100; online info-request form at www.kgibbsboston.com.

• Massachusetts Bay Community College, (781) 239-2500; e-mail info@massbay.edu.

— DVG

The recent holiday season brought tidings of higher unemployment rates, an unwelcome lump of coal for job seekers (who were immediately joined by two of the president’s top economic advisers as a result of the news). At six percent, the unemployment rate was the highest it’d been in eight years, with forecasters predicting increases of up to 6.5 percent in the coming months — the worst since the elder Bush was president.

But not everyone is shaking in his or her boots. If you have the right career in mind, you’ll find that some industries are literally begging for help. Industries currently facing skilled-labor shortages are those less dependent on consumers’ whims or available disposable income, and whose services are always in demand. Even in lean times, people get sick, kids go to school, buildings are built and maintained, and computers run the world. With that in mind, it’s easy to see which professions may offer the safest career paths in an uncertain future.

Nursing

Though there’ve been cyclical nursing shortages in the past, the nationwide gap between the number of registered nurses and available positions has widened so dramatically that the topic is on the lips of policymakers coast-to-coast. The American Association of Colleges of Nursing has pushed for Congress to look beyond past fixes (such as pay increases) to more comprehensive measures, such as outreach to individual states and investigation into fostering public/private partnerships that would recruit and retain nurses. Nineteen states have already implemented nursing-shortage legislation that addresses such issues as scholarships and loan repayment. According to the Massachusetts Nursing Association, our state is "experiencing a serious shortage of nurses" working in hospitals.

If you’d like to help remedy that, here are some options. Quincy College offers the basic two-year AS in nursing that leads to becoming a registered nurse (RN). Boston College School of Nursing offers BSN, MSN, and PhD degrees, as well as an RN-to-MSN program for nurses without a BS. Other local options include programs at Simmons College, Northeastern University, and the University of Massachusetts Boston.

Imaging technologists

Nurses aren’t the only in-demand people in the medical field. The American Society of Radiological Technologists (ASRT) notes that a vast number of current radiation imagists has been in the profession for 30 years or longer. As a result, they’re now retiring faster than they can be replaced. In the industry journal Advance Magazine, ASRT CEO Lynn May worries that "[i]n the long run there is a very real possibility of a severe shortage as the population ages and people retire."

Among the few local programs, Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences offers a three-year bachelor-of-science program in radiologic science, with emphases in nuclear-medicine technology, radiation therapy, and radiography. Bunker Hill Community College offers a two-year program in radiologic science.

Dentistry

There was a time when being a dentist offered enough prestige and fiscal compensation to make it a hot career. Apparently, however, that time is decades past. According to Oral Health, an advocacy group for the dental profession, only 25 states now have a sufficient number of dentists per capita. (The study, using past totals for comparison, defines sufficient as no more than 2000 citizens per dentist; in some regions of the country, the number of citizens per dentist is now nearly twice that.) And a University of Kentucky study revealed that over the past five years, for every three dentists retiring, only two dental-school graduates have emerged to replace them. While there is no quick path to dentistry, the graying of the current workforce bodes well for new dentists’ job placement upon completion of their studies.

Tufts University offers a four-year predoctoral program leading to the doctor-of-dental-medicine degree (DMD); three combined-degree programs; a dental international-student program for foreign-trained dentists; and postgraduate and specialty programs. Boston University offers the DMD, an advanced-standing program for foreign-trained dentists, and 12 postdoctoral programs.

Math/science teachers

In 2002, Massachusetts education commissioner David P. Driscoll sent a letter to the deans of all the state’s schools of education, in which he wrote, "This state is facing a serious teacher shortage, and to address this we need to focus on additional ways to recruit and train the best candidates possible." Especially in urban settings, qualified math and science teachers are ever harder to find, even with the state’s much-discussed hiring-bonus program. The trend is not unique to Massachusetts. According to Education World, US public schools will need an estimated 2.4 million additional teachers in the next 10 years — nearly as many teachers as are currently teaching. With 50 colleges in Massachusetts offering education certification in a variety of specializations, you have plenty of options.

Among those, University of Massachusetts Boston offers a teacher-education program for many of its undergraduate disciplines in the liberal arts and sciences, and a graduate program in adapting the curriculum, designed specifically with the needs of Massachusetts’s diverse public schools in mind. At Brandeis University, students pair one of the BS-degree majors with teacher-certification preparation (and boast some of the highest test scores on the state-required exams for teachers).

Special educators

Some trends are so slow-moving as to avoid detection by those outside the field. The number of certified special educators has dwindled for a decade, but it is only recently that the scope of the problem has been recognized in Washington. When the US Department of Education made its annual report to Congress, it fired a warning shot that was heard throughout policy-making circles: "The United States is experiencing a critical shortage of personnel to meet the needs of children with disabilities." As a result, many thousands of positions in special-education fields have gone unfilled, or were filled by applicants without appropriate certification.

Wheelock College offers a variety of programs, including graduate study in special needs, certification for teaching students with moderate disabilities, and a special-needs-licensure program for people with other teaching certification. At Lesley College, you may choose from professional certificates, a master-of-education degree, and certificates of advanced graduate study in special education.

Librarians

Picture the stereotypical librarian: a kindly, cardigan-wearing old lady, right? That’s an image many librarians would take exception to, but there is a certain truth to the age part — according to the Library Journal, more than half of all professional librarians are in their 50s or older, with 40 percent expected to retire in the coming decade. Half the nation’s school librarians are also slated to shelve their last primer in that time as well. This leaves the American Library Association desperate for young blood — of both sexes.

The only ALA-accredited program in these parts is at Simmons College, which offers a master’s in library science. Cambridge College has a unique distance-learning program that enables students to become school-library media specialists.

Construction

You might think that penny-pinching times would reduce the amount of new construction, but demand for the services of the construction industry has remained steady. The number of skilled construction workers, though, has not kept up. According to the Atlanta Business Chronicle, "[The labor shortage] goes from the architects who can no longer find people who are qualified to do their projects to people like [construction consultants] and right down to the carpenters trying to find someone who can swing a hammer."

For learning hands-on skills in everything from carpentry, roofing, pipe-fitting, and foremanship to complying with OSHA regulations, consider the George W. Gould Construction Institute, in Burlington. For a more traditional academic setting, there’s Wentworth Institute of Technology, which offers programs in civil-engineering technology, construction-engineering technology, construction management, and environmental engineering.

Electrical engineering

In a related trend, the demand for electrical engineers has been high as well. JobWeb, the Web site for the National Association of Colleges and Employers, tracked the most in-demand degrees, and electrical engineering appeared in the top 10 at the bachelor’s, master’s, and even doctoral levels. Positions requiring certified and degreed engineers exceed applicants in Massachusetts, where a study last year by the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University found that 10 percent of electrical-engineering jobs posted went unfilled.

MIT offers three BS degrees in electrical engineering and a master’s of science in electrical engineering and computer science. At Northeastern University, choose from BS, MS, and PhD degrees in electrical engineering.

Information technology

Despite the massive layoffs that made the tech world tremble and laid Internet consultants low in late 2001 and early 2002, information technology remains a hot market for employees with the right skills. According to CNET, the geek’s Bible, a survey of IT managers revealed that they "anticipate a shortage of IT workers at both high-tech and non-tech companies. The managers said they expect that more than 1.1 million tech jobs will be available, but they predict they will be unable to fill some 578,000 of those positions." Programmers and Web developers are among those in demand.

Katharine Gibbs School offers an AS in applied science in computer-network operations and a certificate program in computer technical support. Massachusetts Bay Community College offers a certificate program in information technology and AS degrees both in information-systems management and technology and in computer information systems.

David Valdes Greenwood can be reached at ambobean@hotmail.com

Issue Date: January 16 - 23, 2003
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