And Yet More on Career Pathways

Here is comment from a male ED professional from Texas:

"Reading the follow-up comments to your career pathways article prompted me to write. Economic developers are a unique breed. They are neither fish nor fowl when it comes to characterizing them from a professional development level. I am a CED (now called a CEcD) and I'm proud to have attained that status in the field, but between you, me and the wall, the title really has nothing to do with my career development. It helps in getting jobs in some circles, but I find that most government-based ED jobs are as you can imagine still doled out based on political loyality. Some things never change, do they? ED jobs in the private sector are more likely to look at professional creditionals.

What troubles me is the fact that you reach a point in your career when you're just stuck and you cannot go any higher or make much more money. I guess that is true in any profession. There is always another job challenge in terms of a community product to sell. That is not what concerns me. I think I am fairly marketable in recruitment-oriented states in the South, and that is what I enjoy doing the most. I probably would not be as competitive for a job in a Northern urban area where retention was the name of the game and you had to work mostly on redevelopment issues. That's just the way it is right now. By the way, I am one of those economic developers who believes that there should be some common skill sets that a professional has in any regional environment. Marketing is marketing, but you have to tailor it to the particular community's needs and advantages.

I worry about benefits in the field over the long run. Will they be there when I retire some day? Lots of my friends in the field are concerned about this issue too. We seem to pretend that everything will be alright once we retire. Big mistake, I think.

I would offer one suggestion, which is that we really need to figure out how to increase our impact. If we don't, we are going to become a subset of another field in ten years. I heard you speak some time ago about the need for "power tools" in ED. I agree. Solving the workforce issue is one area we need some new power tools, and I am not talking about the need for more government subsidized training programs. Stronger tax credits maybe. A second area we need to expand impact is in the trade arena. I know a lot of companies in Texas that still think the economy and the market ends in Brownsville or El Paso. It doesn't. We need some new ideas in bridging trade and economic development in the border states. We are more likely to keep our jobs and continue to do useful work if we develop some new power tools."