This talk about “career advancement” has little to do with a huge portion of the workforce. There are tens of millions of unskilled factory jobs where the worker is assembling/inspecting/packing widgets over and over for however many decades they remain with the employer. Add in cleaners/janitors/housecleaners, maintenance persons, fastfood/restaurant crew members, clerical staff…
Just under 13 million total in the entire manufacturing sector, including other jobs.
FWIW that’s the highest since 2008, albeit a smaller percentage of total employment.
OK - I’ll admit my WAG was high. Delete “tens of” and that’s still quite a few folk in jobs with little chance/likelihood/expectation of career advancement.
You seemed to have been denigrating humanities majors. Everyone in college graduates with basically book learning, unless you are lucky enough to get an internship. Even CS majors. What real project gets done in a couple of weeks? What real project is as well defined as a class project? I did a bachelor’s thesis, which was hands on, but few schools require that.
And the trends you note have been going on for years. When I first became a manager I shared a secretary with one or two other managers, 30 people in the groups max. When I retired the only admin was for our VP, supporting 150 people, and she was bored out of her mind. She tried to get people to give her work, but it is so much easier to book our own travel
And I suspect AI is going affect grunt programmers more than creative writers and artists.
I think that now in the USA the second half of @Dinsdale’s dead-end workers statement is the more salient. We can stipulate to 13million factory workers and direct factory support workers. But there are 10s of additional millions of
grocery workers, ag workers, transportation operators, delivery workers, warehouse workers, childcare workers, etc., etc., etc.
You are making an unwarranted assumption. I did not denigrate humanities majors, I made a comment about changes in their employability.
That goes for junior CS people as well. With AI, it’s about to get cheaper to take domain experts and teach them to code with an AI co-pilot than to take a rookie CS grad and teach them the domain knowledge they need to be productive.
All jobs which don’t require physical manipulation or experience in the real world are likely to be taken by AI. ‘Managerialism’ may go away in favor of domain professionals becoming managers with the help of AI.
Carpenters are safe. Field engineers are safe. Office managers, not so much.
There has been no change in their employability. The percentage of people getting just high school degrees, the percentage of people who started college but didn’t finish it, the percentage of people who finished college but didn’t get a further degree, and the percentage of people who got a further degree have each gone up. The percentage of those four groups who are employed has each gone up. You overestimate the percentage of college graduates who have (what you think of as) humanities degrees. The percentage who have (what you think of as) humanities degrees has gone down. Other majors have gone up. The average incomes of those with (what you think of as) humanities degrees has gone up. Have you actually done any research on this? See this website:
I was talking about what WILL happen. Not what has. AI is new. We have yet to measure its effect oin the workforce officially. Come back in a couple of years and we’ll see.
AI also brings jobs, of course. My son is working as a classifier for AIs right now.
So you’re guessing. You haven’t actually done any research on what is currently happening, have you? There are people on the SDMB who do research before they make a statement. Give us some examples of things you made guesses about that then actually happened.
While I’d be willing to concede most of those jobs offer limited career advancement potential, I’d wager 90% offer some sort of advanced education benefit that subsidizes employees getting a college degree. They’re among the most under-utilized benefits for that sort of work. In 20 years at one place, I saw one person use it to get a bachelors.
Probably because they already had a full-time job and a family to take care of. When you factor in commute time, there just aren’t enough hours in a week. I took 2 night classes at a time while working full-time at a desk job, with no kids and a short commute, and it was all I could manage. If I’d had kids at that point, I couldn’t have done it. Not with a spouse with a full-time job and a very long commute. Some people can manage it. Not most.
Where I work we have that benefit and management even makes a decent effort to avoid scheduling you to work during class time (which is another obstacle you overlooked). So I’ve known several of my fellow employees who did earn their degrees with that benefit were I work, and there are couple taking advantage of it at any one time.
However, in quite a few cases those benefits aren’t useful to someone who already has a bachelor’s as they may not be offered for anything above that degree. Currently, about a third of my co-workers have a four-year degree despite running a register, bagging groceries, and stocking shelves. Some, like myself, found ourselves there because what we were doing before was eliminated by technological advancement. Some for whatever reason couldn’t find a better job out of college (and are now trying to pay back student loans working a low-wage job, which explains why many are still living with parents or a lot of roommates).
Then there was on of the corporate jobs I had before everything went to shit in the Great Recession. There the HR department was encouraging the clerical/admin support staff to get MBA’s, and yes, the company would subsidize that, to advance. Except the result was a bunch of admin support with master’s degrees because, it turned out, the corporate culture was that if you were hired on the admin track there you stayed forever and ever. Not one person hired there as an admin was ever able to get a promotion to a higher level. Not one. Partly fossilized thinking, partly snobbery (apparently the company-subsidized business school wasn’t prestigious enough for the people making decisions about hiring managers). Here’s the kicker - when 2007 ended a whole bunch of admins (including me) were laid off because someone decided admins weren’t needed anymore (really - only the CEO would have one after that and everyone else was expected to do their own scut work). There was a clause in the agreement about the company paying for your tuition that if you left the company for any reason before a set number of years beyond your grad date you would be on the hook for the whole amount of the tuition. So… if you were an admin who got your shiny new MBA and were laid off 18 months later… sucks to be you. I am certain there was pushback and protest but I don’t know how that was resolved, if at all, because I had seen the writing on the wall and wasn’t going to do the work to get a degree that wasn’t going to do me any good in advancing at that point in time.
Oh, and just a few months after they laid off all the admins because they didn’t need them any more? Hired a bunch of new ones - younger, less experience, NO degrees other than as associates in administrative support, and a lot less pay and benefits. Of course they didn’t make any effort to bring back any of the experienced staff. Must have been fun times and chaos.
Also, not sure how anyone expected the corporate tree to work in a place composed entirely of managers… I do remember this weird scramble to give the managers at the bottom at least one direct report so they could retain the title “manager”. Also, the whispers about how some would be >gasp!< hourly workers instead of salaried like decent people. (Yes, I actually overheard that one time.)
It would really surprise me if anywhere near 90% of unskilled jobs had such a benefit. Any support for your supposition?
I think the difference is mostly whether those unskilled jobs are with major corporations or with small businesses. e.g. Denny’s may well have a benefit where assistant managers and above can get help with college tuition. Joe’s Diner, where Joe’s doing the cooking and his wife is greeting & seating? Not so much.
One of the real corporate “triumphs” of the last 40 years has been to outsource lots of their ancillary support services to smaller specialist outfits or Mom’n’Pops. e.g. Used to be the janitors at IBM facilities were IBM employees with IBM benefits. Now the janitors work for Bob’s Janitorial Service which is a small business with no employee benefits.
The end result of course is that the vast majority of unskilled / semi-skilled jobs are working for smallish businesses that offer little in the way of benefits and also little in the way of potential advancement in-house.
Are you talking about 90% of ALL jobs, or 90% of the job types you and LSLGuy were discussing in the posts I quoted. The jobs you were discussing in that thread (factory/warehouse/clerical, etc) - I’ve worked many and not one didn’t have some sort of tuition reimbursement program. Some mom and pop place fewer than 10 employees, sure. But, bringing things back around, career advancement is pretty much a non-starter at such places anyway since you don’t get promoted to “owner.”
The actual stat is 56% of all jobs offer tuition reimbursement, fewer than 10% of employees use them.
Thanks. I was discussing the unskilled jobs. Your 56% covers ALL jobs - skilled and un?
Thank you for indicating that your opinion is based on the “many” jobs you personally held. I still remain dubious that many unskilled jobs have such benefits. My job has me regularly work with vocational experts who keep up on employment trends. I’ll next meet one on Wed, and will ask her for her opinion on this.
I’m not sure exactly how many of those jobs you’ve worked or which companies they were but there are a lot of employers that have more than ten employees but fewer than 500. Sure, if you are a clerical or warehouse employee of a big supermarket or home center chain you might be eligible for tuition reimbursement - but that isn’t necessarily true if you work for a small chain with ten locations.
Ironically, IBM is now more of a consulting firm similar to Accenture or Deloitte where corporations outsource skilled and management-level labor. That’s been the trend in Corporate America for decades. Everything has become somewhat transactional and compartmentalized.
I think one of the problems with our society in general is that nobody wants to “do” anything. If you aren’t specifically picking a career like “accountant” or “lawyer” and structuring your education and career plan accordingly, a lot of people just seem to be on this nebulous track of “go to college and get a good job with a good company”. Then ideally somehow in 20 years you end up like the VP of Real Estate and HR with a degree in “French and Art” (not French art?) making $300k.
When I was growing up, I worked all manner of sucky jobs until I graduated college. Aside from giving me some extra spending money, I also got to experience how the quality of the jobs improved as I gained education and experience. The skills I learned in those various crappy jobs all built on each other to eventually land a “real job”. Even the skill of looking for a new job and quickly getting up to speed when I land one is valuable in and of itself.
What you have now is a lot of younger people who would normally be working those sucky “McJobs” aren’t doing it because it’s considered a waste of time. It’s more important to be involved in the right extracurricular activities so you can go to the right schools and land the right corporate job when you graduate.
Or maybe a lot of people are making money on YouTube and TikTok. If you can make a couple hundred bucks a week posting videos of yourself commenting on videogames or whatever, there’s really no need to work a part time job.
You need to combine these thoughts. People are telling you that your method doesn’t work any more. You can’t start in the mailroom and work your way up. Because the mailroom is outsourced, if it even exists. The mailroom and the other employees work for different companies.
So those jobs are absolutely dead ends and are not going to be valuable for learning. Arguably they should even be avoided for stigma reasons. At least not put on the resume. If you need the money to get through school, go ahead, but it’s not going to be something you take to the next job.
I think that sort of thing is a vicious cycle certainly, where these environments become more dead end and it’s harder for someone just doing them temporarily to get any value from the environment other than to get the hell out. The longer you stay, the worse it is for you.
I recall a conversation I had when I was CIO of a small software company and I was hiring a dev lead. We were both 40-something and he’d been in IT since college while I had gone in other directions after school and had landed back in IT only recently.
During the interview I commented that I’d only been in the hot seat on 4 job interviews in my life. He goggled and said he’d had that many this month and indeed most months.
Both our careers were strong outliers, but still it was eye-opening to both of us just how far an outlier could get.
We did end up hiring him, which proved to be a mistake. He was great at interviewing, but actually delivering anything was not in his skillset. Talking about delivering was his skillset.