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Occupational Opportunities for the Next Decade

Sunday, July 25th, 2010

In my June 27 blog, Payoffs of a College Education, I discussed that the Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) 2010 Occupational Outlook Handbook portrays particularly strong growth in jobs for college graduates. These jobs will grow at a faster rate (15% versus 10%) than those that typically require less education and yield higher weekly and lifetime earnings and greater job security. In fact, every step up the educational ladder, from high school diploma, through some college, bachelor degree and professional degree (with a small exception for PhDs), tends to improve virtually every aspect of a person’s career path.

But the level of educational obtainment is a pretty high-level view of the job market. Although it does emphasize the value of graduating from college, it does not, in and of itself, provide much guidance as to which occupations offer the best employment opportunities, the highest earnings potential and the best opportunities for advancement.

Tomorrow’s Largest Growth Occupations

In 2006 (the study’s benchmark year), about half of all jobs (see Chart 3 of the handbook) in college-level occupations were concentrated in three broad categories—education (21%), healthcare (14%) and computers (13%). Adding two others, management (12%) and business and financial operations (11%) covers more than 70% of all college-level jobs.

A nice start, but still too macro a view to provide meaningful help in career planning. Medical jobs, for example, run the gamut from physician assistants to surgeons. Management jobs run from education administrators to CEOs. Jobs within each category have very different educational requirements (from bachelor or below through post-graduate) and are likely to produce vastly differing numbers of total job openings through 2018 (from 66,000 physician assistants to 1 million registered nurses) and growth rates (2% for CEOs to 50% or more for some IT jobs).

The tables supporting the Bureau’s conclusions provide details for multiple occupations in each of these categories. As one would expect, the greatest number of projected openings are concentrated in the three largest college-level job categories: education, healthcare and computers. The first two categories share a few similarities.

Both, for example, are:

  • Being driven largely by population growth and demographic trends;
  • Characterized by especially strong growth in one very big class of occupations;
  • Consist of a large number of moderate and relatively low-paying jobs, and more modest numbers of higher-paying (especially in healthcare) jobs that typically require a minimum of four years of graduate school.

Health care growth, for example, is driven overwhelmingly by the growth in need for RNs, which is projected to grow at a 24% rate and account for almost two-thirds of all listed healthcare openings. Although there will be big needs for teachers at all levels, the demand for K-2 teachers is growing at only a 10.8% rate, while that for post-secondary teachers (and some small specialty teachers) is tracking at 23%.

IT Professions

IT-related job trends are very different. First, although the handbook profiles only five distinct occupations (out of ten that BLS specifically tracks), all four of the specialized, high-skill occupations (network systems and data communications analysts, computer software engineers, systems analysts, and network and systems administrators) are slated for hyper-growth through 2018, at rates ranging from 28% to 53%.

These jobs, most of which require “only” bachelor’s degrees, also provide some of the highest salaries—more than twice the median for all occupations. Many, even during the depths of the recession, are already characterized by strong levels of college hiring, rising salaries and shortages of qualified applicants at all levels of experience.

Moreover, the need for IT skills is being driven not by demographics, but by the rapid, increasingly critical need to incorporate IT into virtually every business, every process and every “machine” (from PDAs and televisions through office buildings and jumbo jets). And this is just the start. Business decisions increasingly require real-time analytics and seamless, real-time collaboration tools. The Internet, meanwhile, is creating new businesses and new job requirements every minute of every day.

This being said, not all IT jobs are created equal. As I mentioned, four of the five listed categories are growing at hyper-rates. The number of openings for the fifth—computer programmers—is actually declining. This is not at all surprising. The demand for the lowest skill IT occupation, data entry clerks, has been plummeting for years. BLS now anticipates similar (albeit slower) declines in the number of openings for computer programmers. These positions, as I’ve discussed in a number of previous blogs, will be increasingly replaced—and compensation reduced—by a combination of:

  • Technology, including more automated development and test processes, software reuse and tools that can be used by non-IT professionals; and by the
  • Rapid growth in the availability and use of lower-priced, offshore IT professionals.

Moreover, while these forces are initially felt in relatively low-skill IT professions, they are already beginning to be felt in ever more demanding occupations. Increasingly sophisticated, policy-based IT management software, remote diagnostic tools and a growing trend toward the delivery of IT as an outsourced service will slash the number of people required to maintain an application, manage a given number of servers or support a given number of users. Moreover, as I have discussed in previous blogs, the number of offshore IT professionals is exploding, their education and training is getting much better and they are moving rapidly up the IT value chain, providing increasingly sophisticated services—including services that integrate IT skills into other college-level occupations.

So, while highly demanding technical specialties may offer promising opportunities for the next decade, IT professionals, like sharks, must continually move forward—or they will die. They must continually evolve their skills to address the most promising career opportunities. Most importantly, they must learn to apply these skills in ways that deliver not just “IT value”, but true “business value” to their company’s line-of-business constituents and especially their customers.

But as the number of opportunities for dedicated IT professionals is large and rapidly growing, this does not even scratch the surface of the need for IT skills in tomorrow’s job market. Virtually every college-level job in America is becoming, to one extent or another, an IT job.

This is not to say they must develop, manage and maintain their company’s IT infrastructure or applications. They must, however, be able to integrate a broad range of increasingly sophisticated IT tools into every aspect of their work. And I don’t mean that people must use word processing and email. Those are yesterday’s skills. Today’s professionals must also be fluent in Internet search, in computer-based collaboration and in social networking. Tomorrow’s professionals must seamlessly incorporate sophisticated information access and analytics tools into their day-to-day tasks and learn dozens of new tools and techniques that most of us can barely identify.

Over the next decade, virtually every professional will have to be an IT professional, as well as a professional in his or her own specific field.

Posted in 21st Century Careers, Business Trends, Community/Other Colleges, Creating the 21st Century Workforce, Economic and Political Forces, Economic Forces, Education System and Institutions, Job and Career Opportunities, Skills Requirements, Societal Forces, STEM Careers, Technology's Impact on Job Skills, Universities and Grad Schools, Workforce Trends | No Responses »
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Tom Kucharvy’s 2010 Research Agenda

Sunday, January 17th, 2010

The IT Industry’s Role in Addressing the U.S.’ Technology Skills Gap: How the industry can secure its own future while providing unique value to employees, customers and society

Over the last six months, I have focused my research around two broad questions:

  • What types of skills will U.S. knowledge workers require to build careers that will deliver the highest value and be most sustainable in a global knowledge economy?
  • What must individuals, schools and corporations do to prepare for these jobs?

I recently wrote a report “IT Companies as Catalysts in Creating the 21st Century Workforce”, which I summarized in my January 11 blog. While working on it, I was particularly struck by three key conclusions:

  1. The particular risks that the IT industry will face from a paucity of required skills and the unique role the IT industry can play in creating the next generation workforce;
  2. The combination of foundation skills (including IT, Internet, math and communications) that all knowledge workers will require and how these skills can be most effectively taught and learned;
  3. The critical role that multi-faceted academic (especially university)/private sector partnerships must play in designing and delivering curricula that prepare knowledge workers for tomorrow’s careers.

I have certainly learned a lot from my research over the last six months and, hopefully, readers have valued from my posts and reports. Ultimately, however, this research ended up doing what most research does—it raised more questions than it answered. Some of these new questions are forming the foundation of my 2010 research agenda.

Here’s a peek into what I’ll be working on in 2010.

Q1 2010 Research Agenda

My 2010 research will continue to examine the changing nature of knowledge work in the 21st century and the requirements for the U.S. to build a workforce that will be truly competitive in the Global Knowledge Economy. I will, for example, drill down into a number of issues that I have touched on in my 2009 research including:

  • The skills and attributes individuals need to compete in a world in which knowledge work is increasingly defined by global competition, the automation of increasingly discretionary tasks, a deluge of data and information and the need to collaborate in increasingly fluid physical and virtual teams;
  • The relative roles of academia and the private sector in developing these skills and in creating and enabling the environments in which individuals can contribute ever higher levels of value;
  • The increasingly central role that the IT industry is playing in redefining work requirements and environments and the unprecedented opportunities for IT companies to shape the workforce in accordance with their and their customers’ needs.

Among the primary issues I plan to explore are:

  • Emerging best practices for recruiting, developing and retaining effective knowledge workforces
    • What approaches are proving to be most effective for companies—especially IT companies—in building and maintaining effective development, sales and services teams?
  • Opportunities for building high-payoff private sector/university partnerships
    • What expectations, contributions and commitments must each party bring to effective relationships, what best practices are emerging for collaborative curricula, course and platform development, research and recruiting?
  • Private sector roles in addressing primary and secondary math and science gaps
    • Although university education is critical, educators must instill interest and teach the basic math and science skills on which university educations can build. What role can IT firms play in enabling and facilitating these efforts? What rewards can they gain?
  • Using technology to improve the education process
    • Which types of technologies and techniques can be most effectively employed in schools and universities and how they can best be acquired, taught, implemented and managed?
  • The roles of IT service providers in addressing customer skills shortages
    • How can IT service providers best help clients evolve their own workforces, supplement their skills gaps and prepare new generations of business architects, technical professionals and CIOs?
  • Building and enabling an “innovation workforce”
    • What are the combinations of technology, management practices, collaborative processes and industry skills that will be required and what role can the IT industry play in developing these skills within companies, in conjunction with universities, and across ecosystems and technology and community clusters?
  • The roles of government in addressing—and exacerbating—the U.S.’s technology skills and innovation gaps
    • Can federal, state and local government organizations play productive roles in laying the foundations for addressing educational needs and enabling potential growth industries, or should they just stay out of the way?
  • The IT industry as test bed and role model for new private sector skills initiatives
    • IT vendors are among the leaders in establishing successful private sector/academic partnerships and in developing systematic employee skills development programs. What role can they play as role models for, enablers of or coaches in helping other industries?

Although my primary interest is in understanding the skills that will be required for sustainable 21st century careers, and the roles that IT companies can play in preparing U.S. knowledge workers for these careers, even I do not live on workforce development alone. After 30 years in the IT industry, I still have a deep interest in, and retain an irresistible drive to express my opinion on any of a broad range of industry-related issues. So, interspersed with blogs about jobs, skills, university programs and the globalization of knowledge work, you can also expect occasional discourses on important IT company initiatives, industry trends and especially, the unique opportunities for IT service providers to address a broad range of business and societal needs.

Posted in 21st Century Careers, Business Trends, Community/Other Colleges, Corporate Social Responsibility, Creating the 21st Century Workforce, Education System and Institutions, Globalization, Immigration and Offshoring, IT Industry and Companies, IT Industry Role in Education, IT Industry's Role, Job and Career Opportunities, K-12, Other Schools, Skills Requirements, STEM Careers, Technology's Impact on Job Skills, Universities and Grad Schools, Workforce Trends | 2 Responses »
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IT Companies as Catalysts in Creating the 21st Century Workforce

Monday, January 11th, 2010

The following is a high-level summary of a more detailed report that summarizes the findings of six months of research into the changing nature of U.S. knowledge work and the requirements for creating a generation of knowledge workers who will not just be able compete, but will not be able to add differentiated value in a global knowledge economy. For a free copy of the full report, click here.

We’ve all seen the statistics and the anecdotes surrounding the declining technical skills of American workers. Although unemployment is at record highs, many positions go fulfilled for lack of qualified applicants. U.S. student interest and skills in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education is plummeting relative to other those in other countries and the U.S. is making it increasingly difficult—and unattractive—for talented foreign students and professions to enter and remain in this country. U.S. manufacturing workers lack the skills to work in new-generation factories and promising green tech firms are leaving the U.S. in favor of countries with larger markets and more sympathetic governments.

Unfortunately, most signs suggest that things will get worse, before they get better.

IT vendors and service providers that are based in or have operations in the U.S. face particular challenges:

  • They will find it increasingly difficult to find sufficient numbers of graduates with appropriate skills and will either have to implement “remedial” programs or increase their use of offshore talent;
  • If IT vendors/providers will have trouble finding skilled people, customer IT organizations are likely to face desperate skills shortages;
  • A decline in math and IT skills among customer’s business professionals threatens to limit appreciation for, experimentation with, and adoption of new IT capabilities.

But while IT vendors face some of the greatest challenges from a U.S. skills gap, they are also the best positioned of any major type vendor to address the problem. These vendors, after all, created and will continue to create the tools that are revolutionizing work. They are also pioneering many of the organizational and business revolutions that transform the work environment of the future. IT companies, for example, have been among the leaders in transforming, automating and optimizing traditional business processes, in disrupting revenue models of traditional industries and in globalizing knowledge work and business processes that few ever dreamed could go offshore.

It’s only logical. Companies that are this involved in shaping and defining the future of knowledge work, are also among the best positioned to understand the skills that tomorrow’s workers will need. Although many such companies are already using their large, established training organizations to directly prepare some of their customers and their partners’ employees, a growing number are going much further.

They are forming increasingly innovative partnerships with universities (and to a lesser extent, all types and levels of schools) to help foster the educating of next-generation employees. Schools, including some that traditionally shunned such collaboration as an infringement on their academic integrity, are increasingly welcoming this help as a means of better preparing their graduates for jobs in one of the most challenging job markets in memory.

These types of partnerships, which can include access to free or low-cost hardware and software, help in designing curricula, courses and Internet-based delivery systems and joint research, are beginning to yield some big benefits to the companies and schools alike. In the end, however, students are probably the biggest beneficiaries.

We are, however, only early in to the second generation of such partnerships. The real benefits—to IT companies, schools, students and to the IT companies’ customers and communities—are still around the corner. So, as discussed in some of our recent articles and reports, some vendors and some universities are already beginning to reap some big strategic and financial dividends from their initial partnerships.

Posted in 21st Century Careers, Business Trends, Corporate Social Responsibility, Creating the 21st Century Workforce, Economic and Political Forces, Economic Forces, Education System and Institutions, Globalization, Immigration and Offshoring, Innovation/Entrepeneur, IT Industry and Companies, IT Industry Role in Education, IT Industry Trends, IT Industry's Role, Job and Career Opportunities, K-12, Skills Requirements, Societal Forces, STEM Careers, Technology's Impact on Job Skills, Workforce Trends | No Responses »
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Integrating Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) into the Global Knowledge Economy (GKE)

Sunday, July 5th, 2009

In my last 2 posts (Welcome to the Global Knowledge Economy and
Why the Private Sector Must Develop a Socially Responsive Workforce Globalization), I explain some of the huge impacts that the type of global knowledge economy (GKE) strategies that are required for corporate survival are likely to have on employees, students, families and communities. Although the vast majority of corporations want to protect these constituencies, most will find it incredibly difficult to reconcile their GKE business mandates with their corporate social responsibilities (CSRs).

But if the private sector can’t reconcile these increasingly irresistible corporate forces, the government may be forced to do it for them. And in all likelihood, it won’t be pretty.

There are, however, options. Although no corporation will be able to protect all of their current employees from the offshoring of jobs, they can play a much more aggressive role than most have currently played in identifying and in helping individuals prepare for the jobs that will not only be sustainable in a GKE, but will also provide the most interesting work and pay the highest salaries.

The private sector—primarily in the form of large global corporations—must become much more proactive in defining their long-term skills requirements, identifying the locations in which different types of skills are most likely to be deployed, and in preparing current and future employees for the jobs that will be most sustainable in each country. Ideally, they will go further to at least partially defuse what is certain to become a GKE time bomb.

global-knowledge-economy-ticking-time-bomb

Although such actions are desirable for all countries, they are particularly critical in the developed countries that are likely to face the greatest losses of existing jobs, and in which political ramifications of inaction are likely to be the greatest. And, if these corporations act properly, they can potentially do much more than just protect their employees and their reputations and stave off government mandates. They also have the potential of simultaneously sowing the seeds for more sustainable knowledge-based economies and, in the process, enlisting the support of some powerful government allies.

To do so, leading global companies will have to play much more proactive roles in:

  • Creating visions around and identifying roadmaps for building careers that will be both sustainable and lucrative in a global knowledge economy; and by
  • Designing curricula and mobilizing a broad range of educational institutions and private training companies to prepare current and future employees for the sustainable knowledge jobs of the future.

But before they can even begin to lay out such a vision, they must answer a number of critical questions. For example:

  • What type of jobs will be most and least susceptible to offshoring, and over what timeframes?
  • What will the most sustainable developed country jobs look like?
  • What career paths must companies provide to help current employees prepare for these jobs?
  • How should students prepare? What educational backgrounds and skills must current and prospective employees obtain?
  • Which schools, universities and training programs will be best suited to teaching these skills and what capabilities must they develop to do so?
  • What can developed countries learn from experiences of India, China and other countries in rapidly educating, training and mobilizing huge numbers of knowledge workers?
  • What can companies and governments do to insulate workers from—and when necessary, provide safety nets and retraining and placement programs for workers who fall between—the GKE cracks?
  • What must students and employees do to best prepare themselves not just to survive, but to thrive in the global knowledge economy?

While the private sector in general, and large global corporations in particular, must take a lead in answering these questions, a handful of large corporations developing plans behind closed doors are likely to engender more public suspicion than support. Although these corporations should probably begin evaluating options, testing solutions and defining proposals in small groups, they must expose their solutions well before they are forced to, and try to build support among key political and education sector constituencies. In the U.S., for example, leading corporations may, for example:

  • Coordinate work on and recommendations around these issues though organizations such as the Business Roundtable and the Research Board;
  • Share research agendas, findings and recommendations with appropriate government teams, such as the Middle Force Task Force (which includes leaders of the Departments of Labor and Commerce and White House National Economic and Domestic Policy, among others); and
  • Engage with education leaders to help identify the roles that different types of institutions can play in educating and training students and workers for these new roles, and what the private sector can do to help.

The private sector may certainly be tempted to delay publicizing the issues surrounding knowledge workforce globalization for as long as possible. After all, why should corporations voluntarily surface such potentially controversial issues before it is necessary—or before they have an opportunity to fully prepare themselves?

Although it may certainly be tempting to hide or even obfuscate the issues, it may not be wise. In the end, the private sector is likely to get a fairer, less heated hearing by proactively framing the discussion and proposing tested solutions than it will by being thrown, unprepared into a seething public controversy.

Posted in 21st Century Careers, Business Trends, Corporate Social Responsibility, Creating the 21st Century Workforce, Economic and Political Forces, Global Forces-General, Globalization, Immigration and Offshoring, IT Industry and Companies, IT Industry Role in Education, IT Industry Trends, Job and Career Opportunities, Societal Forces, Workforce Trends | No Responses »
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Welcome to the Global Knowledge Economy

Monday, June 15th, 2009

We live and work in a global economy. In most cases, the signs of a global workforce are so integrated in our day-to-day lives that we don’t even notice them, such as when we buy products that have been made overseas (whether from Wal-Mart or Gucci), or when we sign a tax return that was actually prepared by an accountant in India. Increasingly, however, the signs of a global workforce become so apparent that they force their way into our consciousness, such as when we struggle to understand an Indian customer service rep or when jobs in our community fall victim to Chinese manufacturers. Occasionally, global workforce practices become high political drama, as around immigration laws, NAFTA, U.S-Chinese economic relations and the staging of protests and riots around international trade and economic summits.

The Globalization of Knowledge Services

But for all the attention, one rapidly growing and ultimately much more critical aspect of workforce globalization has largely escaped broad public attention—the globalization of knowledge jobs. Although most U.S. IT workers have seen how Indian IT jobs are migrating steadily up the value chain (from basic application testing to complex development and even application architecture), this is only the first and most advanced of offshore entries into high-value, knowledge-based services. Consider, for example, that:

  • China (followed by the U.S.) and India are now the most popular locations for multinational corporations to establish research and development laboratories, with China alone housing more than 700 such facilities;
  • “Medical tourist” hospitals in countries such as Thailand and Indian boast world-class surgeons already operate on close to 1 million American patients per year. Some U.S. insurance companies not only cover such procedures, they now offer financial incentives for patients to use these hospitals; and
  • India graduates about 10,000 Chartered Financial Analysts (CFAs) per year, more than any country other than the U.S.—and this is despite the fact that the cost of obtaining the certification is almost as high as likely first year salaries.

The list goes on and on. Accounting, financial analysis, architectural, market analysis and legal research jobs, once the exclusive province of developed country professionals, have all begun to move to offshore providers. And as shown in the figure below, emerging country knowledge jobs are pushing rapidly up the value chain, from those that require relatively rote process-based skills, to analytical, conceptual and, increasingly, to high-level innovative tasks.

The Global Knowledge Services Continuum

Portent or ParanoiaGiven the relative lack of public attention to this phenomenon, one may be tempted to dismiss the examples as isolated incidents. Tempting, but not likely. Consider, for example, the findings of two separate studies, a 2007 study by Princeton Economics Professor Alan Blinder and a 2008 project by the Harvard Business School. Each concluded, using very different methodologies, that a minimum of 21%—and up to a potential of 42%—of U.S. jobs have the potential of being “offshoreable.” (Not that they actually will be offshored, mind you, but that they have the potential.)

As scary as the numbers may be, the trends behind the numbers provide even greater pause. While manufacturing jobs used to face the greatest threat of being offshored, knowledge jobs—those that generally require college degrees and that pay moderate to high wages—are now the most vulnerable to offshoring.

So what can a country—much less a company or an individual—do?

  • Fight the trend by prohibiting it, imposing punitive penalties or by publicly pillorying companies and executives that engage in offshoring? Yet this can ignite a firestorm of inflationary price increases, invite the enmity of countries that have already bought into U.S. championed vision of free and open trade, reduce the competiveness of U.S. corporations and chase many of our most successful businesses to reincorporate in other countries.
  • Ignore it and hope that it will go away—or wait until the problem becomes so acute that we are forced into immediate reaction? This is certainly a time-honored approach to difficult problems. And it may work, at least if we are willing to sit and watch as millions of previously secure jobs disappear, and families and communities are disrupted. Then, we will need to wait for the market to eventually come up with its own solutions, for our educational institutions to adjust and for society and governments to foot the bill.

Surely, there’s a better way. What do you think?

Posted in 21st Century Careers, Business Trends, Creating the 21st Century Workforce, Economic and Political Forces, Economic Forces, Global Forces-General, Globalization, Immigration and Offshoring, Innovation/Entrepeneur, Job and Career Opportunities, Political Forces, Skills Requirements, Societal Forces, STEM Careers, Technology's Impact on Job Skills, Workforce Trends | No Responses »
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Defining the Post-Recession Knowledge Workforce

Wednesday, June 10th, 2009

The composition of the knowledge workforce was in flux before the current recession. Many of the knowledge workers were Baby Boomers—who were preparing to retire. With insufficient numbers of Gen Y’ers to fill their shoes, many of these jobs were destined to be unfilled. To compound the issue, a growing percentage of young adults—especially men—were shunning the college education needed for much knowledge work. For some Gen Y’ers, not going to college was a matter of choice. For others it was an economic mandate as the cost of higher education became more and more difficult for many middle-class families to afford. And for those who do go to college, the percentage of U.S. students who study technical fields including science, engineering, mathematics and IT (SEMIT) continues to decline.

The good news is that foreign nationals are increasingly filling this breach. For example, while foreign-born people represent for only 13% of the U.S. population, according to an April 12, 2009 article in The New York Times, they accounted for 24% of the nation’s scientists and engineers as of 2007. Foreign nationals are particularly well represented at the highest levels of their professions, accounting for 42% of all current U.S. master- level engineers and 60% of PhD-level engineers (and a similar percentage of U.S. university SEMIT masters and PhD candidates as well as 28% of U.S. physicians, and 26% of all U.S. Nobel prize winners). According to a 2007 UC Berkeley report, “America’s New Immigrant Entrepreneurs” (America’s New Immigrant Entrepreneurs) foreign nationals are among the founders of one out of every four U.S.-based technology startups).

The bad news is that America, in its infinite wisdom, is trying to reverse the slide in domestic SEMIT enrollment not by aggressively encouraging and preparing U.S. citizens to study these fields, but by making it increasingly difficult and less attractive for foreign nationals to come to or to remain in the United States

Although the recession will certainly not change everything, it will change a lot. Think the Baby Boomers will retire soon? It is hard to believe recent surveys that suggest that most still plan to do so. After all, the majority were ill prepared to fund retirements even before the recession decimated the values of their small nest eggs and their homes (at least the percentage of their home values that were not encumbered by second mortgages).

And then there are the Gen Y’ers who are finding few jobs. New graduates who are all but locked out of the formal job market are either:

  • Returning to school (which is good for the future of the economy;
  • Being forced to take jobs that are either below their skill levels or, often, totally outside their chosen field (which is bad for the future); or are
  • Temporarily dropping out of the workforce altogether (even worse for the future).

The composition of the post-recessionary workforce is further clouded by a number of anomalies that are either unlike previous recessions, or of a much different magnitude. Examples include:

  • White collar unemployment has dramatically grown (driven partially by the financial services industry meltdown), in addition to the traditional decline in manufacturing jobs;
  • The collapse of the financial services industry will certainly force students and recent graduates to reassess career choices and may prompt them to look to new areas of study (hopefully SEMIT) and industries (such as new-generation manufacturing sectors);
  • Many of the manufacturing jobs that are being lost in this recession will not come back to the United States. Meanwhile, many of the entry level knowledge jobs for which these displaced people can be most easily retrained, are increasingly susceptible to being offshored. The prospects for highly touted green collar jobs remain uncertain;
  • Traditional layoff patterns are changing, with companies increasingly laying off younger workers before older (more expensive) workers (a factor that is at least partially attributable to fear of age discrimination suits and the unwillingness to lose critical skills) and of laying off men faster than women (a pattern which, while occurring across all educational levels, is particularly pronounced among college graduates); and
  • A housing market-induced decline in worker mobility, which makes it particularly difficult for people in economically distressed areas to move to more promising localities.

What does all this mean for the workforce of the future? Although I will look at this in much greater depth in future blogs and reports a few implications jump out.

Consider, for example, the dramatic reduction in the percentage of men that are graduating from college (compounded by a growing percentage of men being laid off). This has the potential of effectively reversing traditional gender roles. It will certainly have profound implications within business, where more and more men will report to women managers. It may have even greater societal implications, with women playing greater roles in local and national politics and a rapidly growing percentage of men playing primary roles in raising families and caring for parents.

A significant delay in the retirement of Baby Boomers (to the extent it occurs) has the potential of helping many companies in the near term, but of creating big corporate, societal and economic changes over the long term. The good news for companies is that a significant delay in Baby Boomer retirement will bail many out of their failure to plan for huge demographic shifts and the associated loss of institutional knowledge. But the negatives are numerous. First, aging workforces will cost companies much more in salary and benefits. More importantly, higher costs, combined with an anticipated slow recovery, will dramatically limit job openings and advancement opportunities for younger workers. Some careers will just be delayed. Others will be permanently sidetracked. But companies with be deprived of a critical supply of management talent and families and communities will be deprived of the income associated with productive careers.

U.S. students’ rapidly declining interest in SEMIT is even more portentous. First, technology-based industries tend to create large numbers of high-paying jobs and generate large volumes of high-margin exports. Worse still, even the most staid industries are being forced to become technology industries. The future of autos, we are being told, is in new, fuel-efficient designs. Even utilities are being forced to go high-tech, with the need to move to clean coal and renewable energy sources, and to build and manage smart infrastructures. Hopefully, factors such as declining financial industry opportunities, growing interest in sustainability and new education incentives and programs (such as those that encourage math and science education) will increase domestic interest in SEMIT education and careers. If not, the U.S. will hopefully recognize the necessity of encouraging and better utilizing the gift of foreign-born talent that is being nurtured by our universities.

Posted in 21st Century Careers, Business Trends, Creating the 21st Century Workforce, Economic and Political Forces, Economic Forces, Job and Career Opportunities, Skills Requirements, Societal Forces, STEM Careers, Technology's Impact on Job Skills, Workforce Trends | No Responses »
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