Adirondack job outlook: Opportunities surge in health and hospitality—challenges remain amid worker shortages

Adirondack Park’s workforce vision involves balancing aging populations with youth-driven sustainability

By Tim Rowland

In some ways the future of the Adirondack Park is written in the state Department of Labor’s job outlook through 2030, projecting some of the fastest-growing job opportunities will be in restaurants and funeral homes.

Yet while there is no denying the importance of recreation and tourism to the region, nor the aging of its population, many Adirondackers envision a younger, more diversified and sustainable workforce, where there are more ways to get around than in a Subaru or a hearse. 

“If we’re going to have the same economy that we have had for the last 50 or 100 years, we’re not going to survive, nevermind thrive,” said Donna Wotton, executive of the Ti Alliance, a nonprofit business and community advocate in Ticonderoga. “If we’re going to retain the Adirondacks the way we’d like them to be, we’ve got to figure out what works in this environment, and we’re going to have to invent some new things to do here.”

The time seems ripe. COVID-19 changed the labor landscape, draining 8,000 workers from North Country employment rolls. The workforce has yet to rebound to pre-pandemic levels.

Job opportunities in certain sectors are growing, but where new workers will come from to fill these positions is an open question. Surveys show that businesses across the spectrum are eager to hire but are often stymied by a lack of worker housing, or a young workforce that emerged from the pandemic in a fickle mood, jumping from job to job and paying more mind to hourly wages than long-term careers.

Add to that, Adirondack populations are getting old fast. In Hamilton County, located in the heart of the park, people over the age of 65 made up 20% of county residents in 2000. By 2030 it will be 40%, according to Cornell University projections.

 The state estimates by 2030 in the North Country, there will be more than 2,200 annual openings in the fields of home health care, personal health aides and nursing assistants. Mortician and undertaker jobs are projected to grow by 6%.

By the end of the decade, government, health care and hospitality/recreation, the North Country’s three main employers, will represent half of all North Country jobs. Hospitality and health care are projected to grow rapidly, government less so.

Covid’s impact on the economy

During the pandemic, wages increased. On the eve of the pandemic, the average health care worker was earning $50,000 a year; two years later it was $60,000.

 Since 2021, the annual compensation for food, beverage and lodging employees increased $5,000.

Meanwhile, retirement appealed to more older employees, particularly those working in fields where human contact was a constant threat. “In the retail business you meet customers face to face all day,” said Jay Ward, purchasing manager at Ward Lumber with stores in Jay and Malone. “It’s stressful to be working in that environment, and people were anxious and tense.”

To replace workers who left during COVID, North Country employers have become creative, offering housing, more flexible hours, signing bonuses, or even a share of the profits.

Carol Calabrese, co-director of the Essex County Industrial Development Agency, said employers used to look for specific skills, a luxury they can no longer afford. “at this point, a lot of the businesses just need a warm body. They’re willing to put in the investment to train them, because just finding somebody to actually come to work is the issue.” 

Other forces at work

But the pandemic hasn’t been the only source of change. Roughly coinciding with the coronavirus outbreak, backcountry hills and dales were being wired for broadband under aggressive state programs, making it easier for people to move to the Adirondacks and telecommute. Wildfires, hurricanes, tornadoes and drought ravaged much of the nation, fueling the notion that the park could be a haven for climate refugees.

Assuming they can find housing, could newcomers come in quantities to move the demographic needle? Labor projections, which predict a reversal of declining North Country job and population trends, are consistent with that possibility.

And finally, stories of economic diversity, at least on a small scale, are beginning to show. Hope exists for young entrepreneurs, for science and green energy, and for new takes on the old industries of mining, logging and farming.

Adirondackers are growing tulips in the dead of winter and making exotic teas out of birch fungus; a Boston start-up is sifting through 75-year-old mining waste in search of minerals valuable in the production of a wide variety of technologies; and a burgeoning number of green-energy projects are providing work in utilities and electronics.

Construction is on the upswing, as housing is in demand and trade schools that were hurting for students just a few years ago now see their classrooms packed. Creative pursuits that include arts, entertainment and recreation are projected to double their current number of jobs by 2030.

Yet these all remain supporting storylines in a region that relies overwhelmingly on government, health care and tourism as a source of employment. At root, the North Country is a rapidly aging region where younger people come to play, but do not stay.

For statistical purposes, the North Country is defined as seven counties covering most, but not all of the Adirondacks, and take in outside-the-park entities including the cities of Plattsburgh and Watertown, the lively college and shipping towns along the St. Lawrence and the Fort Drum military base—all of which skew the data from a purely Adirondack perspective.

Still, Konstantin Sikhaou, labor market analyst for the state Department of Labor, said the trendlines are valid and capture much of what is going on in the Adirondack labor market. And commercial markets inside and outside the boundaries of the park—the Blue Line—are of course heavily intertwined.

Tourism as an economic engine, but those jobs don’t always pay well

Recreation has been—and will continue to be—a growth industry in the Adirondacks, and ORDA is no exception. McKillip said about 1,200 full-time and seasonal workers were on staff when he came to ORDA 20 years ago. Now, the total is almost 1,700. All but 361 are seasonal, and coming out of the pandemic, part-time workers have been hard to find.

The prototypical ski bum, for whom work was a necessary nuisance to support an outdoor lifestyle, had already begun to fade from the scene, McKillip said.

“Nowadays there are a lot of people just out looking to try to make a living,” he said. For ORDA, diversification to include summer and shoulder-season sports such as zip lines and rock-climbing walls makes sense from a business perspective, but also helps stitch several part-time jobs into one, more coveted, full-time position. “We’re trying to have more year-round offerings, which I think helps us in recruitment,” McKillip said. “The tough spots to fill are those seasonal positions that are just part-time in nature.”

Similarly, employment in lodging and food industries, along with arts, entertainment and recreation, are expected to double this decade to nearly 26,000 workers.

Of the 15 fastest-growing occupations, according to the state Department of Labor, 13 are related to the tourist economy. But these jobs pay comparatively poorly and those filling them struggle to afford housing and basics. Of the fastest growing hospitality categories, only the pay for convention and event planners reaches an average of more than $40,000. A cook could expect to make $36,000, better than before the pandemic, but nowhere near what it would take to afford the average Essex County home price of $240,000. Apartments can scarcely be found at any price.

To mitigate the problem, some employers offered affordable housing as part of their compensation package. Aaron Woolf, whose interests include the Deer’s Head Inn in Elizabethtown, provided a home for his chef.

“Good help has always been difficult to obtain for any business,” he said. “It was our biggest impediment to getting high quality managers and executive chefs.”

“I looked at it as, ‘What am I not doing to create the right opportunity?’” he said. That translated into good pay, bonuses and a “real sense of a family community” at Deer’s Head.

Meeting employees’ needs

Satisfying employees will be increasingly important if the Adirondacks hope to weather an impending demographic storm. A housing study on behalf of Warren County—where a quarter of employees can’t comfortably afford the average one-bedroom apartment—predicted that the aging population may result in school consolidations and business closures. As Adirondackers age, who will care for them?

The University Health System of Vermont, whose network covers the eastern Adirondacks, offers education programs that allow employees to earn a salary while continuing their training. “Most of these programs very much fall under a ‘grow our own’ philosophy, because in many instances, there are just not enough RNs, respiratory therapists or paramedics/EMTs, and such to meet our region’s needs,” said Chris Blake, senior communications specialist for UVM Health Network.

Education and diversification will be needed in the hospitality industry as well if the region is to thrive, said Rick Vidal, who opened the New Vida Preserve in Jay last year. Vidal said the Adirondacks does not have a sufficient young demographic to serve as baristas, waiters, housekeepers or dishwashers.

“It’s the concentration of the immigrant population that occupies a lot of those entry level jobs, fortunately or unfortunately,” he said. “But coming to this area, there’s a lack of an immigrant population, and I think that’s an impediment. And then at SUNY-Plattsburgh, I find that a lot of those (college students) are either not entering hospitality or leaving the area outright.”

While housing is certainly an issue too, there’s more to it, Vidal said. He sees the region as too dependent on the outdoor recreation and winter sports industry. “Even if you fix the systemic issues by providing a lot of housing and education, the tourism environment here is very volatile, and very monotone,” he said. “It makes it hard for the business owners and thus employees to sustain year-round businesses.”

The companies that succeed, he said, will be the ones that treat employees as partners rather than adversaries.

“I had these one-on-one meetings with my team before the holidays where I started off just saying, like, are you happy? Where do you want to be in five years? Ninety percent of them said no boss has ever asked them that before.”

And Ward Lumber has had success as an employee-owned co-op. At a national conference of 250 building-related industries last year, a speaker asked how many were fully staffed. “I was the only one who raised my hand,” Ward said.

Along with corporate restructuring, Ward has begun adding women to the business. “There is a large, untapped market for females in the trades,” Ward said.

As a co-op, employees have an opportunity to share in both decisions and profits. It’s been a compelling recruiting pitch.

“Some people are starting to seek us out,” Ward said.