University of Nevada Reno, Orvis School of Nursing, has reached capacity again and is looking to double their enrollment.  When this is completed, it is expected that the new UNR facility will ease the nursing shortfall.  Northern Nevada is not unique in this capacity problem.  Southern Nevada faces the same issue.  And pretty much every nursing program in the State of Nevada is at capacity as we lack sufficient clinical space.

“Growing our own” is surely the best route to go for Nevada.  We have lacked in our production of registered nurses over the year.  To put some perspective to this….back in the late 1990s when we first started focusing on the nursing shortage, Nevada was graduating some 332 registered nurses each year.  The problem was we needed over 800 to fulfill our needs.  So we had to go out-of-market to attract nurses to relocate.  This is how Recruiting Nevada came about.

However, we knew that we needed to increase Nevada’s home-grown supply of registered nurses.  So we lobbied the Nevada Legislature to double the nursing program.  That happened 3 sessions later and between the public nursing schools and the privates, Nevada now graduates around 1,000 registered nurses each year.

We are well on our way to a sustainable recruiting solution for registered nurses in Nevada.  There still are some changes that need to happen in clinical scheduling to increase (and optimize) overall capacity.  Several groups are working on that problem as we speak.  Kudos to UNR for their expected growth and contribution to the overall wealth and health of Nevada.

Experts say nurses are leading a trend toward more organized labor in the medical setting — mostly in hospitals.

A recently published article in American Medical News discusses the increased number of unions in hospitals. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of medical personnel covered by some form of collective bargaining agreement or registered as union members is edging up. This is partly because the health care sector now employs many more people than do traditionally unionized industries such as manufacturing.

Original article

Online job ads for health care practitioners and technicians grew by 3,300 listing in April for a total of 630,000 listings, a level of demand not seen since the recession began two years ago, the Conference Board reports.

The report, which tracks more than 1,000 online job boards across the United States, also notes that the demand for health care support occupations has remained relatively strong throughout the recession and grew by 2,400 listings in April, to 128,700 listings, the highest monthly level since the HWOL series began in May 2005. Increases in this field reflect the continued strong demand for workers in occupations like occupational and physical therapists and nursing aids, the report said.

Demand in the health care labor market varies substantially from the higher-paying practitioner and technical jobs to the lower-paying support occupations. In April, advertised vacancies for health care practitioners or technical occupations outnumbered the unemployed looking for work in this field by 4 to 1, and the average wage in these occupations is $32.64/hour, the report said. The average wage for health care support occupations is $12.66/hour and there were more than two unemployed people looking for work in the field for every advertised vacancy, the report said.

Original article by John Commins, for HealthLeaders Media.

The following article by Buck Wargo, In Business reporter, is a question and answer with Robert Lang. Lang is the director of the Lincy Institute at UNLV and co-director of Brookings Mountain West, a partnership between UNLV and the Brookings Institution in Washington. He is the Brookings Mountain West director based in Nevada. His goal is to get the voice of the region heard and understood in Washington, so that it will obtain more resources to tackle its problems.

(photo by Sam Morris)

Lang has some good insights/ideas for the future of our state:

“On a more important level, it looks to me at this point, there appears to be a golden opportunity with the leadership in this city seeking to actually look for an alternative way to go forward — to figure a way that is more resilient to change and downturns in the economy. We are at a point where Las Vegas is about to switch from a one-dimensional to a multidimensional world city. No one could have ever imagined you could have gotten a world city out of an industry like gaming, but that is how worldwide it became. They are now exporting this around the world, to China for example. As a result, this city is to gaming what Houston is to energy. Energy wound up in Houston because there were oil fields in the Gulf, but even as those resources dwindled in relative terms to what we find in the rest of the world. Houston maintained a lead in the actual knowledge about that industry — how to find the resources and how to finance it and even how to put out an oil fire.”

“Las Vegas has this key industry, and it was able to get the region to a couple of million people. Going forward, everything shouldn’t be reliant on it. The industry also spun off an alternative industry in conventions. Conventions can give you increasingly permanent advantage if they reach enough scale. We are going to get the Consumer Electronics Show permanently housed in the city. We also have promising companies like Switch Communications. And if we can get Yucca Mountain remade into a national data storage facility, this would bring a lot of high-tech people to this region.”

Read the entire article here

As the Nevada economy bounces along the bottom, economists and futurists continue to state that Nevada needs to change from being a consumer to becoming and exporter.  I ask, “What can Nevada export?”

Nevada has done an excellent job of exporting ‘a great experience’ for years.  Travelers from across the globe have visited our great city and we have delivered and exported a once in a lifetime experience.  It is important that we do not forget (or neglect) this. This is our most valuable export.

But what else can we export?  Considering most manufacturing takes an abundance of energy, we are limited until we become the renewable energy capital of the World.  Then we can utilize the energy we produce and hopefully we can export our excess energy to other energy hungry states.  But reality is that is at least 10 years away.

So what else can we export?  Well, many of our professional firms such as engineers and architects have learned that they can export their services.  As other regions and countries look at the expansion of gaming, they look at Las Vegas as the model to take from.  So they engage our local design firms to produce drawings and engineer these new casinos. 

I would argue that we are an exporter of gaming talent as well.  I know some people may immediately jump to the conclusion of ‘this is brain drain.’  But is is not.  And if we do it right, it does not have to be. 

Let’s dive a little deeper – UNLV is known for as being one of the best ‘hotel and hospitality’ colleges in the World.  Most of the talent stays right here in Las Vegas.  Some are ‘exported’ to work in hotels across the country, or even the World.  But I would venture to say that Las Vegas retains the best.  So in essence, we are an exporter of gaming talent.  Yet, we benefit from the ability to source directly from the best college for this profession. 

So can we do this with other professions if done right?  I think so.  We would clearly need to fix our state budgets.  Or at least how we fund higher education.  But imagine if we increased our production of health care professionals from higher education.  And not only production, but quality.  And our local health care employers benefited from the deeper applicant pool.  We could retain the best and become an exporter of health care talent. 

We are a long ways away from being able to accomplish this.  But it is a concept that has merit.  I encourage you to look to Henderson, which has done an amazing job of attracting private higher education institutions that do not rely on Nevada state funding.  These colleges (some 10+ of them), are training professionals from other states and many of them become employed right here in Southern Nevada.  And each of these colleges employ dozens, if not hundreds of highly skilled professionals themselves who live in our communities.  They own homes, shop and eat in our local restaurants.  In essence – they contribute to our economy and diversification efforts.

I suggest we look at Education as a business.  One that will initially provide us with the workforce that we need, but a business where we can eventually export our excess talent.  What a great position we will be in then.

Here is reality:  During this Great Recession the United States has lost well over 8 million jobs.  Last month, we registered 162,000 new jobs (which I think is a false indicator).  In February we only lost 36,000 jobs which was much better than the 726,000 jobs we lost the previous February. 

Now let’s add some perspective:  Say we were able to add 200,000 jobs this month.  And let’s assume we can continue to add 200,000 new jobs each month thereafter.  How long would it take for us to recover all of the jobs lost at this rate?  It would take 3 1/2 years, if we did not include all of the jobs that we should be adding for new entrants into the workforce.

So where will all of these jobs come from?  That is the million dollar question…especially in Nevada where the only two sector to see any job growth last year was health care/education and mining.  How about green jobs in Nevada?  Will we see growth there?  The jury is still out.  Nevada is surely positioned to take advantage of renewable energy, but we have not heard about that gold rush of jobs quite yet.

After attending Harrah’s community job fair where over 7,000 job seekers showed up to apply for 500 new jobs in Las Vegas it is easy to see just how bad it is.  Nevada needs to develop a strategy to attract new industry here and diversify our economy.  We know it will start with health care and education, or what I am calling “Eds & Meds“….but it will require much more.  

A recent article in Time Magazine does an awesome job of diving into the issue of where the jobs will come from and how we will need to look to small business owners and entrepreneurial ventures to carry the load.  If you have the time to read this article, it is a great read.  Check it out here.

In our continuing quest to stress how we must diversify our economy, In Business Las Vegas published a question and answer article with Mike Skaggs on just this topic:

The diversification of Nevada’s economy always seems to come up when times are bad, as in, “The reason things are so bad in our state is that we’re too dependent on the gaming industry.”

Mike Skaggs, Executive Director of the Nevada Economic Commission (photo by Steve Marcus)

Mike Skaggs, executive director of the Nevada Economic Development Commission, knows that all too well, having devoted most of his career to working to diversify one economy or another. He heads the state’s economic development effort, focusing on a diversified economic base.

Skaggs talked with In Business Las Vegas about the challenges of economic diversification, the state’s biggest rivals for recruiting businesses and the roadblocks to getting companies to consider Nevada for their operations.

Read the article here
By Richard N. Velotta (contact), In Business reporter

He sums up what we’ve been stressing over and over in this newsletter:
We have to stay the course. In the past, we’ve gone through one of these and the hospitality industry came back with, “OK, never mind, we don’t need to do this anymore.” Well, we do. We have to make this a permanent, long-term commitment to get this thing diverse so we never go through this again.

If you want to read a very information article on Nevada being Down and Out:  Salary and job outlook for Nevadans goes from bad to worse with little relief in sight….take the time to read the article written by Jennifer Robison from the Las Vegas Review Journal.  Basically, only two industries saw job growth in the past two years.  Others took massive hits.  Check out the below:

• Natural Resources and Mining:  +400
• Construction:  -36,400
• Manufacturing:  -4,400
• Trade, Transportation and Utilities:  -18,200
• Information:  -1,200
• Financial Activities:  -5,200
• Professional and Business Services:  -15,600
• Education and Health Services:  4,900
• Leisure and Hospitality:  -28,600
• Government:  -5,300

All I have to say is…..Eds & Meds, Eds & Meds, Eds & Meds.

Las Vegas, and the Western United States in general, are expected to rover behind the rest of the country for the first time in history.  Brookings Institution released its’ fourth quarter economic analysis which shows that job recovery in Las Vegas will lag behind the rest of the country.  Much of this has to do with our reliance on the gaming and construction industries, both of which have been pummelled in this economic recession.  This further validates my “Eds & Meds” position made last week. 

Several of the scholars from  Brookings Mountain West have been presenting to Las Vegas Business leaders recently.  The presentation is realistic in the findings it presents, yet optimistic in the opportunities that Nevada has in front of us.  

Read the entire Brookings Institution Report.

Its obvious that Nevada is at a cross roads again in terms of economic diversification.  We need it.  And everyone agrees.  We have been here several times before.  The question is  – “Will we do anything different this time?”

As many know, I believe that if we focus on the growth of “Eds & Meds” we will achieve economic diversification.  Look at Pittsburgh’s success with this program.  Not only did Pittsburgh find growth in education and healthcare, they attracted other leading industries to enter the marketplace.  Frankly, this is what turned Pittsburgh, PA around.  Unless an initiative had something to do with education or medical, the economic diversification leadership of Pittsburgh did not pay as much attention. And now Pittsburgh is an admired turn-around city.  Today, Pittsburgh has one of the lowest unemployment levels in the country and is not feeling the recession like other markets.

By following this best practice, we would improve upon the two biggest weaknesses of Nevada that stop companies from relocating here.  Nevada offers one of the best business climates in the World, but we lack in what is most important to many companies.  And that is offering families of workers a great education and quality health care. 

I remember all too well when Las Vegas and Nevada arrived at the cross roads last time, right after the September 11, 2001 tragedy.  The Las Vegas, and therefore the Nevada, economy was crushed.  Occupancy rates dropped immediately, and quickly following were room rates.  Revenues plummeted.  Projects were halted.  And the people of Nevada cried “Why did we allow ourselves to become some dependent on gaming?”  And we committed to change our dependence. 

But as soon as the gaming engine began to roar again four months later all of those cries fell on silent ears.  Nevada was back!!  And projects were now behind schedule after being put on hold for four months.  So engineering and construction companies doubled their hiring capacity to make up for lost time.  And a few looked at this job creation as diversification, because of course they were construction and professional jobs, not gaming.  But what we neglected to acknowledge was that they were tied to gaming. 

Well, here we are again.  And this time is different.  Much different.  With many projects being moth-balled for at least five years.  So those construction, engineering and architecture jobs will not be returning any time soon.  And those jobs make up our second largest industry.  Nevada DETER states that 28.7 percent of these jobs have gone away during the recession. 

So, let’s start valuing education and healthcare.  It will not only create new jobs in Las Vegas in both of these industries…..it will attract other great companies to relocate here.