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The name of the game is reinvention, and as others here have noted, constantly upgrading transferable skills.
Unfortunately this IS true, but it makes me wonder how long we will allow those at top of the financial pyramid to keep manipulating us like this.
So you think the drive for technology and progress is some sort of global tin foil conspiracy?
The internet and technology you are using to post your Luddite beliefs that skills/knowledge should never be upgraded in a working persons life exist because people reinvested in themselves to learn about these scary new things.
What was awful hyper-card stacks on macs, that possessed less processing power then my last cellphone, was built into HTML by programmers who learned new skills. Then it was expanded to XML, Java, C#, and more by people reinventing themselves again.
Forcing people to keep using old command line interfaces in basic, to keep the programmers employed instead of upgrading their skills like those "at the top of the financial pyramid" want us to, is batcrap insane. Doubly so for using this new fangled technology to disseminate the idea!
This example is just one friggen industry too!
Do you want to keep everyone technologically impaired so people don't need to educate themselves anymore?
I know, let us start making buggy whips so the people that the automobile supplanted can have jobs again.
And how is that working for us? Several of those formerly dirt poor nations we built up are now gobbling up the natural resources from the rest of the planet, making commodity prices unaffordable to many poor Americans.
Kind of ironic, isn't it? But it's not those at the top here who are going to suffer for it, so what's for them to worry about?
Troubleshooting Macs is a tech thing. It's not just someone answering the phone and doing intake.
Here in Silicon Valley, at least, when you tell someone you have a "tech job", it is usually meant as a software engineer, project/product manager, marketer, or finance guy at a company like Google, Apple, Adobe, Intuit, Netapp, Facebook, etc....or at any number of tech startups around here. Those are very different caliber jobs from the dude troubleshooting your computer over the phone (who is probably in India, too).
I think you missed my point. I was asking if you thought people in most professions were going to lose their jobs over any adverse economic situation either upon us or coming down the road. You clarified that by saying that your point was that the trend is for people who LOSE or LOST their jobs are unlikely to find another based on the level of job they had.
In my second question, I was asking why there were these many administrators in the first place in one tiny town. That would be a NATURAL cause for layoffs even in better times.
Schools have become very topheavy with bureaucracy, not of their own choosing. Armies of paper pushers are required to comply with all the state and federal government mandates. The situation may be even worse in other fields, such as health-care, but there they can gouge the patients for solvency. Schools couldn't even afford the manpower to do the paperwork in good economic times, and have already been cutting back for years in academic expenditures.
I don't know the particulars in Benton Harbor, a city of 10,000 with eleven learning centers. Nor do I know the definition of "administrator", which might simply have meant "non-teaching staff" or clerical. When I was on the school board in a town of 4,000, there were two fulltime office staff in the Superintendent's office, with only one high school and four grade schools. A lot of people with titles like "activities director".
electric utilities across the nation are struggling to hire electricians. the company my father works for in Pennslyvania is trying to hire numerous electricians and utility-men. but it's not as glamerous as applying for a job at IBM, Cisco, or Google with an EE degree, so they don't have a strong pool of applicants to choose from.
Americans seem to be pretty picky, even when they have options. there are jobs out there. this isn't unique to an electric utility in PA. it's like that in many parts of the country.
Maybe they are struggling to find people called "electricians" who are required to climb a 40' pole in the rain and work with high voltage?
How does this mesh with the idea people express that if things get bad enough, American teens will start doing the jobs that illegals now perform?
Hey, I wanted to get training but I couldn't afford it and tech employers don't train people. Tech employers whine about not being able to find qualified workers, but they don't train, then they run to government for more H1B visas.
The last time I saw a tech employer provide training was EDS in the 1980s.
That's a huge problem today. There are so many bright people with aptitude & potential, but with no real way to obtain skills.
Here in Silicon Valley, at least, when you tell someone you have a "tech job", it is usually meant as a software engineer, project/product manager, marketer, or finance guy at a company like Google, Apple, Adobe, Intuit, Netapp, Facebook, etc....or at any number of tech startups around here. Those are very different caliber jobs from the dude troubleshooting your computer over the phone (who is probably in India, too).
Yup, and it doesn't matter whether in India, US, Mac, PC, etc. when you make that support call the first line of defense is someone who isn't well paid that has a list they'll run thru that will fix 95% of what customers are calling about.
They aren't a "tech person" they are someone who can read from a computer screen out loud.
Troubleshooting Macs is a tech thing. It's not just someone answering the phone and doing intake.
they have scripts that they follow. it really isn't a high-skilled job. i did a tech support call center job in high school. it's a step higher than customer service, but it's not very much higher.
Macs are a little different though because of the model Apple uses for tech support. The "Genius" bar is a bit more advanced in terms of tech support than Dell's tech support is. but either way, it's a job that high school and college kids could do no problem. The trouble-shooting steps are spelled out for them, and rarely does it require much knowledge that couldn't be taught in a day or two of training.
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