Grand FORKS – The labor market around Grand FORKS has slowly since last year, according to job service data, but many residents still use local job exhibitions to try to find employment suitable for their experience and skills.

The latest online employment report from the job service shows that there are more than 13,000 job opportunities in the state as of August. Nearly 1,600 of these openings are located in Zone 4, which includes Grand Forex Province.

“I would like to say that it slows down a little, but not as we see in other parts of the country,” said Dustin Hilbrand, director of the workforce center at Job Service ND.

While the number of openings in Grand Forex province does not decrease at a record pace, compared to the rest of North Dakota, the region witnessed the largest decrease on an annual basis last month with a reduction in 254 openings, according to the report.

Hilbrand said that his ministry had witnessed a little less participation in the employer in the last job fairs, although there are still sufficient places to employ one of the Alelerus Center meeting rooms, as was the case on Tuesday, September 30, during the job ceremony, the Cities Grand Cities Fall, where there were 36 compartments from the employer.

The three industries with the largest number of job opportunities in the region at the present time are health care with 371 openings, retail trade with 165 and agriculture with 157, according to the job opportunities report. Hilbrand said what he saw in his role with the ND work service that supports these numbers.

“Healthcare is always the number 1 in the state – it was for years,” he said. “AG is likely to be first and then health care, but a lot of AG functions were occupied by H-2A workers in the northwest, and for this reason we go healthy.”

With the current labor market, some job seekers say it is a mixed bag, especially depending on the skills that applicants bring to the table.

Nicholas Kenny said the exhibition on Tuesday was the first in Grand Forex, after he moved from the twin cities area just a few weeks ago. He was primarily looking for work related to his previous experience in manufacturing functions and warehouses, but he was also open to other industries.

While Kenny admitted that there is definitely a wide range of job opportunities to choose from in larger cities such as Minypolis and St. Paul, he also said that his first impressions in the labor market in Grand Forex show that there is a lot of what happens in this region as well.

He said: “It seems that there are many major companies, or at least companies that are very interested in making the Grand Forex area more attractive to potential employees.”

The other attendees participated in their struggles, with openings in their chosen fields. Lucy Pivalakua is a 2025 graduate of North Dakota University, who specialized in computer science. She has been looking for work in a field linked to “continuous” programs since May.

She said, “I really didn’t see much holes.” “There are not many large technology companies here. I have seen some holes and I applied, but I didn’t really hear.”

She added that she knows other people with computer science backgrounds who have seen more mixed results, with some of the drop functions shortly after the college and others are still searching for about seven months after graduation.

Another fair present, Katrina Parfield-Takir, felt that there is a balance in the types of jobs represented in the exhibition, where more employers offer positions to truck drivers and “intense job functions” instead of holes related to customer service or soft skills.

Parfield Thaker said that she moved to Grand Forex from Georgia about a year ago and has a background in behavioral health and similar community awareness functions. She said that the market in the region for these types of jobs is different from what it was using in the south; The work holes in its field were “few and far between”, and those she found for them to have less starting salaries than she expected.

She said, “Therefore, it is a shock in some way, but I am flexible, and I am still ready to correct.”

On Tuesday, the exhibition was one of the large opponents of the work that it kept every year by the Grand Forks Labor Office, with the other held around April. Hilbrand said that his office is also making a large virtual work fair in January and monthly job exhibitions on the first Wednesday of each month, where he said that the employer’s participation can differ.

“One month, we can have 10 employers, then the next month, we can have 20 employers,” he said. “There is no rhyme or reason for that, which always makes it a kind of fun.”

But even with the current number of job opportunities and the amount of job fairs held at Grand Forms, Hillbrand said these numbers do not mean that there are no people ready to work, especially among the smaller Grand FORKS residents. According to him, the work rate of the workforce for children from 14 to 24 years is 50 %.

He also said that North Dakota has the second unemployment rate in the country by 2.5 % and one of the highest rates of participation in the workforce by approximately 70 %, which is the third highest in the country, according to federal government data.

“People in North Dakota are working,” said Hilbrand. “The numbers prove this.”