October Workforce Report: Shortage of construction workers in hurricane-impacted areas

With rebuilding efforts underway in hurricane-damaged areas, the market for construction workers in Houston, Miami and Puerto Rico is tight, according to the LinkedIn October Workforce Report. Houston, Dallas and Austin are three of the top ten cities with the largest relative shortage of construction skills nationwide.

Impacted areas will need to look to the Northeast (Philadelphia, Hartford, Providence) and the Midwest (Cleveland, Kansas City, Milwaukee) where there are large pockets of available construction workers.

Meantime, on the national jobs front, hiring across the U.S. was 19.8 percent higher in September versus September 2016.

The oil and energy sectors once again experienced the biggest year-over-year increase (27.3 percent higher), with the manufacturing and industrial (20.7 percent higher) and aerospace, automotive, and transportation (19.1 percent higher) industries rounding out the top three.

Seasonally-adjusted hiring (hiring that excludes seasonal hiring variations – like companies hiring less in December due to the holiday season) saw a 2.4 percent jump from August to  September.

Key insights:

• Help wanted: construction workers needed in the Southeast – In recent weeks, hurricanes have wreaked destruction in Houston, Miami and Puerto Rico. Houston, Dallas and Austin are three of the top ten cities with the largest relative shortage of construction skills nationwide. Our data shows that there are large pockets of underutilized construction workers in the Northeast.

• Hiring remains strong, creeps steadily upward through September – Hiring across the U.S. was 19.8 percent higher this September versus September 2016. Seasonally-adjusted hiring (hiring that excludes seasonal hiring variations – like companies hiring less in December due to the holiday season) was 2.4 percent higher in September than in August this year. A notable exception was Miami, which experienced a 26.7 percent month-over-month decline in seasonally-adjusted hiring; this decline was likely due to an extended disruption to hiring from the Hurricane Irma evacuation.

• Growth in Nashville’s tech sector outpaces supply of skilled workers – Nashville has a small but rapidly growing tech sector, which is currently constrained by a scarcity of workers skilled in IT infrastructure, software engineering management, web programming, and artificial intelligence. While the supply for all four of these skills has increased over the past year, there is still a skills shortage for each of them due to rapidly increasing demand. In fact, Nashville has the biggest skills shortage for software engineering management in the United States.

Click here to read more of our October LinkedIn Workforce Report.

More than 141 million workers in the U.S. have LinkedIn profiles; over 20,000 companies in the U.S. use LinkedIn to recruit; over 3 million jobs are posted on LinkedIn in the U.S. every month; and members can add over 50,000 skills to their profiles to showcase their professional brands. This gives us unique insights into U.S. workforce trends.

The LinkedIn Workforce Report helps workers better navigate their careers by highlighting workforce trends in the U.S. and across 20 cities. Insights include whether hiring is up, down, or flat, which skills cities need most, and where workers are moving to and from.