Employers added jobs this year faster than some Inland Northwest economists projected, and observers expect further gains in 2017, though possibly at a slower pace. 

Doug Tweedy, the Spokane-based regional labor economist for the Washington state Employment Security Department, says that through October, the Spokane metropolitan statistical area gained 7,500 jobs, outperforming the job market in the previous two years. In 2014 and 2015, employers added between 4,500 and 5,000 jobs annually. 

For 2017, Tweedy says he’s projecting job growth of just under 2 percent in the Spokane MSA, which would be an additional 5,000 jobs. 

“As we add jobs, it does attract new people to the area,” he says.

Grant Forsyth, chief economist for Spokane-based Avista Corp., says he’s projecting a somewhat more conservative 1.5 percent employment growth for 2017 in Spokane and Kootenai counties combined. 

“We’re getting a little bit of a mixed signal at this point, which indicates slower growth,” Forsyth says. “We’re probably going to have some growth in 2017, though at a slower pace.”

As an example of mixed signals, Forsyth points to the fact that employment growth in Spokane and Kootenai counties has outpaced the U.S. as a whole this year by nearly a percentage point—a 2.5 percent increase in Spokane and Kootenai counties compared with a 1.5 percent increase nationwide. However, he says, initial claims for unemployment have stopped falling and appear to have leveled out. 

Forsyth says job growth likely will continue to be strong in professional services, a sector in which the largest share of new jobs has been created in recent years. 

Tweedy says one subsector of professional services—called professional, scientific, technical and including accounting, legal, and research and development— especially has been strong in recent years.

“That subsector has been the poster child for growth for the last three years,” he says. 

Following several years of growth in professional services jobs, which typically have above-average pay and good benefits, leisure and hospitality employment has risen, Tweedy says.

Most of that growth is in restaurants and bars, he says. 

In 2017, Forsyth says, factors that could slow job creation in the Inland Northwest include labor shortages in some sectors, rising interest rates, and uncertainties surrounding President-elect Donald Trump’s new administration.

“The election was quite strange,” Forsyth says. “It was much more oriented toward personality rather than policy. A lot of policy was left out of the equation, and the details just aren’t there. It’s very misty.”