While Manhattan still ranks tops for Big Apple job seekers, Brooklyn is on the rise. It’s providing more and better quality jobs than any other outer borough.
Manhattan still creates the most new jobs, according to CareerBliss, a job collection and career community Web site, but Brooklyn is making substantial gains.
CareerBliss found that 90 percent of the 416,566 new job postings in Gotham were based in Manhattan last year. But Brooklyn showed surprising strength, coming in second in the city, with 5.6 percent of new job listings.
“Brooklyn is a very promising job market, with 25,000 job listings in 2010,” according to Alia Henson, a spokeswoman for CareerBliss.com. She added that Brooklyn’s job growth was mostly in the tech, health-care and finance sectors.
Queens came in a distant fifth in city job creation, accounting for just 0.4 percent of the new listings, according to the study. Queens’ job postings were not only fewer in 2010, but tended to be lower-paying jobs, according to Henson.
Brooklyn’s strong growth, Henson added, was traced to the information technology, management, design and marketing sectors, she noted. These are also the top job sectors in Manhattan.
“We are seeing positive job growth across the country, in particular in areas like Brooklyn, where there is a diversified job market. No one particular job type dominates the Brooklyn community, which allows people with a variety of skill sets to find employment,” according to Heidi Golledge, co-founder and CEO of CareerBliss.
“In contrast,” Golledge added, “Queens is an area that heavily relies on retail and service-related industries to drive their job market.”
And what kinds of jobs were turning up in New York City last year?
Looking at each borough, the medical, health-care (including nursing) and finance sectors were the top job creators. And a Wall Street bank is now playing a critical role in the city’s economy, according to CareerBliss.
JPMorgan Chase was the No. 1 in new job listings in Manhattan and Brooklyn. In the Bronx, Montefiore Medical Center listed the most new jobs, while in Queens, unsurprisingly, No. 1 was Kmart, a major retailer.
On Staten Island, the biggest new-job engine was Project Hospitality, which is a non-profit organization providing services for the homeless and those with multiple health problems. Project Hospitality has a staff of some 300.
Educational institutions also supplied many new job listings. These included Yeshiva University, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, both in the Bronx, and Wagner College in Staten Island.
The other good news is that New York City came in No. 1 on CareerBliss’s list of top hiring cities. The bad news is that Golledge projects that the biggest job growth for this year will not come in the mega cities.
“In 2011,” Golledge says, “you will see an increase in hiring in medium-sized cities such as Baltimore and Hartford, Conn., which came in 15th and 17th on the list.”
Why? A city’s size isn’t the only factor in why a city creates jobs at a fast pace. Golledge says that healthy job growth often comes from having a heavy concentration in booming sectors. Today, these are health, science and technology.
Indeed, nationwide, CareerBliss found that the job sectors most in demand were informational technology, sales, engineering, health care and accounting.
