It look like a lot of people get into California's travel and tourism industry as a stepping stone to other careers, according to a new labor market report.
Among eight other comparably-sized industries in California, travel-tourism has the highest percentage of people who were not working previously.
"Forty percent of new workers in the industry coming either from unemployment or from outside the labor force or from school. It was higher than we anticipated," says Matthew Baird, a researcher with the RAND Corporation, the nonprofit policy think tank that released the report.
About 19 percent of workers are in their early 20s, the most-represented age group among the industry's workers. Baird describes it as a launching pad.
"Where people might be into the travel-tourism industry as a cashier but then move into a position as a paralegal after that," says Baird.
"You might have a person who was working as a maid or housekeeper in the travel tourism industry, work there for a couple of years coming from unemployment, and then transitioned into child care for example," says Baird.
The travel-tourism industry is defined as everything from: transportation services, accommodations, entertainment, amusement, gambling, RV parks and camps.
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