Kane unemployment has slight uptick in December, but down from 2009

Kane County was one of only 15 counties in the state to see its unemployment rate rise in December, according to the latest figures released by the Illinois Department of Employment Security.

But the county’s unemployment rate fared much better in December 2010 than in December 2009.

Either way, local employment experts are determined to see the rate continue to decline.

Of the 102 counties in Illinois, 83 saw at least a minor drop in unemployment in December. Four counties saw a flat unemployment rate compared to November.

With a labor force of nearly 269,800 people, Kane County’s unemployment grew 0.4 percentage point. That accounted for a 9 percent unemployment rate, or a total of 24,150 people without a job.

Overall, the unemployment rate improved for every county in Illinois in 2010 compared to 2009. Kane County saw its unemployment rate reduced 2.1 percentage points compared to last December.

Dee Reinhardt of Kane County’s Department of Employment and Education said the keys to finding a job today are looking in the right industry and setting yourself apart from the larger-than-normal pool of applicants.

“I’m seeing that employers are being very particular about the skills and the characteristics they are requesting,” she said. “They are looking for the purple squirrel, someone who stands out. In other words, if an employer is looking for 11 particular characteristics in a new hire, you’re someone who has 12 of those 11 characteristics.”

Reinhardt’s agency provides free assistance to job seekers with sprucing up resumes, job interview practice and even free workshops on how to find jobs using Internet tools such as LinkedIn.com. Reinhardt said she just received a 56-page list of jobs in a posting by Waubonsee Community College this week. Many of the jobs are sales, home health care and service-related jobs.

Those listings pair up with a 25-page list of jobs on the website for Reinhardt’s agency. The list contains opportunities ranging from actuaries and airline pilots to welders and zoologists.

“What we are trying to focus people on are jobs in what the state considers ‘key sectors,’ ” Reinhardt said.

Part of that is a look toward the future and what is considered to be “new and emerging jobs” where a rising number of job openings is expected. Jobs in biofuels processing, medical assistance and wind turbine energy are expected to be the booming fields. Those fields could mark opportunities to remake careers for the long-term unemployed.

State projections for job opportunities up to 2016 show where the jobs won’t be in the future.

File clerks, electronic equipment assemblers, printing workers and sales engineers are all local fields expected to lose more than 100 positions each by 2016. There are nearly 90 other types of jobs in other sectors expected to see more than a 10 percent loss of employment opportunities in the same time frame.

The good news is, the IDES also projects nearly 2,600 new jobs will be created, on average, each year in the county until 2016.

The question is whether the economy will recover rapidly enough to rely on those projections.

For Mary Shesgreen, the current economy, and the new Congress guiding it, indicate a bleaker future than she’s comfortable with. Shesgreen recently staged a rally outside a North Aurora unemployment office with the local chapter of the Living Wage Jobs for All Coalition.

She’s planning another rally for noon today outside the unemployment office in downtown Elgin at 30 DuPage St. This time State Sen. Mike Noland is expected to join her.

“Our focus is to make it clear that none of the measures for job creation happening at the federal level come anywhere near what we want,” Shesgreen said. “We want a federal jobs program like what was created during the Great Depression.”

Shesgreen, and many of the union workers who are part of her group, is not a fan of the theory of trickle-down economics.

“It does not work,” she said. “The rich have gotten richer and richer. The middle class is under assault. And the verbal attacks on public-sector workers are just an attempt to strip away unions and reduce the American worker to cheap labor. We need government spending to create jobs.”