reak your leg in Anchorage and chances are you’ll spend a few hours in one of the city’s three main hospitals—Alaska Regional Hospital, Providence Medical Center, or the Alaska Native Medical Center. Break it out in the Bush, and you may find yourself having to fly to a larger city to get specialized care, especially if there are complications.

While there are many advantages to living in Alaska’s remote areas, one of the biggest drawbacks to rural living is the lack of access to specialized healthcare.

“Urban areas by definition are defined as a large population that can support a more robust healthcare infrastructure; rural areas do not have the same advantages,” explains Heidi Hedberg, chief of Rural and Community Health Systems, Alaska State Office of Rural Health.

atural resource extraction has acted as a foundation for Alaska’s economic activity since before ground even broke for the Trans Alaska Pipeline System and remains a vital part of Alaska’s economic makeup. But tying state funding primarily to commodity-driven industries has (and will again) put Alaska in a tight spot. It’s widely acknowledged that Alaska lacks a robust field of value-added businesses, which create local jobs, provide valuable materials at high quality and often lower cost, and keep Alaska money in Alaska.

Two businesses—in wildly different ways—have set their sights on making cost-effective, high-quality, local products: NRC Alaska and ImagineItAlaska.

y most accounts Alaska’s economy is finally set to emerge from several years of recession. The state’s residents can expect more employment opportunities with about 1,400 new jobs coming online in industries that have been stripping costs and reducing headcounts over the past four years. The primary drivers behind this (albeit slow) recessionary emergence are military spending, new and legacy projects in the oil and gas industry, and tourism, according to Alaska Economic Trends Job Forecast for 2019 by Karinne Wiebold, economist for the Alaska Department of Labor.

With that said, there are some unknowns keeping analysts and industry watchers cautiously optimistic about the state’s economic recovery.

MTA builds infrastructure and networks for the long-term

he November 30, 2018, earthquake was not an insignificant event. But despite experiencing a pretty good shake, Matanuska Telephone Association (MTA) CEO Michael Burke is proud to report that the association’s network didn’t have any service outages, though in some areas it ran on backup power for a short time.

It’s symbolic of how MTA has found solid ground in the midst of significant changes in its industry. Burke says, “Across the country, telecommunications co-ops are struggling in this landscape of extreme technological change. Not us. MTA continues to grow and develop during a time of immense change.”

MTA and its wholly-owned subsidiaries have been growing in many ways, including expanding its team of employees and its engagement with the community. “I probably lost count in terms of how many people we’ve added in the last several years,” Burke says.

To find quality employees, MTA’s HR team regularly participates in recruitment efforts, including attending job fairs, sponsoring internship programs, and working with the Alaska Job Corps Center located in Palmer on internships and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) through apprenticeship programs “to hopefully bring in new talent and train them up.”

Mark Hylen, Beacon’s vice president, agrees. “Really our team helps inspire that culture. Probably the biggest part of our orientation process is around our core values, so we try to inspire the elements of having fun, rock star customer service, and quality excellence at the very beginning, and then it’s really the people that embody it.”

n 2017, BP Alaska celebrated forty years of operations at Prudhoe Bay, which over the last forty-plus years has produced 13 billion barrels of oil. “We’re trying to go for forty more,” says BP Alaska President Janet Weiss. “We can’t get there by doing what we used to do.”

To that end, as of a late-February interview, BP Alaska had completed 40 percent of a 3D seismic program on the North Slope, “one of the neatest things that I’ve seen in a few years,” Weiss says. The seismic survey, which should be completed this month, encompasses 455 square miles, the largest of its kind performed by BP Alaska in Prudhoe Bay. “We’re doing that in a forty-two-year-old field, which is fantastic. We did a smaller shoot at the North End of Prudhoe a few years ago, and it was so valuable, so beneficial, that we wanted to do the entire field.”

rian Benson has spent more than forty years working with Alaska’s oil and gas industry. As the Alaska area Vice President of Airgas, an Air Liquide America company, he has seen some major ups and downs in the industry.

“Some of the largest growth we saw was during the pipeline days,” he says. “Then we had some contraction, and then more growth, and then some contraction during the 2008 period when the country went through recession, and then steady growth until Alaska went through our recession here about three years ago.”

The latest recession occurred after oil prices plummeted in 2014, erasing nearly 6,500 jobs and $680 million in wages, according to a 2017 study by the McDowell Group commissioned by the Alaska Oil and Gas Association.

chools throughout the nation are facing a teacher shortage, and nowhere is this felt more starkly than in Alaska, where a large number of educators are recruited from the Lower 48. This, in addition to other factors including the remoteness of many of the state’s schools, the lack of a competitive retirement system, and legislative budget issues, makes recruiting and retaining skilled educators a monumental challenge.

According to Dr. Lisa Skiles Parady, executive director of the Alaska Council of School Administrators, the situation has become even more dire in the last couple of years.

ith more than 100 million employees in the American workforce, we have a melting pot of generations working amongst teams or actively seeking employment. We find ourselves caught in a paradox; torn between change resistant dynamics of honoring the legacy of a company or accepting advancement in management philosophy. Traditionalists, Baby Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z dynamic organizations are challenged with engaging a work force including multiple generations in the workplace. Complicating matters, according to Gallup (2017), only 18 percent feel their work is important based on the mission and purpose communicated by their employers. Furthermore, in 2016 the average annual organizational turnover rate in the United States workforce was roughly 18 percent. It is estimated that all other generational turnover aside, Millennials, who report the lowest rate of engagement, cost the US economy roughly $30.5 billion annually (Gallup 2017). Millennials (ages 23-28) make up roughly half of the work force and when combined with a tightening labor market, it is vital to recruit, hire, manage, communicate, and develop employees in a way that addresses turnover and a lack of purpose.

he cruise industry is crucial to Alaska tourism and the state’s financial well-being. The industry includes approximately 2,180 Alaska businesses that provide tours, activities, and services to the cruise lines and their passengers, according to Cruise Lines International Association (CLIA). The businesses range from retail, restaurants, and car-rental companies to air transportation providers, hotels and lodges, day cruises, and shore excursions.

The financial effect of the cruise industry is evident across multiple sectors, including direct visitor spending, cruise line spending and payroll, crew member spending, air and ferry tickets, employment and labor income, and revenue to municipal and state governments.

ying in my cozy bed inside the toasty, tastefully decorated room staring up at the star-filled night sky from a Borealis Basecamp igloo, it was hard to believe that, with all of these creature comforts, I was actually spending the night off-the-grid outside of Fairbanks waiting for the aurora to light up the sky.

I had planned on roughing it a little, having made plans to travel in February to Fairbanks and then up the Dalton Highway to above the Arctic Circle to chase the elusive Northern Lights. What I hadn’t expected was the level of quality, custom-tailored accommodations and tours that would take the trip to a higher level.

While I often write about Alaska businesses, I rarely get to experience them from a user’s perspective, especially when it comes to being a tourist in the 49th state. But my recent trip to Fairbanks and the Arctic Circle to witness the aurora gave me a first-hand look at why more and more travelers cite Alaska as one of the number one items on their bucket lists.

More than 5.6 million passengers traveled in and out of the Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport (ANC) in 2018. The airport also saw 2.79 million tonnes of air cargo during 2018. Almost 85,000 additional passengers, a 3.1 percent increase compared to the previous year, passed through the gateway of Alaska. Most of the increase can be attributed to a robust tourism industry. Last year airlines boosted their flight frequency, used larger aircraft, or both, to accommodate the increased demand.

Anchorage, the world’s fifth busiest air cargo airport, also saw solid growth in its air cargo numbers. Air cargo grew by 2.52 percent to 2.79 million tonnes. dot.state.ak.us/anc

enea Saade, a shareholder at Littler Mendelson, counsels clients in Alaska and the Pacific Northwest on a broad range of employment issues including wage and hour compliance, accommodation and leave requests, enforcement and defense of noncompetition and nonsolicitation agreements, workplace investigations, and discipline and terminations. Saade also assists clients in the development, revision, and enforcement of employee handbooks, policies, and contracts and provides onsite employment law training. She regularly represents employers in federal and state court proceedings, agency audits, and investigations. Prior to joining Littler, Saade was a partner at two West Coast firms, as well as an associate at firms in Seattle and Boston.

he Corporate 100 list is comprised of companies that provide vital employment in Alaska’s population centers as well as its rural areas, which are often in need of job opportunities. For example, Trident Seafoods Corporation, which tops the 2019 list, has shore-based processing plants in Akutan, Chignik, Cordova, False Pass, Ketchikan, Kodiak, North Naknek, Petersburg, Sand Point, St. Paul, and Wrangell.

In addition to seafood, other major job-providing industries represented by the 2019 Corporate 100 companies include healthcare, Alaska Native corporations, and transportation.