Experts say California’s job market is currently weak

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — He won’t say it himself, but Seraffin Garcia is pretty handy on the guitar and vocals.

“I wish I could be James Taylor,” Garcia said.

The amateur musician has a lot more time to practice these days at home in Sacramento after recently taking early retirement from the tech industry, after 20 years as a hardware engineer.

“I took a package with my company, which incentivized some of us to leave the company,” Garcia said. “They were downsizing. There were a number of involuntary cases.”

Garcia is far from alone.

The state’s Legislative Analyst’s Office, in a recent report, stated the tech industry has seen the biggest decline in jobs in California over the last two years at 16%.

In July 2022, it said there were 531,000, but 98,000 of those have since gone away.

It’s not the only industry to see a decline.

The finance sector has also seen an 8% decline, manufacturing has also seen a 3%, said Chas Alamo, principal fiscal and policy analyst at the Legislative Analyst’s Office.

“The state’s labor markets are certainly weak at this point,” Alamo said. “Monthly jobs numbers have been revised downward regularly. Over the past 12 months, the state has added, essentially no new net jobs, which is an unprecedented one-year trend.”

Alamo said the loss in jobs in the tech and finance industry has a particular ripple effect on the state’s revenue as they are industries that can pay well.

“The state’s revenue picture depends largely on personal income taxes,” Alamo said. “And personal income taxes are heavily reliant on taxes paid by high-net-worth individuals.”

But not every industry has seen job losses.

Alamo said health care, along with social services, saw 240,000 jobs gained since September 2022.

Allison Cotterill with Dignity Health said certainly for them when it comes to nursing, they are actively hiring.

“We’re definitely recruiting for all different nursing specialties,” said Cotterill, chief nurse executive at Dignity Health Mercy General Hospital. As many people know, we’re experiencing nursing shortages across the entire nation. But what we’re actively doing here at our facility is really growing nurses internally.”

As far as the tech industry, there has been a significant slowdown in layoffs and Garcia said some ex-colleagues of his who were let go are in a better position now.

“Most of these folks who have left, my previous employer, they found good jobs elsewhere, and some of them found much better jobs elsewhere,” he said.

In his old industry, Garcia said as far as employment goes, if you have a good skill set, you’ll always strike the right chord with employers.