Young Job Seekers Being Pushed Out of County

Mark Goldberg thought of himself as a hometown boy. But when he graduated from San Diego State University four years ago, it became clear he wouldn’t have much luck putting his finance degree to work near Ventura.

“I would have jumped at the chance had something come up,” said Goldberg, 26, now a management analyst at a San Diego Navy base. “I was open to the idea that I’d move back to Ventura, an entry-level job would open up. That never happened--at least not to me.”

Mara Antos knows the feeling. A showroom manager in Studio City, Antos, 31, has spent six years trying to find work near home. A graduate of Thousand Oaks High School and Cal Lutheran University, she never considered leaving Ventura County and just bought a house in Moorpark.

But she has been turned away by three dozen Ventura County companies since 1991. Because the local job market has been so harsh, she fears she will never escape the grinding daily commute.

“There’s no comparison,” Antos said. “Ventura County is like an oasis in a vast desert. When I cross over the hill into the Valley, I’m lost in the concrete and smog.”

With a master’s degree in public policy from USC, 28-year-old Jeff Sadler appears destined to join the ranks of Ventura County natives pushed out of their hometowns by a lack of job openings.

Sadler would like to work for the county government. But he knows there are more openings for urban planners than suburban planners.

“I don’t think I’ll find anything here, “ he said. “It’s not as crowded. It’s not as polluted. But to get a job here is kind of difficult.”

Ventura County is kind to its young. This coastal haven of good schools, safe neighborhoods and rural landscapes seems to be the ideal place for parents to give children everything they need to become successful.

The advantages are not lost on the young: A Times poll taken two years ago found most county teenagers want to live here when they become adults.

When those teenagers become young adults with career goals, however, they run headlong into the realities of the Ventura County job market.

Entry-level professional jobs here are scarce, the competition is intense, and in many instances the jobs pay less than similar positions elsewhere.

“There’s not a lot out there for college graduates,” says UC Santa Barbara economist Mark Schniepp, who tracks Ventura County’s economy. “They’re not going to get a lot of mileage for their degrees.”

An Unsettling Trend: Low-Paying Positions

At first glance, things seem promising for those Ventura County natives who graduated this spring, packed their diplomas and headed home.

The county’s unemployment rate plunged to a seven-year low earlier this year. Cal Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks reported nearly 100% of the 200 seniors who went through the school’s recruiting program this spring had found jobs--more than half of them in Ventura County. The economic expansion appears to have prompted a modest optimism about local job prospects. A University of California poll released this month found 30% of Ventura County residents believe economic opportunities for the young are increasing, while 33% think the situation will remain stable and 18% expect things to get worse.

State labor statistics show the county added 200 high-tech jobs in April. Citing Amgen and numerous start-up technology firms, some business people say Ventura County is on the verge of becoming a miniature Silicon Valley.

A UC Santa Barbara study released earlier this year, however, found an unsettling trend in Ventura County’s economic recovery: Plenty of new jobs are being created, yet many of them are low-paying ones at malls and restaurants.

Retail trade, in fact, was the leading job-growth sector in 1996, with 933 new positions added.

Moreover, the study found the average job lost in Ventura County during 1996 paid $43,315 per year. The average job created paid an annual salary of $29,913.

Those statistics confirm Ventura County is still feeling the sting of corporate downsizing, said Charles Maxey, dean of Cal Lutheran’s business school.

Well-paying management jobs continue to vanish, leaving fewer opportunities for young workers to climb the corporate ladder, he said.

“All of the downsizing was aimed at managerial jobs. The management hierarchy is smaller,” Maxey said. Many of Cal Lutheran’s 325 MBA candidates tell Maxey they are getting an advanced degree simply to hold on to their current jobs, not find better ones.

“As a college graduate, you have to be prepared to take an entry-level job that we wouldn’t think was appropriate a generation ago,” Maxey added. “That’s the whole nature of our economy.”

UC Santa Barbara’s Schniepp said there are some fundamental reasons why Ventura County has not grown into a business hub that generates good jobs. Transportation links are a key element in economic growth. Yet Ventura County, except for the Ventura Freeway, is largely cut off from the Southern California freeway system and has no major airports, Schniepp said.

Schniepp also said county residents often oppose new business development, choosing rural preservation over urbanization.

“The cities want to remain small,” he said. “You have choices, and a lot of the choices have already been made.”

Most Teens Hopeful of Careers in County

The grim job prospects don’t seem to stop the county’s youth from wanting to stay.

Some 53.4% of local high school seniors go on to college, according to a 1995 California Postsecondary Education Commission study.

A Times poll in 1995 found about 55% of local teenagers want to remain in Ventura County as adults.

Yet that strong desire to stay in the county seems to fuel the disappointment of many local families.

The fear of taking a job he was overqualified for weighed heavily on Mark Goldberg’s mind when he graduated from San Diego State in 1993.

Before transferring to San Diego State, Goldberg attended Ventura College. He worked part time at Circuit City. During his senior year, he began to think that if he came home, he could find himself working at Circuit City again.

His mother, knowing her son wanted to become a financial analyst at a big company, would send him any local job listings that seemed to fit, such as stockbroker openings and financial advisor training programs.

Goldberg didn’t want to sell stocks or retirement plans. But the only promising financial analyst openings required several years experience.

“Either I felt I wasn’t qualified,” he said, “or I wasn’t interested.”

Another warning sign was his father’s struggle to find engineering work after being laid off by a Santa Barbara defense contracting firm. Although his father eventually got a job in Simi Valley, he was unemployed for several months.

All this convinced the Goldberg family that Mark should stay in San Diego.

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The San Diego job market was rough too, and Goldberg had to work for a while at an engraving shop before landing a job with the Navy. Now he writes reports for the military on issues such as work-force efficiency, drawing on the analytical skills he had sharpened in school.

His mother, a professional job counselor, says Mark made the right choice by not coming home to Ventura.

“It’s frustrating,” said Arlene Goldberg, director of the Thousand Oaks-based Conejo Youth Employment Service. “You can come out of college with the motivation to learn and the desire to earn money, but if no one gives you that break it’s very demoralizing. They’re sitting here with this piece of paper that says they know something. But no one wants to hire them.”

Arlene Goldberg said this time of year is always tough. The Conejo Youth Employment Service focuses on finding work for youths age 13 to 18, but college graduates come looking for help each summer. Goldberg said it is hard to tell them they will have a hard time finding work near home--and that if they do find a job, it probably won’t pay much.

The prospect of a pay cut is one reason Mara Antos is working in the San Fernando Valley.

Growing up in Thousand Oaks, Antos dreamed of one day being a businesswoman in her hometown. She planned to join the Rotary Club, maybe get involved in city politics.

But when she graduated from Cal Lutheran with a liberal arts degree in 1991, California had begun its slide into a biting recession. Antos applied for an administrative position at Amgen, even asking a friend there to hand-deliver her application to the human resources department.

That job did not materialize, and neither have two subsequent Amgen applications led to any positions. Three dozen applications at the biggest local companies, including State Farm Insurance and GTE, haven’t produced any results either.

Antos’ company, Pella Architectural Products, has a Thousand Oaks office--but no openings there. Now and then, Antos will send a resume to a local firm. But the managerial openings she has found in the Conejo Valley start near $20,000 a year, far less than she earns as a showroom manager for her company, which makes doors and windows.

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So Antos sticks with the grim hourlong commute into the San Fernando Valley, even though she plans to have children soon and wants to spend more time at her new home in Moorpark.

She and her husband, an aircraft mechanic at Los Angeles International Airport, bought the Moorpark townhouse after searching in Thousand Oaks, where home prices were much higher.

“I find myself making more money in the Valley,” Antos said. “But the cost is not having a life. . . . What the [commute] does to you is eliminate the ability to have a life, to meet your neighbors. You wind up being isolated from your community.”

Jeff Sadler has narrowed his search to government jobs. But the market is tough.

Sadler, a 1986 Ventura High School graduate, earned his master’s degree in public policy from USC this spring.

Growing up in midtown Ventura, Sadler saw the shopping malls and business parks transform the city. He remembers how new developments always stirred controversy.

In graduate school, Sadler’s professors would bring up Ventura County in lectures on municipal development, saying the county has admirable land-use policies.

This fueled Sadler’s desire to return home and find work as a planner with the county government.

“I feel this connection with Ventura,” Sadler said. “I saw this place grow, from a lot of fields, to a lot of development. What motivates me, is that I’d like to see things done with a lot of input. I don’t want people to think policy is made in a vacuum.”

But all that development hasn’t brought good jobs for aspiring professionals such as Sadler.

The county government has 400 to 500 job openings at any given time--but receives about 20,000 applications a year for those positions. Officials say they often turn promising young candidates away because of limited work experience.

“There’s a lot of competition,” says Ron Komers, the county’s director of human resources. “In general, we take people with experience.”

Making matters worse, the county this year may actually lay off workers to close a deficit.

Sadler might be getting his last look at Ventura County. He is renting a room from a friend in Santa Paula, but the job hunt has pulled him far from that small town. He has lined up interviews in Culver City and Los Angeles.

Trade-Offs Often Come With Working in Area

To be sure, there are many who are launching ambitious careers in Ventura County.

But their success stories are tempered by trade-offs. Lower pay and fewer career options are the cost of working minutes from home.

“I live in an awesome area. I commute two miles to work,” says 30-year-old attorney Scott Norman, a former Los Angeles accountant.

Fed up with Los Angeles, Norman fled the city for his hometown several years ago, earned his degree from Ventura College of Law and now works for a Ventura firm of 13 lawyers--large by county standards.

Still, being an attorney in Ventura carries a heavy price. Norman estimates he earns 20% less than lawyers at similar-sized Los Angeles firms.

Growing up in Camarillo, Miguel Cervantes dreamed of becoming a doctor and one day returning to Ventura County to work in a Latino neighborhood.

“It’s always been my goal to do primary care in a setting where I feel I’m part of the population I’m serving--where I feel I’m part of the community,” said Cervantes, 37.

Cervantes’ career plans came together. He graduated from UCLA and was accepted into the university’s medical school. He did his residency at Ventura County Medical Center, and when he finished in 1991 several private physician groups offered him a chance to join their partnerships. He decided to start his career at a medical clinic in a largely Latino neighborhood in Oxnard.

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But with managed-care policies shrinking the size of the health industry nationwide, opportunities for doctors in Ventura County are drying up as well.

“I think the job market is definitely tougher,” Cervantes said. “I feel I was right in the pocket of that last generation of physicians who had a choice as to where to live, and were able to find a job in the area they wanted.”

As hundreds of Ventura County natives return home this summer clutching diplomas, labor experts say those determined to find work here should be aware of labor market trends.

“A lot of high-tech jobs, a lot of computer jobs, and a lot of jobs in education” is how labor market researcher Doug Perron puts it.

Perron cited recent government studies confirming these trends. State Employment Development Department statistics show 1,500 teaching jobs have been created in Ventura County during the past year, largely a result of the elementary school class-size reduction program.

And a study released by county officials last month indicated many of the fastest-growing professions in Ventura County through the rest of the decade will be science-oriented: computer network managers, biotechnology research assistants and computer graphics specialists.

Backers of the proposed Cal State Channel Islands campus in Camarillo argue the university would trigger economic growth in Ventura County.

Handel Evans, president of the proposed campus, said businesses lack incentive to locate here. The absence of a large research university has prevented the growth of a skilled local labor pool, he said.

“We’re losing an educated work force. Because of that, there’s no incentive for [businesses] to come here,” Evans said. “When you get a university in an area such as this, it makes it much simpler for them. . . . I would like to think we could be a catalyst for that.”

In the meantime, those who grew up here and managed to find good jobs say they feel fortunate--and never plan to leave.

Amgen researcher Chris Spahr said he never wanted to leave Newbury Park. That is why he went to college at UC Santa Barbara. And that is why he kept his fingers crossed when applying at Amgen after graduating with a bachelor’s in pharmacology in 1993. It is also why Spahr has been living with his parents, saving money so that he can buy a home.

“My absolutely highest priority was I wanted to live in Newbury Park,” said Spahr, an avid hiker and beach-goer. “The crime rate is low. It’s really beautiful. My father’s absolute nightmare was that I’d wind up working in a city, far away.”

Like Spahr, advertising representative Jane Schneider was determined to stay in Ventura County. She graduated from Cal Lutheran this spring, landing a job with a Westlake advertising firm after sending out resumes to about 30 companies.

Knowing how expensive rent can be in Ventura County, Schneider is staying with her parents in Camarillo and saving money. She does not consider that a sacrifice.

“I’m so excited to stay in the area I love, with the perfect weather,” she said. “I think it’s going to work out very well.”

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Ventura County’s 20 Fastest Growing Professions Requiring a College Degree

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Annual 1993 2005 Growth Openings Computer Engineers 540 1,380 156% 78 Construction Managers 410 1,010 146% 63 Employment Interviewer 140 320 129% 19 Merchandise Displayers 280 610 118% 35 Property and Real Estate 300 600 100% 32 Managers Computer Scientists (misc.) 80 160 100% 8 Residential Counselors 120 240 100% 13 Physical Scientists 180 350 94% 23 Computer Systems 960 1,850 93% 85 Analysts Insurance Claims 70 130 86% 6 Examiners Underwriters 270 500 85% 27 Physical Therapists 220 400 82% 21 Special Education 650 1,140 75% 53 Teachers Biological Scientists 230 400 74% 23 Chemists 150 260 73% 14 Marketing, Advertising Public Relations 1,170 2,020 73% 104 managers Financial Specialists 350 590 69% 28 Industrial Designers 350 590 69% 28 Engineers (misc.) 760 1,280 68% 58 Management Systems Researchers 240 400 67% 19

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Source: Cal State University Long Beach