There’s been a lot of discussion about the decline of jobs considered to be “mid-skilled” during the last several years. A recent Regional Economic Press Briefing prepared by our friends at the New York Fed took another look at this important issue. They aggregate occupations into three skill categories: higher-skill, middle-skill, and lower-skill professions. The specific occupations of each category are outlined in the following chart:
Using data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Occupational Employment Statistics dataset, we were able to decompose the Sixth District states’ labor markets using the same skill categories that the New York Fed used.
Both the higher-skill and lower-skill categories grew from 2007 to 2013, and the middle-skill group shrank for both the United States and Sixth District. The proportion by which the middle-skill group’s share shrank during the time period was roughly similar for the nation and Sixth District, with the difference between the two differences being less than 1 percentage point. Yet more interesting, we were able to compare how these groups’ compositions have changed prior to and following the recession for each Sixth District state. You can see a state-by-state decomposition in the following chart:
Florida, Georgia, and Tennessee all saw their share of their middle-skill jobs shrink by roughly 4 percentage points during the time period, while Alabama’s share of middle skill jobs decreased by about 3 percentage points. The middle-skill groups in Louisiana and Mississippi, often the outliers in Sixth District data, shrank by the smallest amounts during the time period 2007–13, roughly by 2 percentage points. However, Louisiana’s share of higher-skill occupations was the only one not to expand from 2007 to 2013. The shrinking share of middle-skill jobs in that state was almost solely the result of a growing share of lower-skill jobs.
To understand how the data in the chart above came about, we can look at changes in the composition of these groups (higher-, middle-, and lower-skill groups) by state during both the recession and recovery. The first chart below shows that the middle-skill groups took a particularly hard hit across the nation and District in the previous recession...
...while those middle-skill jobs have been the most sluggish to come back, both across the nation and the Sixth District, as the following chart shows:
By Mark Carter and Sandra Ghizoni, both senior economic analysts in the Atlanta Fed’s research department