Letter from the Editor

December 2011

The rush for jobs in booming North Dakota has been getting a lot of attention lately in the national media. Publications from the New York Times to the Wall Street Journal have sent reporters to the state in the past year to find out what’s driving the country’s lowest unemployment rate of 3.5 percent.

Oil, of course, is a big part of the answer, along with a healthy farm economy and a growing high-tech sector. As one official put it, North Dakota’s economy “sticks out like a diamond in a bowl of cherry pits.

Minnesota is no slouch itself when it comes to the economy, posting among the lowest unemployment rates in the country at 5.9 percent in November. But as analyst Amanda Rohrer documents in this issue, state residents can’t resist the westward pull of North Dakota for jobs.

Each day, more than 27,000 Minnesotans cross the border to work in North Dakota. The size of the daily commute isn’t completely surprising when you consider residents are mostly traveling from a rural part of Minnesota to the job-rich North Dakota border cities of Fargo and Grand Forks. As the story illustrates, jobs know no boundaries and people will log the extra miles, if necessary, for steady, good-paying work.

Our cover story examines careers in the real estate industry, which is evolving with technology. While good old-fashioned relationship-building and leg work never go out of style in the real estate business, today’s professionals also use websites, social media and smartphones to get deals done. It’s an exciting industry with a variety of jobs.

Elsewhere, we look at some of the results of a two-year study on green jobs in Minnesota and examine employment in the public sector. Despite conventional wisdom that state and local government jobs account for an increasing share of the workforce, Dave Senf documents in his story that the relative size of the sector has been shrinking for decades.

As always, thanks for reading Trends, and we look forward to bringing you four more issues in 2012.

Monte Hanson
Editor