Dr. Mike Slotkin shared his knowledge and expertise in a Mark Reed article published August 2, 2012, in Florida Today. Entitled, “Is Brevard Poised for a Jobs Breakthrough?”

Excerpt: How bad was Brevard County’s job market?

So bad that layoffs from the space shuttle program look like minor dip on employment charts compared to much deeper, lasting losses from the housing slowdown in 2006-2007 and banking collapse in 2008.But now, the Space Coast may be eking into positive job growth for the first time in years, says economics professor Mike Slotkin from the Florida Institute of Technology. Do politicians have anything to do with that?

Question: How would you summarize the jobs picture in Brevard today?

Slotkin: This was going to be the turnaround summer. We’ve had job contractions here since, really, 2006. On a yearly basis, we had about 216,000 payroll jobs then. That has declined each year. In 2011, we had about 193,000 jobs. Having withstood the shedding of jobs from Kennedy Space Center last summer, what we’re looking for in an upcoming jobs report — in August or September — is year-over-year increases of a couple thousand jobs. If we can end the year at maybe 194,000 or 195,000 jobs, you can definitively say this was our turnaround summer. Realize, it’s a long way from where we were.

Link to full article: http://www.floridatoday.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2012308020033 .

Link to faculty page: http://www.fit.edu/faculty/profiles/profile.php?tracks=mslotkin