Minnesota Careers

When you think of Minnesota, you think of snow. But Minnesota has more to offer than cold weather and lots of snow. It can offer you a career in a wide range of industries. When searching for employment trends and facts, it is important to do your homework. Know what jobs are in demand. And find out which jobs are expected to grow over the next five to ten years. It's also important to know the required amount of education, training, and or certification before applying for a particular job. Here are a few ideas to help you in your search.

Check to see if the area, or in this case, the state of Minnesota, has a state government webpage. Many governmental entities will provide employment information as a part of their web information to help those who are possibly thinking of relocating or moving to the state. This is always a good place to start. Minnesota happens to be one such entity.

For example, if you look at Minnesota's state page, you will find an area dedicated to businesses and jobs. You can then navigate through until you get to a page titled Occupation Employment Stats. This page lists multiple occupations that you can select to get more detailed information such as the page for Healthcare Support Occupations. On this page, you can find mean and median salaries, as well as the leading industries that employ healthcare support workers. You can also choose to look up the employment outlook for that particular industry and or occupation.

Another such tool would be what is called a job site. Be careful though. Not all job sites are reliable. Pay close attention to where their information was gathered from, and how up to date the information is. A good job site will have information such as the top ten, twenty, twenty-five etc. careers for their area. Mention of median salary, possible numbers of current positions being held within that industry as well as expected percentage of growth over the next few years are other important facts to look for on the job site. Let's take a quick look at one such example.

On one particular site, the ten top careers for Duluth, Minnesota were listed as follows: logging equipment operators (mean local salary $29,270), forest and conservation technicians ($34,090), furnace, kiln, oven, drier, and kettle operators and tenders ($45,180), crushing, grinding, and polishing machine setters, operators, and tenders ($39,130), millwrights ($38,080), separating, filtering, clarifying, precipitating, and still machine setters, operators, and tenders ($42,150), highway maintenance workers ($37,310), radio and television announcers ($18,880), community and social service specialists ($35,080) and social and human service assistants ($23,460).

If you chose the city of Minneapolis, Minnesota from this same page, you will find the same type of table containing the top ten careers, but specific to Minneapolis as follows: floor sanders and finishers (mean local salary $45,060), audio-visual collections specialists ($53,840), umpires, referees ($31,500), semiconductor processors ($31,500), food scientists and technologists ($72,060), gaming and sports book writers and runners ($17,700), religious workers ($34,480), automotive glass installers and repairers ($41,370), biomedical engineers ($70,270) and area, ethnic, and cultural studies teachers, postsecondary ($64,400).

It's also important to gather information regarding both long-term and short-term job outlooks. This information can be gathered from sites such as the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. This particular site offers valuable information at it relates to employment. It offers local, state and national averages, statistics, unemployment trends, occupational profiles, occupations by metropolitan areas, average wages, job openings, and employment projections, just to name a few of the pockets of information found on this site.

Do your homework. Minneapolis has much to offer in career choices as well as well paying occupations. Take the time to search out these and other employment tools to help with your job search and employment in a growing and satisfying career.

Resources:

Minnesota Jobs - Salary and employment info. Browse by job title, or by city.

http://www.bls.gov/OES/

Minnesota Colleges - Find out where in MN to get appropriate training for your ideal job position.