Reminded me of this brief thing I saw on lileks.com about an old magazine article about how to make your own “tin can lamp”:
Remember the ‘Secretarial Pool’? Gone.
Posting from Taiwan: I really tried to make a go of it finding a job in the US, after I got my MBA. It just wasn’t happening. After a couple of months I ended up getting discouraged and settled in the short term for a job for which I was laughably overqualified. Perhaps if I had kept on knocking my head against the wall I might have still made a go of it. But eventually I began to feel, what’s the point? I knew that as soon as I had returned to Asia, I’d have a suitable professional job within a week of landing at the airport. And that’s what happened.
I rewrote this post as the first time I was going to talk about how I don’t have much immediate worries here and I’m able to support my family on just my salary, but in tone it’d probably sound 180 degrees from what I intend – I sure don’t care for the fact that I’m unable to find a corresponding job in my own country, and though I feel a little (just a little) reassured about my kid’s future as I’m going to make sure she attends school here and becomes fully literate in both Chinese and English – I sure didn’t expect that to be an absolute must for her, rather than a “nice to have” thing to chat about on her resume.
You know we’ve had recessions before, right? The current recession sucks a lot, but it’s not a new phenomenon and, like all previous recessions, it will go away.
Good welders are always in short supply as well, as are truck drivers.
Didn’t most of them just become generic “administrative staff”? That’s what Mum’s friends did, at any rate.
What is “uneducated”? Someone who spends 4 years as an apprentice basket weaver probably knows more about how to weave baskets than someone who majors in basket weaving at university. Both people are educated only in different ways.
As I’ve said in other threads, I’ve had guys come out of university with computer science degrees that I wouldn’t want to touch a computer. I’d much rather have a tech from a technical college do such work. Who is more educated? It depends on the job you want them to do.
Yes, but companies are shedding those folks now, too.
A lot of things I used to do - arrange travel, arrange shipping, find information - is now done by managers themselves at their own desks using their own computers. Thus, “generic administrative staff” have become largely redundant and have been cut from the workforce in vast numbers.
Typewriter manufacturers. Secretaries.
And remember we’re talking about a comparison to buggy whip manufacturers. I don’t think we would call that employment on a “grand scale”. The point is that there are many such examples, all that add up to a re-alignment of employment opportunities. Telephone operators. Typists. Gas station attendants. Bank tellers.
Then why on Earth are those thousands of students wasting their time, money, and energy getting those degrees?
Exactly. I don’t understand all of the people who go to college working toward a degree with no plan for their life whatsoever, and no clue as to how that degree might help them get a job at some point.
In my experience, we have far too many people leaving college with liberal arts degrees, and far too few leaving college with technical decrees. The U.S. gives gives out thousands of technical work visas to foreigners because we can’t find enough qualified engineers, for example. While the numbers of college graduates has increased greatly over the years, the number of graduates with technical decrees has not increased much at all, or has actually decreased. Why is this?
It’s simple. People choose to study what they are interested in. Works out well for the ones that do get a job!
But not so well for those who don’t.
For example, back as an undergraduate, I was equally interested in engineering, chemistry, and history. However, it was fairly obvious that the job prospects were far greater for someone with a degree in the first two fields of study than the latter. This was a large factor in me getting a degree in chemical engineering. However, I have not lost my interest in history. I took electives in history, and have continued to read books on history since graduating. There’s nothing to say that one can’t continue to learn after college.
Besides, how many people who get degrees in history actually work as historians? Most end up getting a job that has no relation to their degree.
I’m not saying that everyone should pick a course of study and/or a career based solely on what can lead to the most lucrative job. However, it should be a factor, IMHO.
I’m actually dealing with this is with my son. My goal for him is to be happy in life. One way to enhance one’s happiness is to be gainfully employed. I don’t want him to have to struggle to get work his whole life.
In discussing various career options, he has heard that lawyers make a lot of money. However, I have encouraged him not to become a lawyer solely for the money. For one thing, many lawyers don’t make as much money as people think, and those that do generally have a poor work-life balance.
On the other hand, if he expresses an interest in something like “Art History,” and wishes to get a decree in this, I would also encourage him to evaluate what he can do with that degree after graduation.
What kind of colleges are people going to where their graduates can’t eventually find jobs? I understand that it’s tough starting out as a new college grad and that people may not get the job they wanted, but everyone I know eventually finds work.
Not hardly.. My daughter is graduating this month, a year late from spending a year studying in Germany. Many of her friends who graduated last year are either unemployed or under-employed. Lots of companies have special programs for hiring new college grads, but a lot of these are shut down after laying off lots of people.
This is a problem that will get better when the recession is over.
Oh, it’s both. We have a plan B and a killer app. The company’s been around for almost twenty years, so it’s not like we’re a naive start-up, We already make a good profit selling software not related to smart phone apps. The apps business is just icing on the cake.
There will inevitably be companies which don’t survive the shakeup but that doesn’t mean the number jobs will decrease in the long run. The number of people working in the software industry today is vastly greater than say 1980 despite the ups and downs individual PC software companies may have faced since then. The gaming industry melted down in the famous crash of 1983, today it’s vastly larger than its peak before that.
In general automation often means lower costs for businesses and lower prices for customers. This means more money that can be spent on other things which means more jobs. Since we don’t know exactly what people will spend on we can’t predict the exact industries but the broad picture is reasonably clear. Rich countries will experience rapidly ageing populations who will have to be looked after. Many of these elderly people are wealthy and many of the others will have government-funded care so the demand is definitely there.
There is enormous scope for job-creation in the education industry as well. Students can learn much better if they have individual attention both for regular instruction and to spot learning/behavioral disabilities. A lot of these jobs especially in regular instruction could be carried out by people with a general college education. The only constraint is a lack resources but if automation could release resources from other areas you could easily create millions of jobs in education.
In general I think people underestimate the number of potential jobs that are out there but not being created because of a lack of demand. Then they don’t understand the fact that forces like automation and outsourcing will help shift demand thereby making those potential jobs viable.
If I may address the question of being “under employed” for a moment. I realize a lot of graduates say things like they didn’t go to college to work at a Starbucks or Banana Republic or whereever, but what exactly did they go to college for? What is it they think some big company should pay them lots of money to actually do?
Can someone from the US find a professional job overseas? I was under the impression the only jobs you could get was teaching english. Do you know if someone from the US can get a job in a scientific field overseas?
I guess that settles it. Spain, which has a 40% youth unemployment rate, is just full of slackers.
I honestly don’t know if it’ll get better after the recession is over.
I have read that large numbers of baby boomers do not intend to retire for various reasons (boredom, lack of financial security). As a result those positions will not open up for young people to take.
Not only that but job creation has been shit for 10 years. I think the US created about 5 million jobs in 10 years before the recession wiped those out, plus 3 million more (we had 132 million jobs in 2000, we have 129 million in 2010). Normal historical job creation for that period would have been 20-30 million net jobs and we should’ve been at about 160 million jobs by now. When you add it all up (the recession + lack of job creation from last 10 years) the US is probably about 30 million jobs short of what our population ‘needs’.
Not only that, but job creation in the future will to a large degree be in low wage, low security, no benefits service sector jobs. Food service, low wage health fields like CNAs, landscapers, receptionists, etc.
So you add in the drastic shortage of jobs, the fact that new job creation will be low wage, part time, no benefit jobs with boomers who cannot/will not retire from decently paying, full time jobs with benefits and young people are screwed for a long time. I really don’t think things will be good next year or the year after that. This seems to be a structural problem in our economy.
Eventually, no doubt, especially if you consider the fast growing market for Android apps also. But right now there are a lot of people all working on the same apps, and many of them won’t be around soon. We’re going to move into an area because everyone else is there already is not a real great business model. I was mostly telling suranyi to not be very thrilled, but it is good that the company is not betting the farm on this thing.
The issue is whether the jobs created by improved productivity are better or worse than the jobs eliminated. Yes home and nursing home nursing jobs will increase, but I doubt they pay as well as many jobs eliminated - and I write checks for my father’s nurse every two weeks, so I know.
However at the moment jobs in the ed biz are disappearing. The problem is not a lack of teachers, or even skilled non-teachers. It is a lack of financial resources to pay for them. The “freeing up” of resources reduces the tax base, and makes the electorate even less willing to pay for schools. In California the number of students per teacher has gone up, not down, recently.
How does automation increase demand? In some instances it does by decreasing prices, (as does offshoring) but on the other hand it also decreases demand by decreasing the customer base. Take computer manufacturing. 20 years ago this was mostly done in-house, and IBM, HP. Compaq, and AT&T all had manufacturing plants. Now most of the work is done by contract manufacturers, except perhaps for final assembly. It is a lot more efficient, in that equipment and expertise are shared across several customers, but the manufacturing engineers I used to work with are all gone, and they didn’t go to the CMs. some CM jobs are in the US, but many are not. There are other side effects. Equipment manufacturers used to have sales teams to sell to a large number of customers - now they sell to a half dozen so the teams are reduced. There is less need to advertise, so trade journals are closing, and less to exhibit at conferences, which are shrinking. If there are six customers in the world, developing new products is a lot riskier, since you are dead if these companies reject you - so the manufacturing equipment sector is consolidating, taking with it even more jobs.
Now the upside is that cheaper computing equipment creates new market segments - but if the manufacturing engineers start working tech support they will see their standard of living be reduced - which leads to less demand.