SLOW AND STEADY

IPittsburgh Post-Gazette f you’re curious where the boom in new jobs will boom loudest, and you have a thing for percentages, the Pittsburgh region has a clear winner: health care, specifically ambulatory health care services such as health screenings, hearing testing, smoke cessation and pacemaker monitoring services.

Listed as “miscellaneous ambulatory health care services,” the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) says these jobs have seen a three-fold increase locally since 2013, from 157 jobs for the first quarter of 2013 to 665jobs for the same three months in 2017. That’sa 324 percent increase. The next closest category was insurance-related activities, which merely doubled its 2013 total of 453 jobs to 907 in 2017.

But hold on a second, cautioned PNC economist Kurt Rankin. Creating 500 new jobs is all well and good — and could be the result of just one or two new companies opening up.

“That’s still .04 percent of the Pittsburgh jobbase. Every job is good, but it’s not market movingin terms of the broader economy.”

True, the whole number of 665 does not come close to the near-2,500 jobs in computer systems and nearly 5,000 in services for the elderly and disabled.

And at least a partial reason for the good showing by the “miscellaneous ambulatory health care services” category may be the bureau’s grab bag definition, seemingly throwing in every health job description that didn’t fit somewhere else.

BLS, in fact, went to some trouble to define which jobs don’t fit in that category, providing a list of the excluded that’s longer than those falling within the definition.

Not counted, for example, are services provided in physician and dental offices, outpatient care centers, medical and