ANSWER: Job Market

answer: 

Occupational Outlook Handbook lists Engineers, including Aerospace and Aerospace Engineers. BLS' May 2008 State Occupational Employment and Wage Estimates shows California:

Occupation Code Occupation Title Employment (1) Median Hourly Mean Hourly Mean Annual(2) Mean RSE(3)
00-0000 All Occupations 15,212,610 $17.52 $23.12 $48,090 0.4 17-2011 Aerospace Engineers 13,590 $50.26 $51.39 $106,890 1.6%

In this site's notes "About May 2008 National, State, Metropolitan, and Nonmetropolitan Area Occupational Employment and Wage Estimates" it says: (1) Estimates for detailed occupations do not sum to the totals because the totals include occupations not shown separately. Estimates do not include self-employed workers. (2) Annual wages have been calculated by multiplying the hourly mean wage by a "year-round, full-time" hours figure of 2,080 hours; for those occupations where there is not an hourly mean wage published, the annual wage has been directly calculated from the reported survey data. (3) The relative standard error (RSE) is a measure of the reliability of a survey statistic. The smaller the relative standard error, the more precise the estimate.

BLS's Occupational Employment Statistics, include a discussion of "Green Jobs", near the top of that page, though it is not yet an official category.

You can also try California's Labor Market Information, which links to a map where you can select a specific area profile, or search for specific industries, such as Engineers

If you are near an academic library, especially at a public university, you can probably get onsite access to commercial databases such as Ebsco, Gale, or Proquest journal/magazine and newspaper partly full text ones. Academic Search Premier (Ebsco) gets 9 articles for the search: green jobs and california. That search defaults to title, subject and abstracts. In Advanced Search, if you "Select a field" TX-All Text, "green jobs" and "bay area" gets 12 articles. In TX searches, it's wise to use the double quotes for phrases. But in full text searches (as you no doubt have noticed in Google), words can be so far apart that they are totally unrelated. Ebsco and most other commercial databases have "Proximity search", to look for words no more than a specified number of words apart. In Academic Search Premier, TX green w10 jobs w10 california gets 12 articles; in Business Source Complete (also Ebsco), it gets 17 articles. Proquest uses a slash in those proximity operators: california w/20 green w/20 jobs gets 9 hits in the Washington Post. If you are in California, no doubt the libraries there will have San Francisco and Los Angeles newspapers full text. Local papers are especially important with your question about Jane Harmon - for example, the Washington Post gets only 9 hits in "citation and document text", for the very broad search: Jane Harman and econom*.

If you go to a large academic library, it is well worth searching the big engineering databases, to get the perspective of those actually working in the field, and attempting to forecast job trends and hiring. Compendex gets 16 articles for: aerospace and jobs and sustainab*; 7 for aerospace and employment and sustainab*, 108 for "aerospace industry" and california, etc. Even where "California" shows up only in an author's address, you can still use this to get leads on where the authors are working - or what university research centers may have more information about job trends in your field. The AIAA Meeting Papers full text database gets 3 papers for the search: green manufacturing, and 23 in Advanced Search if you look for: sustainab* and manufacturing in "title contains" box. But AIAA is a notoriously troublesome database (though it has much very valuable research), and I am having problems maintaining our connection with it this afternoon. You may have better luck simply going to www.aiaa.org to see if they have any public information about job trends. I can get into their Career Center, but many of their other sites ask for an American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics member password. Possibly our UMD IP address is letting me in as an institutional subscriber, also.

You can also try the websites of the people involved: Jane Harmon, or search for them in USA.GOV.

Jim Miller
jmiller2@umd.edu

Related Question