Today’s announcement by Google and Governor Granholm (read the Detroit News Article here) of 1,000 new jobs is welcomed news for Detroit’s creative class. From the Detroit Free Press article (read full article)

“The jobs will vary in skill demands and pay. The average salary for new hires is expected to be $47,000 a year.

“This is a huge, huge, huge, huge thing,” Granholm said Monday. “It’s a tremendous statement about Michigan having a cutting-edge workforce.”

David Fischer, Google’s director of online sales and operations, said Monday that the company’s focus is on hiring bright, motivated people.

“We worry less about experience than raw talent. We’ve had tremendous success hiring people straight out of universities, with majors from engineering to art history.”

While tax incentives and government assistance are crucial to attract major investments by such companies as Google, “raw talent” is mentioned as one of the deciding factors to locate this new facility in Ann Arbor. This is further proof that talent attracts investment by new economy companies. If we are to become and remain competitive in the global economy attracting and retaining talent to our region must be the number one priority.

Our region is in a painful but ultimately necessary time of transition. With tremendous losses in manufacturing in our state we continue to push forward with gains in knowledge-based jobs. While smaller in number than the thousands of reported job losses in manufacturing, the gains in “creative class” jobs are vital and yet often go unnoticed. Hopefully Google’s announcelment today will be an encouraging sign of an upward trend to potential creative class workers considering relocating to or from the Metro Detroit region.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 11th, 2006 at 2:56 pm and is filed under Jobs, Marketing, News, Policy, Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.