Pay gains remain tiny, GlassDoor report indicates
The Philadelphia metro area showed the strongest growth among large metropolitan areas, based on the number of job openings, although pay gains remain modest.
The report came from GlassDoor , a popular website that keeps tabs on job openings and uses crowd-sourcing from current and ex-employees to rate the work environments of large and smaller businesses.
The metro area includes the Philadelphia suburbs in Pennsylvania and New Jersey as well as New Castle County in Delaware and Cecil County MD.
The number of job openings declined in a number of categories in the Delaware Valley over the past year, with the number of aerospace-defense job openings down by nearly a third, with other sizable declines in legal, accounting, banking, and energy-utilities.
The number of job openings in government, while not large (785) was up sharply from a year ago. By contrast, healthcare, an area where growth was flat over the past year, had nearly 19,000 openings.
On the minus side, wage increases remained on the paltry side, up 1.7 percent (about the rate inflation) and identical to the national figure
Higher paid professions and occupations, including lawyers, often saw declines in average pay, with lower-paid categories, such as cooks and emergency medical technicians and paralegals, getting bigger pay hikes.
Fox Business reported the top ranking for the Philadelphia metro area, which beat out hotspots such as Atlanta and Boston.
Houston saw the largest decline in job openings. The market is affected by the ups and downs of the gas and oil business.
