Click to watch Dave Fehling's 11 News report

HOUSTON – Joblessness got worse across the nation with a loss of more than 60,000 jobs.

The national unemployment rate for June released Thursday: 5.5 percent.

Houston is also seeing more people out of work, but there’s a twist: In certain companies, there’s a dire shortage of skilled and college-educated workers.

In Houston’s East End, the high price of oil is great for business. It’s why Vam Drilling — is running 24 hours a day, seven days a week, rolling out miles of pipe used around the world to find crude.

But finding enough workers?

“We have so many jobs that we can’t fill,” Vam Drilling spokeswoman Denice Hollis said.

To make hires, they’re pulling out all the stops.

“We’re having to supply visas, and we’re having to look abroad,” Hollis said.

They’ve even resorted to hiring workers like teenage computer wiz Jason Cherry. He works part-time alongside full-time engineers and started when he was 15.

“Sometimes I have stacks on drawings to be modified,” Cherry said.

It’s a problem up and down the Ship Channel: From tugboat companies to breweries, businesses are struggling to find workers.

“We’re all fighting each other for the same type of people,” Hollis said.

Hardest to find: those college-educated engineers. But also skilled maintenance techs are also hard to come by: the people who keep all the heavy machinery running.

In fact, the majority of the jobs here don’t require college degrees, but they’re the kinds of jobs high schools have been steering kids away from.

“You know, I think the education system is certainly a piece of the blame,” St. John’s teacher Doug Carr said.

Teachers said unlike when they were students, high schools now no longer teach what used to be called “vocational ed.” But in the East End, the Chamber of Commerce is working to solve the labor shortage.

Local industries are putting up thousands of dollars to start special programs inside East Side high schools.

Austin and the new Houston Advantage High School will teach hands-on skills for working at the port and in manufacturing, skills that can earn technicians $40,000 to $60,000 a year.

Milby and Chavez High Schools will offer college prep courses related to the energy industry.

What’s more, some of those high school students are getting intensive courses this summer in math and physics at Rice University. That’s where 11 News found not only Jason Cherry but also Alana Alina.

“I know that I want to pursue the engineering field,” Alina said.

They’ve heard about the worker shortage and are banking on what a college education will earn them.

“Sixty-thousand maybe, so it’s going to be pretty good,” Alina said.

And that’s a pretty safe bet. Energy jobs will likely stay plentiful in Houston if the price of oil stays high.

Just look at numbers now: Houston’s overall unemployment rate has crept up from 3.9 percent this time last year to 4.2 percent.

But due in part to oil drilling and exports at the port, there haves been thousands of new jobs created in the past year: an overall Houston job growth of over 2 percent.

Nationally, job growth has all but stalled. By contrast, is what’s happening at places like Vam Drilling.

“As long as people want the oil and gas, we have to provide them with the pipe to look for it,” Hollis said.

They say the only thing threatening to slow them down is a shortage of workers.

Of the 12 biggest metropolitan areas in the country, the city that’s chalked-up the most job growth is Houston.