Uhm, I was going to explain why this is a REALLY. BAD. CHOICE. But I’d rather let the following do the explaining for me:
^^^ this will be part of why if you graduate with a CS degree, you will graduate into an oversaturated job market.
The lesson? What ever you retrain for, will be oversaturated with qualified applicants. You’ll be right where you were before, except you blew an extra $tuition either out of your bank account or are that far in debt.
If you must persist in Computer Science, then minor in Sanskrit or Mandarin.
Should I go ahead and give my degree back then? And tell my bosses to stop paying me, since computer science (and presumably all of IT) is dead? Since we’ve had a job posting for a systems admin for over a year now, I guess we’ve been looking in the wrong places. Stupid us…I guess we should have been looking in India or China instead of America. The job market being over-saturated and all…
Did you seriously want to train all 15million for one job sector? Good to see that number is down for the 16million you kept quoting in your previous threads.
For those reading that aren’t trolls, if the US needs truckers, it will eventually need both trucks and truck maintenance. Those are direct results, less direct are gas stations and truck stops. If trucks are hauling you need people to load and unload.
Unless of course they’ll hauling cheap crap from China.
Do keep trying, maybe your next thread will hit the mark.
I found this book to be yet another one of those books churned out by the machines of middle management, and handed down to the employee. Most of these books BECOME best sellers because they are sold in bulk to corporations for pennies on the dollar…
The writing is haphazard, poorly edited, unhelpful, sends mixed signals, and boils down to a rather insensitive “Things change, get used to it, change or you will die. Now keep moving.” I would never give this to an employee, because that would be like giving an employee a stick of deodorant and wondering why they’ve stopped talking to you. This book does not care about the reader, and if I got it, I’d think, “Is my boss telling me to move on?” Comparing people to mice, and life’s goals to cheese is patronizing to anyone with a sense of self-awareness. The motivational parables are generic, and seem out of place to the rest of the scare tactic this book is…
This is the WORST business book I have ever read…
The unbelievably large number of people who think this is a good book is very scary. I hope these people are not important decision makers…
I have never felt my intelligence more insulted than when reading this. It’s patronizing, shallow, insipid, and still manages to be patently insulting
Yup, truly horrible book. Suggesting it to someone is the internet equivalent of suggesting deodorant, which is exactly what I was going for. When someone fails repeatedly to understand that the world changes, and starts thread after thread with the same message, what else is there to say other than your cheese has moved, get over it?
There isn’t a magic answer to “what should I retrain for?” Any more than, “what basket should I put all my eggs in?” In other thread not long ago he demanded to know what the “next big thing would be.”
Ayup. It’s about time someone told that emperor about their nakedness.
“Who moved the cheese” misses the point altogether about this economy. It missed the point about this economy the moment it hit the shelves. The cheese has not only moved, but now there is less cheese. This simple and undeniable fact completely flies right over the heads of the book’s authors and those who read and believe in their snake oil sales scam that they pass off as a philosophy.
Now mind you, “who moved the cheese” is a noble idea in a NORMAL economy in a NORMAL phase of creative-destruction, when one industry is going the way of the dodo and is being replaced by something new and even more dynamic. But that ain’t happening now. We’re contracting - growth is happening for the top 1-5% while everyone else is seeing their opportunities shrink into oblivion. High paying jobs are being replaced by shit jobs. There’s less cheese. Unless, of course, you have a passport.
Obviously not everyone can be a truck driver, but you wanted to know what people could train for, and if anyone’s unemployed, truck driving is a lucrative option.
You asked.
Health care. Home health care, especially, is a huge growth industry. But no, that won’t employ everyone, either.
One of the challenges with this question is that there’s a world of difference between retraining and education. Education opens a lot of doors than retrainig later in your career. I think when people say “training” they often mean “Education” and don’t understand that it’s pretty damned tough for a 43-year-old guy with a family to just go back to college. The fastest growing jobs are in medical and biotechnology but you can’t just take a LEarning Annex course for eight weeks to get into that. Environmental engineering is also a growth industry but, again, that’s years of education.
Oh, count yourself lucky, there are WAY worse. “Good To Great” has certainly not aged well.
I am really unsure why you think this is something new. I remember thinking about this in the 90s when the service industry as the primary form of low skill employment became prominent.
There is also a contradiction in your post. You mention growth and then ignore it. Your OP is about “retraining” in the sense of getting skills at Word. To stand a better chance, you have to retrain by getting an education in a growing field.
Seeing it this way, I would argue that the retraining programs are a waste of money if they are not actually pushing people into educational programs in growing industries.
Also, you’re right, my impression is that there has always been consistent but haphazard employment in teaching English in foreign countries.
This sentence pretty much describes my former employer.
Anyway I had to attend a seminar on this book at work a few years back. Watched a video, filled out some worksheets, had some group discussions, etc. Agree, a big waste of time. We did all got a copy of the book, though. I may have glanced at it once or twice, but right now it’s sitting in a box alongside all the other junk I have stored in my shed.
I addressed that in an earlier post. Retraining for Word is not a good idea and the article missed the mark with that; but it did not miss the mark with the overall point. Edited: also, growth is happening - but not for the working class. It’s all going to the captains of industry. I’m sure you know the phrase, “Water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink”. That’s what’s happening now. Also consider the scenario of the Ethiopian food supply drop. They got more food. Where did the food go? Same problem here with this “growth”.
That being, if you retrain for a ${growing field} you are guaranteed to be walking into a heavily impacted field when you’re done. Guaranteed. Because there are far more workers than there are jobs, and this is going to be true into perpetuity. It may be 7 million down the line instead of 16 million but 7 million people out of work still means at least 2-3 people fighting for the job you’re trying out for. Which means 1 or 2 of you must go home unemployed. The math dictates that. No amount of platitudes erases the fact that at the peak of this joke of a recovery 1 to 2 out of 3 applicants WILL go without a job no matter all the training in God’s universe. Nowadays? 4 out of 5 people must stay jobless no matter what they retrain into. No. Matter. WHAT.
The problem is it is next to impossible to get the usual suspects to wrap their brain around the fact that it does not matter what you retrain for in this kind of employer’s market. Your odds are 4 to 1 that you will be poorer for the experience and still jobless. Whether you all learn Microsoft Word or become black belts in Six Sigma, you have only a 20% chance of getting the job. Period. Dot. Stop.
When growing industries are identified and everyone takes aim to retrain into them, these programs will still be a waste of time. Because then said growing industries will be over-saturated with qualified applicants. Then what? I can’t find one Doper who can answer that. My answer is simple: if you’re unemployed, a) become an ex-pat or b) starve. Speaker Boehner(sp?) and his Republican ilk are making sure Option C is boarding the sailboat right now.
I’ve never quite gotten people who put a lot of emphasis on this. I mean, knowing how to use Microsoft Word is important. But it’s something that most people can pick up in about 20 minutes.
And you realize who else knows how to use Microsoft Word? Pretty much anybody who’s had to type a term paper since 1995. So, yeah, it’s not really going to give you any sort of an edge.
A job I would never have thought of that is (or at least used to be in France at the past) in demand is…fishmonger.
Years ago, the school’s orientation advisor of a coworker’s son advised him to train as a fishmonger (he was really bad at school and was envisioning becoming a cook).
There has been a high rate of unemployment in France for a very long time, so it’s not like you could easily find a job even at this time. And besides, fishmongers are uncommon to begin with, so there isn’t a large number of jobs in this branch. Nevertheless, I was amazed. The boy eventually settled in a job after maybe a year and a half. But he was both a lousy and picky worker. So, meanwhile, he was fired or quitted at least once a month (he even managed to be fired twice in a week). But he would land another job every time within days.
Of course, even assuming that fishmongers are in demand nowadays and in the USA, there’s no way there could a significant number of jobs in this branch, so in the grand scheme of thing, it doesn’t matter except for some individuals. But it shows that even with a high rate of unemployment, there might be obscure jobs in demand.
Also, concerning this story, there’s something else I noted. Despite the obvious lack of workers (demonstrated by how easy it was for him to land a job), the salaries offered still were barely above the legal minimum. So, this demonstrate that though maybe some workers have unreasonnable expectations, employers can be guilty of the same.
They can want workers, while still being unwilling to pay them more despite the shortage (I don’t think it applies to high-level jobs. But I believe it does for low status jobs. Employers don’t think they should pay more than the minimum to lowly workers, even when they have a hard time finding any). For instance, since the poster was talking about a shortage of truck drivers, does the usual salary of a truck driver rise accordingly?
If a person seeks to get an education/retrain they have to go on the best information available; there is nothing else to add to that.
Yes, there will always be more workers than there are jobs. That’s true in the best and worst of economies. I always expect that I will be competing with others to obtain a job. If, without further analysis, I had a 20% chance of obtaining any job I got an interview for, I’d be pretty confident that I will get a job fairly soon.
So is your conclusion to not try then? I think I understand your strategy now. You are going around the internet and trying to make everyone give up hope. When everyone has stopped trying to find work, you will be able to have your pick of the jobs!
Seriously though, you are not thinking things through. You are not identifying the fact that people are not all identical. As was pointed out with fishmongers and truck drivers, there are jobs people just do not train for. There are jobs that people only take half-assed training for. There are jobs where people stop at a bachelor’s but can be outcompeted by somebody with a master’s. Even in high-growth, soon-to-be-saturated fields, there are an innumerable number of ways to differentiate yourself while obtaining re-education or retraining. It’s tough while the job market does not seem to grow, but it is growing in some places and retracting in others.
The only thing I see in the article you linked to is a lot of hard luck stories due to the fact that people are not putting the effort into retraining that is needed from them, and that they are getting crap advice from the people who have jobs giving out advice. These are fundamental problems that I can get behind as needing something done. Whatever else it is that you are getting out of all this is beyond your ability to control.
I have two and a greencard. Why? Because cheese moves.
For most sane people that book is drivel, but may allow for quiet reflection on the balance between complacency and adventurism. But for some people that harp incessantly about the same topic over and over, it’s a much needed reminder that the world changes.
BTW Spent some time tonight talking to a general contractor and all around great guy. 4 years ago his business was entirely new construction in one area of the state. Now it’s 100% remodeling in a different area of the state. The world changes. If there is less cheese, get better at finding it. Do you really think this is the first time in human history the world changed? First time in American history? First time in recent history?
The US has a birth rate around 1.6 meaning that it’s shrinking and requires immigration (legal) to continue to grow. If jobs are that few and far between the availability of H1B/TNs will change to match. As it stands there are already a limited number.
Welcome to the real world, is this your first visit?
That’s how it works. Lots of businesses fail because by the time they enter the industry it’s saturated.
The best analogy is betting on horses. The more sure thing the bet is, the closer your odds are to 1, meaning you get nothing for it, and lose to the house.
The only way to survive in a capitalist society is to seek out information and use that to your advantage. Gone are the days when you could drop out of highschool and get a high paying job at a factory. The world changed. The horseless carriage and oil-less lamps are here to stay. I know it’s shocking, we have computers now too.
There are many, but you have them all on ignore.
No, your answer was tariffs, which are absurd. But at least the massive government bureaucracy would employ lots of people.
