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GREENSBORO — Education, foresight and luck.

Greensboro needs all three if it’s going to build an economy that can prevent or recover from hammer blows like the one American Express delivered Wednesday.

The company said it will close its Greensboro service center by the end of the year and move about 1,500 of its 1,900 jobs out of the region. It estimates that 400 employees will work from home in the Triad.

The news sent clear signals about the need for worker training, the pace of technological change and the recession that keeps battering the work force.

Five experts on jobs and the economy said the Triad can do a lot to defend against such layoffs in the future, but that sometimes an economic hurricane hits no matter what anybody does.

“This certainly is not isolated to American Express,” said Dan Lynch, president of the Greensboro Economic Development Alliance, which recruits industry to the area. Lynch said a number of companies operate call centers in this region, including Citi Cards, and the Internet is a threat to all of them.

“You can go online and do so much more,” Lynch said. “This is a technological enhancement that increases productivity. Any of our service centers might be experiencing the same thing. This is something that we need to keep an eye on.”

Consumers are just as likely to log in to get answers about their American Express charge cards as they are to call an 800 number and talk to one of hundreds of workers who staff the phones around the clock, the company said when it announced the closure.

Lynch will contact such companies in the coming weeks to ask about their plans and learn what they might be considering.

He said the alliance and other economic developers target specific industries, including financial services, for special education programs and recruiting. But Lynch said nothing is sacrosanct when it comes to planning for the future, and the alliance can shift its focus to new growth industries if it finds that others are shrinking.

Little will change, however, without a work force that’s better educated, said Keith Debbage, a professor of urban geography at UNCG.

Debbage, who does economic research for the alliance and its parent the Greensboro Partnership, said the Triad has struggled for 20 years with job cuts in textiles and other traditional industries.

And while the area has replaced many of them with call center jobs, those are clearly vulnerable as well.

“What you’re seeing now is a spreading of that restructuring to low-wage, white-collar employment,” Debbage said. “It’s not just manufacturing folks; it’s also white-collar work where the skill levels are not particularly high.”

The earnings for such workers, somewhere around $30,000 a year, are “slightly lower than the median earnings for this market,” Debbage said.

In some ways, he said, call center jobs are the modern equivalent of manufacturing jobs that didn’t require more than a high school diploma. But call centers do not necessarily improve earnings.

“They were always touted as great job generators but not wage generators,” Debbage said.

People with college degrees, however, tend to be creative people who can work with knowledge and solve problems.

Debbage pointed to a recent Forbes magazine study that ranked the Greensboro-High Point metro region No. 1 in the nation for the fastest growth in the median salary for employed workers with college degrees between 2007 and 2010.

Such Greensboro companies as RF Micro Devices, which makes semiconductors for wireless telephones, and Honda Aircraft, which will begin building the HondaJet next year, employ many workers who have college degrees and a variety of intellectual talents — despite being considered manufacturing workers.

The average salary for manufacturing in the Triad is more than $51,000 a year, Debbage said.

“We’ve got to focus on the highest levels of talent we can possibly produce in our market­place,” he said. That means building strong students, beginning in kindergarten through college and beyond.

“We’ve been hit hard again,” Debbage said. “Yeah, it’s disappointing that it’s spreading into the white-collar sector. It’s a departure. Yes, it’s a hammer blow; you can’t color it any other way. But it really tells our community we’ve got to be supportive of education.”

Education is essential. But North Carolina also must recognize the demographic changes that are driving that need, said one analyst at UNC-Chapel Hill.

One survey estimates that by 2018, 59 percent of the jobs in North Carolina will require education beyond high school, said Ferrel Guillory, director of the Program on Public Life at UNC.

“In our anxiety to try to keep people employed — that’s a humane anxiety — we have also brought in and accepted the relocation of installations like call centers,” Guillory said. “It’s not outdoor work under a boiling sun like picking cotton. It’s not breathing cotton dust. It’s still low-wage, low-skill work.”

“To some extent these (call centers) are kind of holding actions to keep people employed as we get our core working population educated,” Guillory said.

Coming soon, he said, massive population change is on its way. The baby boom generation, which begins hitting 65 this year, is 70 percent white in North Carolina, he said.

Younger adults and adolescents, however, are about 50 percent white, which makes it imperative for the state to make education programs as diverse as possible for black and Hispanic workers.

“The education challenge before us is to close some of the achievement gaps,” Guillory said. “We’re going to be more dependent on blacks and Latinos filling jobs” that have been dominated by white workers, such as accountants, construction foremen and other professional careers.

“It’s not just in gross numbers, but it’s also in closing achievement gaps,” Guillory said.

Workers also bear some burden for improving themselves.

“What happened at American Express is a sobering wake-up call,” said David Moff, CEO of The HR Group, a human resources management company in Greensboro.

“For potentially vulnerable employees, take heed. Realize that reinventing yourselves is vital for survival. Invest in education to be ready for the higher-level knowledge jobs that will emerge and call for higher skills. This is the real world where job security is only as good as your talent, capacity and ability,” Moff said.

“Ask yourself if what you are doing can be moved or automated,” he said.

Still, no amount of education or planning can blunt the edge of a recession that slices jobs across the board, said one analyst who specializes in job development issues in North Carolina.

“In this environment, saying that it’s all due to educational mismatch, really, I don’t think it’s accurate,” said John Quinterno, principal with South by North Strategies in Chapel Hill. “It provides a reason for policymakers to say there really isn’t anything we can do.”

Quinterno, who has done research on community college policy, said, “I think one of the arguments people will use to say that education pays is the fact that the unemployment rates are a lot lower for people with a four-year degree. If you look nationally, the rates have shot up for both groups of folks.”

Quinterno doesn’t throw cold water on the notion that people can improve their employment prospects through education, especially with professional graduate degrees.

But “the fundamental problem that’s facing a lot of folks in the short term,” he said, “there’s just not a lot of job creation, period.”

Contact Richard M. Barron at 373-7371 or richard.barron@news-record.com