Retail Is The Hot Place To Look For A Job

Research indicates a steady revival in the opening of retail stores, paving the way for job openings in the sector.

If the U.S. economy comes hopping back, one of the business sectors bouncing the highest will be retail.

According to a report by real estate services company CBRE, many retailers who conduct business nationwide are planning to open more stores in the near future. This is a positive development for the workforce, as retail is typically a people-heavy business requiring plenty of not-necessarily-skilled labor (in the form of stock people, sales assistants, cashiers, etc.). As such, any increase in store openings will create jobs and help ease unemployment, which remains relatively high.

In the report, nearly 60% of the companies polled said they would expand their network of outlets. The timing for this is ideal; with the underperforming economy, rents in shopping malls and on main streets throughout the country have dropped to attractive levels. Meanwhile, many firms started to rein in their spending when the recession hit several years ago, and as a result have cleaner balance sheets and more cash to spend on assets like new shops and the workers to staff them.

Curiously, the expansion plans of the retailers are not matched by their overall opinion on the economy's prospects. Only 27% of those surveyed believed it was improving, and that figure was down from that of the previous year's poll.

According to the CBRE report, most of the retailers planning to open new stores anticipate doing so in the southwest of the country. Some states in this region are particularly thirsty for jobs, with unemployment standing at over 11% in California and a robust 13% in Nevada at the end of 2011. The average across the U.S. was 8.6%.

Overall, retail is one of the anticipated bright spots for hiring over the next few years. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the sector's workforce is set to expand by 8% from 2008 to 2018. This means a total increase of approximately 374,000 jobs.