CHEYENNE – Cheyenne again ranked highly on a new study saying it was the No. 6 place in the country to find a job, although the city has slipped from its No. 1 ranking in February and No. 4 ranking later in the year.
Cheyenne was the only city in the Rocky Mountain region to make the top-10 list on the career network website Beyond.com’s quarterly study. Many ranked lists rely on sheer numbers of job postings to calculate the top markets, causing the cities with largest populations to rise to the top on most occasions. But the company’s methodology instead looked at proprietary data and uniquely correlated it to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
While in a past interview the company admitted that many of the job postings for Cheyenne have a national, work-from-home footprint, it called out the health care and medical; transportation and logistics; and sales and sales management as high-growth categories.
“We wanted to correlate jobs to the number of people in the workforce,” Vice President of Marketing Joe Weinlick told the Business Report in a prior interview. Weinlick was unavailable for comment Monday.
Aggregators said the jobs available in Cheyenne average a $46,000 salary with a cost of living 14 below the national average. With Cheyenne’s unemployment rate of 4.7 percent, Beyond.com claimed that there are three jobs open for every available member of the labor force.
Local economic developers have recently touted Cheyenne’s economic success. Cheyenne LEADS CEO Randy Bruns said at Wyoming Business Report’s Cheyenne Economic Forecast Lunch in November 2013 that Laramie County’s real gross domestic product rose almost 2.5 percent in 2012 alone, partly because of about 2,500 new jobs added between 2010 and 2013.
“That’s astonishing when you consider the size of the workforce we have here,” he said. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Laramie County’s population in 2012 stood at less than 95,000, meaning a new job was created for every 38 people in the city during the period.
Outranking Cheyenne on the newest study were the following places:
1. Manchester, New Hampshire
2. Longview, Washington
3. San Jose, California
4. Des Moines, Iowa
5. Cedar Rapids, Iowa
Casper ranked No. 21 on the list.
Original by Mark Wilcox
Wyoming Business Report