Job market in Rio Rancho and ABQ? (Albuquerque, Santa Fe: insurance, attorneys)
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Hi everyone. This is my first post so please bear with me. I will be relocating to Rio Rancho in the next couple of months from L.A. Would appreciate any info on what the job market, wages and cost of living normally costs. I have an AA with background in business, former legal secretary and a couple of classes away from an ABA paralegal degree. I am over 40 yet have quite a bit of experience in professional corporate environment. Finding a good job that will allow me to make enough money for living expenses is a concern. Thanks.
Hmmm... can't really speak to what the legal field pays here. But overall wages in general are lower here than in many parts of the country. Albuquerque hasn't quite caught up on wages to my mind, even though the cost of living is going up -- I don't see the wages going up at the same rate. But that is a big generalization.
There are some high paying jobs but mostly at the national research labs like Sandia or Los Alamos. I live in Rio Ranch and work at the university. I'm in the IT field and overall the wages in that area are much lower than in several other markets. That said, I managed to find a great paying job -- so you just never know.
As an example... I moved here from the DC area -- the cost of living in housing is significantly different. A $250K house here could easily be $500K in the DC area. But the food, utilities, insurance etc. seem to be about the same. But when my son and his fiance looked for jobs here they were going to have to take about a 40-45% pay cut so it wasn't worth it for them. I would not have moved if that had been the case either.
Probably best to do a bit of searching on the web to see what is being paid in the legal field. There are a ton of attorneys in Albuqueruqe and in Santa Fe. Also I believe there is Thomson Legal or something like that here -- a corporation that supoprts the legal field -- and IIRC they might pay fairly decent.
There are plenty of jobs here and more coming. Our job growth has been averaging almost double the national average the past few years. As for corporate type jobs, there is Sun Healthcare, PNM, Lovelace Health, Presbyterian Healthcare, and Gap Inc. I'm sure there are more but these are some of the big ones here. I've worked at Gap since they moved some of their corporate function to ABQ almost 6 years ago. As for legal work there are always open positions in that field.
in2legal, you might checkout CareerBuilder.com and setup a search to email you job openings in your field on a regular basis. You can get a surprisingly good feel for an area based on job postings. You can also do a Yahoo or Google search for attorneys in the yellow pages, and then link to their websites to get a feel for paralegal needs.
Be sure to check out Santa Fe postings as well - for my field, I'm starting to think that Santa Fe might have more opportunties were I to relocate to ABQ.
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