If Ashley Hartmann had her way, the junior at the University of Michigan would leave the state after getting her degree.

“The job opportunities are horrendous in comparison to the rest of the nation,” Hartmann, a chemistry major, said at the MPowered Entrepreneurship career fair in the school’s student union last week.

Michigan has struggled to staunch the exodus of local talent. The state lags behind its neighbors in the percentage of college educated workers it retains, according to a 2008 report from Michigan Future Inc. – a non-profit organization that aims to push for a knowledge-based economy in the state.

The study, called “Young Talent in the Great Lakes: How Michigan is Faring,” found that 11.2 percent of Michigan households are young professionals compared to 16.6 percent and 15.6 percent in nearby Illinois and Minnesota respectively.

MPowered president Ankit Mehta, a junior at U-M, says he hopes events like the career fair will provide students like Hartmann with job opportunities and to keep them from fleeing the state after graduation. Unlike most campus employment events, which feature company representatives flown in from New York and Boston, almost all of the more than 90 companies at last week’s fair are based in Michigan.

“Companies come to the career fair because they are looking to hire students and they are looking to hire full time employees and there’s so much talent and so many people that want to stay in Michigan,” Mehta says. “How to connect the two, that’s where the career fair comes in.”

Doug Neal, the director of U-M’s Center for Entrepreneurship says students often feel they need to leave home because they believe Michigan lacks job opportunities.

The students may be right. Michigan’s unemployment rate stands at 11.7 percent, far worse than the 9.8 percent for the rest of the country, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

“Sometimes it’s just lack of awareness of the opportunities that might be around them,” Neal says, “and sometimes there are not as many opportunities as we would like.”

The skepticism cuts both ways. Skip Simms, the interim president of Spark, an economic development organization based in Ann Arbor, MI, says local startups and other potential employers believe Michigan lacks talent. As a result, the companies … Next Page »

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The tech scene here is on the move. In comparison to other U.S. cities, Seattle has had the largest growth in tech jobs, and has moved up to #9 (from #10) in total number of tech workers. By comparison, Boston ranks #6 in number of jobs gained and #4 in total tech employment.

That’s all according to the American Electronics Association’s “Cybercities 2008″ report that compiled stats from 60 cities. The AEA rankings were based on labor stats from 2006, the most recent data available, and were not normalized to population. In terms of raw number of tech workers, the top five metro areas were New York, Washington DC, San Jose/Silicon Valley, Boston, and Dallas-Fort Worth.

In 2006, the Seattle area had a net gain of 7,800 tech jobs, a 7 percent increase over 2005, for a total of 127,700 jobs. The average wage for those jobs was $96,200 (#5 nationally, compared to $95,100 for Boston—no slouch itself). Seattle ranked first in software publishing (thanks largely to Microsoft) with 42,600 jobs, ninth in telecom with 18,800 jobs, and ninth in manufacturing of measurement and control instruments with 6,400 jobs. The area had a total of 4,900 high-tech establishments—as compared to 8,200 in Boston—according to the survey.

Some (including me) have questioned whether the 2006 growth stats are still relevant in 2008. The experts I’ve talked to say the answer is definitely yes—at least for the Seattle area. “My sense is there has not been a slowdown,” says Seattle-area Web entrepreneur and Xconomist Andy Sack. “I saw the article on the #1 fastest growing… and my thought was, well that explains why recruiting has been and continues to be so difficult.”

A word of caution, though—echoing University of Washington computer scientist Ed Lazowska’s Xconomist post from yesterday. “Future growth depends on our ability to make high-tech careers attractive to our children,” said J. D. Hammerly, a vice president at Battelle Seattle Research Center, in an AEA press release. “We need to spark more excitement and enthusiasm for technology, sciences, and math. These skills are critical to prepare young students for an increasingly technical world, providing them with the foundation to become highly paid tech workers.”

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