The Top 5 US Cities for Job Growth - Ep. 45

Ryan: Aloha folks and welcome back to Degree Free. We are your hosts, Ryan, and Hannah Maruyama on this podcast, we share a fundamentals we've discovered and the mistakes we've made while self-educating getting work, building businesses and making money. We'll tell you how to make it happen. No degree needed.

Hannah: Hey everybody. We are super happy to have you back on the podcast. Again, this week and we send out a short newsletter once a week. I promise you want to get this newsletter and has all sorts of degree, free news resources, job, job tips, career ideas, stuff that you are definitely going to want to see and probably send to people that you know, who are in the same boat.

Um, so if you want to get that, go on over to degreefree.co/signup and you will get it for free once a week. 

Ryan: Right on. And, uh, let's get into today's episode today. We are going to be talking about the top five US cities for job growth. 

Hannah: This is kind of an interesting one because it's been a wild few years.

Ryan: Yeah, definitely. 

Hannah: So I think a good place to start with this is why are we talking about this? What, for what reason? 

Ryan: That's a good question. And I mean, the reason why we're talking about this is, because, you know, a lot of people with the job market being what it is, they're finding it hard to find jobs and there might not be jobs in your area.

And so it might be beneficial depending on what industry you're in and depending on what you want to do to think about moving to someplace where there are jobs. And so. What's on a smaller scale. Like when I was in my early twenties, like I was a busser at a restaurant, like I cleaned up the dishes on people's tables and then I took it to the back to the dish pit and then the dishwasher washed them.

And it was like closing time. I don't know. I was like 12, the restaurant was closing, but not the bar and the dishwasher was rushing to get out of there cause he had to catch a bus home and I was just like, I guess the last bus home.

Hannah: Oh late then.

Ryan: Yeah. And I was like, oh, where do you live? And he's just like, oh, I live in this part of town.

That's like an hour away or an hour and a half. But that was by car. 

Hannah: Oh yeah. On the bus. It's like two and a half hours. 

Ryan: Yeah. It's like two and a half. Yeah. Like two, two and a half hours one way. And I was just like, whoa, you live all the way out to hair and you work over here. Like, what are you doing? Like, why don't you just find a job over there?

Like you're a dishwasher. Like, why don't you just find a job over there? And that was like a super ignorant, like, uh, I mean, it didn't mean it in that way, but I didn't know I was ignorant. You know what I mean ? 

Hannah: You're young.

Ryan: I was young. I just didn't know. And then, so he looked at me and he's younger.

He's younger than I am, maybe by like a year or so. And he looks at me, he's like, dude, I gotta go where the work is. 

Hannah: It's a good mentality to have. 

Ryan: Yeah.

Hannah: Realistic. 

Ryan: And I remember hearing that and I'll just like, that's a good point. 

Hannah: Yeah.

Ryan: Right. I mean, so this guy is willing to and has to, or feels like he has to jump on the bus, take that thing for two, two and a half hours, one way.

And then two, two and a half hours, the other way for an eight hour shift. It's a long day. Right? Exactly. And, but the lesson still stands for me. You have to go where the work is. 

Hannah: Yeah. If you want, if you want to make a certain wage or you want a certain type of job. Yeah, absolutely. And keeping that mentality, maybe we can help people if they, if they're starting to feel like they're stuck and they can't get a job in the field that they want to work in.

Ryan: Exactly. 

And you know, looking for jobs in other areas, just like how this kid did, it really opens up the job market as early as they can, the biggest pushback that we kind of get here is I can't just leave. I can't just move, right? 

Hannah: Yep. 

Ryan: That may or may not be true. I'm not sure, but a lot of these people at the same time-

Hannah: they move for college, 

Ryan: Right.

At one point in their life, I'm all for most of the people that we speak to it. That moment in time was only a couple of years ago if that maybe a few months. And when they were looking at college, they were thinking about going to moving halfway across the country or all the way across the country.

And now, because you're thinking about moving for a job instead of college, you can't move. The only difference is that you don't go into debt in order to move, to get a job. I mean, maybe you go into this too, a little bit of consumer debt. I mean, don't say save the money first, but maybe, you know, maybe you do, which is not good.

Don't do that. 

Hannah: Yeah. That's a little iffy. It's not a fan of financial advisor. 

Ryan: Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's not financial advice, but it seems like that's. Yeah. Prudent. 

Hannah: Yes. There you go. Okay. So this episode is going to have a lot of numbers, stats, names of cities and stuff like that. It's supposed to serve as a primer for you to kind of give you an idea of places you could go, but it's also to start you down the path of your own research so that you can start thinking a little bit more dynamically about how to get the type of job or the type of work that you want, or how you can get into a certain industry or field that you'd like to work in.

So, you know, it's just a good starting point. 

Ryan: Yeah, definitely. And there's definitely way more to consider than-

Hannah: job growth

Ryan: .. Just job growth. So the stats that we're going to be talking about today, come from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, and there's actually two lists of metropolitan areas.

And we'll get into them. But this data set is from January, 2021 to January, 2022. And that's the most recent data that we have so far. And so the two lists that they have is one is going to be all metropolitan areas. And we're going to get into that a little bit more, but the other one is going to be metropolitan areas that had a million plus people in the census that was dated 2010.

And it's like not exciting. 

Hannah: Um, I'm just going to list these real quick, cause it's going to surprise no one and they're the major cities of the country it's going to be, you know, greater New York city, greater LA, greater Dallas, greater Chicago, and then greater San Francisco. 

Ryan: Yeah, exactly. 

Hannah: Like shocker.

Ryan: Yeah. That doesn't shock anybody so now, you know, if you want to get jobs in big cities. There's a lot of job growth in big cities 

Hannah: As of the census cause of 2010. 

Ryan: Well, with people that, 

Hannah: Yeah.

Ryan: So that being said, there is another list that goes over all metropolitan areas from January, 2021 to January, 2020.

And it's similar, but not really. And so the first place is going to be the Los Angeles long beach, Anaheim, California area. And that had just over 460,000 jobs created in the past year. And I kind of just go down at least the first. 

I'll read the list off and we can talk about it, but it's going to be San Diego, Carlsbad, California, once again, Southern California, 120 something thousand Las Vegas Henderson, paradise Nevada, 120 plus thousand jobs there.

Orlando, I'm not going to say this right. I'm going to butcher this Kissimmee. Sanford Florida, 110,000 plus, and then Austin Round Rock, Texas. So those are the top five by metropolitan areas for 2021 to 2022. What I found interesting about that list is that because it was from that time period, it seems to me that, what this dataset lacks is.

Hannah: Context. 

Ryan: Exactly 

Hannah: It lacks industry. 

Ryan: Yeah. Like the industry and what those jobs are 

Hannah: and when we looked at this list, what we suspect is that it's, these are largely service restaurant, probably industry jobs. 

Ryan: Yeah. Maybe restaurant. I'm not sure, but, but service. I mean, Anaheim has California. Anaheim has Disneyland.

Orlando has Disney world, right? Vegas has Vegas. Vegas is Vegas and San Diego. Those are all industry towns. Right. And so, and largely at least the top three LA San Diego, Las Vegas. Those were all hit pretty hard by Covid restrictions. So

Hannah: they're shut down a long time.

Ryan: Right? Exactly. So this could be the opening up of it.

Hannah: At least that's what we think. And it's getting caught up in these stats. 

Right. And so the rehiring, this is exactly what we talked about with the, , don't use this list. I has like, okay, I'll just, you know, move to San Diego or, you know, um, move to Austin or whatever, because it's getting bigger.

Right. But it might not be in the industry that. But this is just interesting to use as a jumping off point for. Your 

research. There's a pretty big jump between that LA long beach Anaheim and San Diego. Uh, that's a pretty, that's a pretty large gap, you know, that's, that's pretty huge. Yeah. It's like almost half a million to down to a hundred, you know, 125,000 ish 

Ryan: And we'll put links to everything, to all these different lists on statistics in the show notes, um, degree free.ca.

And you can, you can find all of this or if you're on YouTube, it'll be, it'll be down below. And so the next set of five cities that we're going to be talking about was compiled by money geek.com. And this one, we put it second because the data is a little older. This is from May, 2021. So I believe it's measuring from the year, may 2020, to 22, May, 2021.

Hannah: That's a Rocky time.

Ryan: Right. And so they also.

Within the rankings, they weighted different things. So they waited hourly wage growth growth in the last 12 months on growth in the last 36 months. And there, they went into the whole methodology in their article and we'll link to that in the show notes. But with all of that combined, the five top cities were completely different and economy.

Like geographically, it would, they're very different. And it might highlight the difference in time, right? From January, 2021 to January, 2022. And from May, 2020 to May, 2021

Hannah: independently, I happened to know that some of these places are places that people who were working remotely, there's some overlap in places that they moved to and bought homes as well.

Ryan: Yeah. And like I said, it's just such a different spread of cities than the last one that we read, right. It was all Southern California, Nevada, Florida, and Texas. Right. Whereas this one is all over the place. 

Hannah: Yeah. So this one's got a Salt Lake City, Birmingham, Alabama, Jacksonville, Florida, Indianapolis Carmel and Anderson Indiana, and then Nashville Davidson and Murfreesboro, Tennessee.

But yeah, there's no overlap between this list and the other one, these are super, these are super different. Uh, Right. Compared to those giant metropolitan cities. And it's interesting. Cause it was, you know, a year prior. 

Ryan: I mean, these are all cities too.

Hannah: Yeah. But it's just, it's different though.

It's different, you know, people move, people move to cities. So, but it's just different how there's no overlap. 

Ryan: Yeah. These are cities too. But the difference is that I think it has to do with the COVID restrictions. Right. I mean, these are the cities and states that opened up a little bit earlier 

Hannah: and they also have a lot lower cost of living.

Right. And there's something to be said, I'm not commenting on whether or not good or bad restrictions. That's not what I'm saying. I'm just looking at the, I'm just looking at these two lists from different times. Comparing and contrasting 

just the general yeah, the growth. 

Right, exactly. But yeah, that pretty much sums it up.

Right. I mean, within the past year that we've seen, a lot of California, Florida, Nevada, Texas opening up or, and, and increasing job growth. Right. But if we go back a little bit further, we see places. Utah, Alabama, Florida, Indiana, Tennessee,

places you don't hear of as much.

Ryan: Right. Those places had bigger job growth and hourly wage growth as well.

Right. And so take this for what it is, which is just more information, right? I mean, it's like we said, it's just a jumping off point for you to do. Start thinking about it 

about it. And if you're looking for, you know, if you're looking for a job and you're wondering what to do, this just might spark something in you to go and look and see if there's somewhere you might want to move in order to get 

work.

Yeah. And you under the right circumstances, especially if you find that you can't find a job where you are, or you're having a really hard time finding a job, moving to a place with more opportunity is something that could really help your career going where the work is, right. Taking a page out of that dishwasher, that was like two years younger than me.

Right? Giving me life lessons in the dish pit, right going where the work is. Important. Right. And at least being willing to now you have a list of places to look into at least. 

Hannah: Yeah. This is a good place to start. 

Ryan: Yeah, definitely. All right. And that's pretty much it for today, guys. Thank you so much for listening.

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