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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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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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IBM’s Role in Creating Tomorrow’s Workforce

Sunday, October 11th, 2009

My October 5, 2009 blog, Technology Vendors‘ Roles in Addressing the College Conundrum,  assessed some of the primary changes that colleges and universities must undergo to help prepare their students to find and to succeed in the knowledge jobs of the 21st century. It explained the critical roles the private sector can play in helping colleges make these changes and why IT vendors are particularly well suited to help.

My July 27, 2009 blog, How IBM is Helping Universities Develop 21st Century Workforces, provided a high-level overview of IBM’s Academic Initiative and Global University program. I recently completed a deeper examination of IBM’s initiative and wrote a more detailed report (IBM’s Effort to Create the Workforce of the Future) that explained these programs within the context of IBM’s employee development program. In this report, I spelled out the benefits the programs will deliver to universities, students, IBM partners and customers—and to IBM itself. The entire report is available for purchase on my web site. To whet your appetite, here’s a summary of the report’s primary findings.

IBM has been one of the leaders in partnering with universities and other organizations to ensure the availability of the type of IT professionals required to build, run and optimize the types of IT infrastructures and solutions that have become the foundations of 20th century organizations. While it is continuing with these efforts, it is now focusing its primary efforts on partnering with universities and adapting its own employee development models to ensure the availability of a new type of professional—what it calls a “T-shaped person”.

These T-shape people, whether IT professionals, business professionals or public service professionals, must be interdisciplinary generalists, rather than narrowly-focused specialists. Although they must certainly have deep skills in specialty (the vertical axis of the T), they must also have sufficient understanding of a broad range of related disciplines (the horizontal axis) to allow them to see contextual linkages, to constructively participate in interdisciplinary teams and to continually adapt their visions and their contributions to rapidly changing conditions and needs. But whatever the individual’s specialty (whether IT, business, scientific or any other field) all must understand how to apply IT tools to the needs of their profession.

Therefore, IBM is adapting how it works with universities to leverage its traditional relationships with IS, engineering and business departments, into all types of disciplines, from psychology, through public affairs through medicine. These new relationships are multi-faceted, including everything from help in designing courses and curricula; providing required hardware and software; funding research, scholarships and internships; and helping to create interdisciplinary research centers that bring together academics, businesses and government officials to address gnarly problems in areas including transportation, energy, food safety and environment.

IBM’s initial goal in creating T-shaped professionals and research centers is to feed the company’s own need for qualified people. It selects future employees from among this expanded pool of graduates and is adapting the company’s internal employee development programs to transform these interdisciplinary graduates into solution-focused professionals who can proceed through any of five broad career paths.

But if these efforts go as anticipated, they will accomplish much more. They will help promote independent research that is aligned around IBM’s primary market objectives, provide solution-focused employees for IBM customers and partners and ideally inspire a new generation of students to understand how they can use IT (ideally IBM’s IT) to bring new value to their own fields. Ideally, many of these fields will align with the rapidly expanding sets of market needs being addressed under IBM’s Smarter Planet initiative. It can, in other words, be a win-win proposition, helping everybody, with the exception of IBM’s competitors.

Posted in 21st Century Careers, Business Trends, Corporate Social Responsibility, Creating the 21st Century Workforce, Education System and Institutions, IBM, IT Company Strategies, IT Industry and Companies, IT Industry Role in Education, Job and Career Opportunities, Skills Requirements, Technology's Impact on Job Skills, Universities and Grad Schools, Workforce Trends | No Responses »
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Technology Vendors’ Roles in Addressing the College Conundrum

Sunday, October 4th, 2009

My September 27 blog, Leveraging University Education into Careers for the New Economy, suggested how college students can structure or supplement their coursework to make them more attractive to potential employers. Many of these approaches, such as selecting appropriate majors and minors, independent study programs and thesis topics and developing strong social networking competencies, are generally within students’ own control. (Even these approaches, however, are dependent on the college/universities’ ability to fund these classes—a condition that can no longer be assumed.)

However, while many of the requirements for creating university experiences that will better prepare students for the knowledge jobs of the future are within the control of students, many others will depend on proactive efforts by the colleges. These include:

  • The teaching of math, statistics and the use of IT tools as core academic offerings and the deep integration of these tools into all coursework;
  • An increasingly interdisciplinary design and delivery of courses; and
  • Availability of proactive career counseling to help students identify career options, career pathways and the types of work that will best prepare students for opportunities in their chosen fields.

Unfortunately, many of these changes are totally antithetical to many universities’ organizational structures and cultures. For example, as I discussed in my previous blog, most universities are organized in discrete stovepipes that implicitly discourage cross-disciplinary collaboration. Professors, meanwhile, are typically hired and rewarded on the basis of their depth of knowledge in their particular specialty (rather than as interdisciplinary thinkers) and many consciously shun practical applications of their work and involvement of corporations in tuning curricula. On the other hand, most university career centers are culturally attuned to these objectives. However, they often lack the number of career counselors and the degree of interaction with the companies most likely to hire their graduates.

What’s a university to do? How can it overcome the inherent challenges of culture, tenure and a lack of resources to provide their students with the help required to prepare them for the careers of the future?

One approach is for universities to actively solicit the help of corporations that are in a position to hire graduates. Many corporations already have large, well established and very active university relationship programs. Some, such as JP Morgan Chase and Wal-Mart, help universities (Syracuse University http://globaltech.syr.edu/ and the Universities of Arkansas and Arizona respectively http://sustainability.uark.edu/15347.php) develop and fund programs under which the university creates and teaches courses and conducts research that are aligned to the company’s needs, and the companies provides internships and job opportunities for selected graduates.

But while all type of companies in virtually every industry offer programs to help universities prepare students for new jobs, as explained in my September 5 blog, The IT Vendor’s Employee Readiness Burden, I believe that IT vendors are particularly well suited to help. Why? Through their products and practices, these vendors are playing disproportionately large roles in shaping the environments in which tomorrow’s graduates will work. These vendors, for example, are developing the technologies that will redefine the nature of knowledge work and pioneering practices, such as globalization and seamless collaboration that will determine the type of students who will be best suited for different types of work. Just as importantly, IT vendors will also have some of the first and greatest needs for graduates with these new skills.

I recently wrote a report (IBM’s Role in Creating the Workforce of the Future) which talks about how IT vendors are helping universities in a myriad of ways. I’ll also continue to follow this topic in future blogs.

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, Global Forces-General, IT Company Strategies, IT Industry and Companies, IT Industry Role in Education, Job and Career Opportunities, Skills Requirements, STEM Careers, Technology's Impact on Job Skills, Universities and Grad Schools, Workforce Trends | No Responses »
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How IT Services Providers Can Help Clients Address the Coming IT Skills Gaps

Saturday, September 5th, 2009

The growth of the IT industry has depended on broad availability to people with IT skills-people to work both at IT vendor and customer organizations. Although it may be tempting to scoff at the emergence of a skills gap during a period characterized by a combination of recession (when companies are being forced to lay off and defer the hiring of qualified people) and globalization (with a huge growth of IT skills in India, China and dozens of other emerging countries), three fundamental trends will combine to jeopardize the availability of the type of skills that will be required to allow developed country companies (especially U.S., Western Europe and Japan-regions on which IT vendors still demand for the vast majority of their revenues and profits) to effectively apply IT to addressing the business needs of their companies. These trends are:

  1. Demographics, a combination of a dearth of Gen X and Y’ers to replace retiring baby boomers, insufficient transition planning by many companies, and simultaneous declines in both the percentage of young adults graduating from colleges and, especially, those majoring in IT or other technical curricula.
  2. Globalization, whereby the rapid growth of offshore labor supplies and skills (and the pressures this will impose on developed country entry jobs and salaries) will initially reduce both the attractiveness of IT careers and, longer term, jeopardize the development of the type of higher-level skills that developed countries will need to mange their own environments and, most importantly, effectively apply IT to their company’s business needs.
  3. Industrialization/Automation, in which lower-level entry tasks (those that are instrumental in helping people learn the foundation skills that are necessary to learn higher-level skills) will increasingly be instantiated into software.

At first glance, it may appear that the combination of 2 and 3 will address the shortfalls created by 1. Moreover, the combination of all three of these trends could very well result in IT organizations that are much more cost-efficient -and effective-than are traditional organizations.

But while the globalization and Industrialization of IT work will certainly reduce the demand for IT-trained “bodies” in the U.S., it will simultaneously reduce the supply of people trained to provide the types of high-level skills that are required to:

  • Architect and manage sophisticated projects and, most importantly, those that best understand how to
  • Apply IT as a tool to address business needs and achieve strategic advantage.

From where will such skills come? True, offshore sources may well produce many of the architectural and managerial skills required to offset a dearth of developed country skills. Although companies may prefer to retain these and other high-level IT skills onshore, many can probably make do with offshore talent. And since few end user organizations are likely to have the scale or the best practices required to build, staff and manage world-class offshore IT organizations, they may even be able to justify outsourcing these functions to third-party providers.

But what about that mix of deep business process, IT architectural and business strategy skills, combined with the type of corporate cultural sensitivity, that is required to identify and sell the need for, and align the types of organizational resources required to drive such projects to fruition? Such capabilities cannot be offshored, much less outsourced. How will developed countries in general, and individual companies in particular, recruit, develop, nurture, manage and retain such skills? Even more fundamentally, what type of skills should companies look for in people who can grow into these roles, where are such skills being taught, what career paths are most effective in developing these skills and what cultures are required to develop skills into talents?

True, the “mere tasks” of increasing college graduation rates, the percentage of students who major in IT and related disciplines and the quality of the educations these students receive, may well increase the pool of raw materials from which such talent may be developed. But the use of such blunt instruments to increase the genetic probabilities of creating the new generation of such talent is not an effective or efficient means of developing these skills. This is particularly true given a probable decline in the number of entry jobs from which such students can percolate to the top.

Neither the country, nor individual companies need huge numbers of raw skills-they need a totally new approach to selective breeding on the type of talent that will be required for the skills that businesses really need to be competitive in the future. They need entirely new types of education, entirely new career paths and entirely new ways of looking at the type of value that IT must provide in a more global knowledge-based economy. 

Since IT vendors in general, and IT service providers in particular, are playing such key roles in driving the  globalization and industrialization/automation tends, they are best positioned to determine the ways in which these trends will redefine the needs for next-generation IT skills. And since they have so much to gain from the availability of such skills-and so much to lose from death of these skills-they have huge incentives to help create them.  Some, as I will discuss in future reports, are already working to define and help universities create the foundation for these new skills.

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, Global Forces-General, Globalization, Immigration and Offshoring, IT Industry and Companies, IT Industry Role in Education, IT Industry Trends, IT Industry's Role, IT/Business Consulting/Outsourcing, Job and Career Opportunities, Skills Requirements, Societal Forces, STEM Careers, Technology's Impact on Job Skills, Workforce Trends | 1 Response »
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Is the Great Recession Creating Two Lost U.S. Generations?

Sunday, August 30th, 2009

We have all heard of Japan’s “Lost Generation”, the young adults who entered the workforce during Japan’s decade of economic stagnation (generally the 1990s). Since the Japanese economy did not create sufficient numbers of new jobs to absorb these new entrants, these youths-including highly-trained graduates from good universities-ended up taking whatever type of work they could get. 3.3 million people who planned to enter Japan’s lifetime employment economy ended up taking menial odd jobs, contract work or temporary jobs. As explained by BusinessWeek in May 2007 , many of these jobs:

  1. Paid poorly, forcing many to live with their parents, rather than their own homes;
  2. Provided limited job security, which diminished marriage prospects; and
  3. Offered few benefits, which discouraged pregnancies (thereby exacerbating Japan’s falling birthrate).

Worse still, these jobs did not make use of these peoples’ existing skills and did not provide the type of new skills that would prepare them for more responsible positions. So when Japan’s growth resumed in the 2000s, companies shunned these workers in favor of younger, more recent graduates whose skills were current and who were not tarnished by spotty, low-level and non-traditional job histories.

What will be the long-term fate of this Lost Generation? Although it’s always dangerous to predict the future, it’s hard to foresee a future that will be kind to this generation.

So what does this mean for the U.S.?

The Gen Y Challenge

Although I ‘m certainly not predicting that the U.S. will suffer a full lost decade, we could easily suffer a lost half decade. U.S. employment peaked in December 2007 and, according to The Wall Street Journal’s article The Great Recession: A Downturn Sized Up, Stanford economist Bob Hall states that job losses have been piling up at a faster rate since any time since 1948–a pace that Hall expects us to surpass over the next couple months.

These job losses are expected to continue at least through the end of 2009, and possibly well into 2010. Even when the recession ends, growth rates are expected to remain low and most companies will increase the hours of current employees before hiring new people. And as we now recognize, a number of these lost jobs in industries ranging from automotive manufacturing to financial services are unlikely to come back at all. Although growth fields, such as healthcare, education and, increasingly, government are likely to sop up some unemployed workers, it is not yet clear which other industries are going to offer large numbers of sustainable, high-value job opportunities for newly minted knowledge workers—or over what timeframe they will do so.

True, the U.S. is not Japan. Workers who—due to no fault of their own—miss the first step of the employment ladder, are less likely to suffer a lifelong personal stigma. Moreover, some of those new graduates that are financially able are making the best of employment situation by going to graduate school. Even so, many of those Gen Y’ers who are forced to divert from their chosen career paths will face a big challenge. After all, when new jobs do become available, who are companies most likely to hire:

  • Applicant A, a 22-year old that just graduated; or
  • Applicant B, a 27-year old with the same educational qualifications, that has spent the last 3-5 years in menial or temporary jobs that did not exercise existing skills or create new ones?

Okay, newly graduating Gen Y’ers have the potential of becoming one of America’s new Lost Generation. Who will make up the second potential Lost Generation? Consider the Baby Boomers—Gen Y’s parents.

Baby Boomer Lost

It’s ironic. Two years ago, labor force economists and far-sighted corporations were in a panic. Baby Boomers were preparing to retire en masse and there were not enough Gen Y’ers to replace them. Even those companies that expected to be able to attract new entrants were struggling with challenges of capturing and managing the transfer of knowledge from retiring workers to their replacements.

That was before the Great Recession. Baby Boomers, in their mid- and late-50s, are now among the most prominent victims of the layoff ax.

It may be a something of a stretch to consider these people part of a Lost Generation. After all, most have already enjoyed 30 to 40 year careers. Moreover, weren’t many of these boomers planning early retirements, anyway?

Many of them were. But that was before the recession and before many of them recognized that their savings were far below what would be required to fund retirement, much less accommodate unforeseen medical costs or the growing potential of outliving their savings. According to an AARP study that was conducted before the bust, 73% of people over 50 did not even have sufficient income or assets to meet emergencies. Now, as explained in careersecretsauce,  many of these “reluctant retirees” are finding themselves out of work at a time when:

  • Their 401K and home values have been decimated;
  • They have years before becoming eligible for Social Security or Medicare and
  • Many will have trouble securing or affording health insurance once their COBRA plans expire.

Worse still, given the tough time that most older people have in finding new jobs, and the limited number of new jobs that the recovery is likely to produce, few have much hope of finding productive, well-paying jobs in their fields.

Even if these involuntary employees do find productive jobs or manage to create sustainable businesses of their own, many will lose the promise of a secure retirement.  Fewer will be able to muster the spending that will be required to fund new jobs for either themselves, or their children.

Am I overstating this problem? If not, what can be done to reverse or moderate this spiral? Although I plan to address these and other perplexing dilemmas in future blogs, I need your help. 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, Job and Career Opportunities, Skills Requirements, Societal Forces, Technology's Impact on Job Skills, Workforce Trends | No Responses »
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