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This post might seem to be a downer, in that it brings forward unpleasant facts. Hopefully there will be a few sanguine responses to balance this doom and gloom. I fully recognize that by my focusing on one aspect of the job market I give an incomplete impression of it, and the overall future is undoubtedly brighter than the one painted here, but the issue I present too big, and discussion of it too important, for me to minimize or ignore it. It is only through early discussion and action that we can hope to mitigate the worst effects of future changes. With that preface, here goes:
To be honest, I think kids graduating high school now have to make much harder decisions than we older folks did. Whereas we could choose a career with some certainty, they cannot. The job market is inherently unstable at this point, and where it will be by the time of their retirement is impossible to guess. Even suggesting where it might be ten years from now is a challenge.
The roots of this instability go back to the near-exponential growth of technology. While we can't predict the future, we can look at past changes and expect to see continuation of major trends.
Starting back with the beginnings of the industrial revolution, we see that weaving and garment making had been a "cottage" industry, where people made cloth and garments in their own homes and earned (overall) a decent living wage for their labors. The introduction of automatic looms and mechanization made home weaving obsolete, putting hundreds of craftspeople out of their jobs, to be replaced with a few low paid mill employees. Individuals could not compete with the technology and the low costs of cloth made on these looms. There was a backlash with the Ned Lud movement (aka Luddites) attempting to redress some of the major problems. You might want to web search on this phenomenon, as it is important knowledge if you want to even begin to understand the job market, management, and labor.)
The outcome of the Luddite activities was that the mill owners agreed to collective bargaining. This became the start of unions, which served to limit worker disgruntlement. Until that development, the very government of Britain was threatened with mass rioting and insurrection at a time when it had major problems with the empire.
The union issue is really a side issue in employment though. The effects of increasing mechanization and technology continued. A blurb on a recent tv program noted that cigarettes were all originally hand rolled by tobacco companies, with an employee able to roll about 4 per minute. Early mechanization removed that job entirely, replacing it with a machine that made 200 per minute. Hundreds more jobs were lost.
The auto industry, with its many repetitive tasks involved in making vehicles, saw huge numbers of job cuts from the introduction and use of increasingly sophisticated robots. This change occurred even with the unions. Thousands more jobs were lost.
In the office, rows of desks of accountants were replaced by a different technology - the computer. In motion picture exhibition, the hand accounting of cashiers, managers, and corporate accountants has been replaced by a computerized ticket that is automatically tallied and properly reported without further intervention. Accounting departments of dozens of people are replaced by one or two people "supervising" the computer reports and checking for errors. In the accounting departments of all industries, tens of thousands of jobs have been lost.
The effects of technology has also affected management positions. With fewer people to manage, many management jobs have disappeared as well. Yet more jobs are gone forever.
The shift over the past years have driven people into the positions where "soft" intelligent decisions need to be made, decisions that cannot be handled by common computer programs. Sales, customer support, and customer service have been somewhat safe havens. However, even these positions are being quantified and eliminated. Remember how the telephone company once had thousands of operators on staff and how when you called the phone company you got a live person? Call AT&T today for anything but the initial sales department and just TRY to get to a live person. Chances are about 99% that you won't be able to do so - because there is only a fraction of the customer support staff that once existed. All those jobs are gone.
Let's pause for a minute to wonder - why aren't we being told about all of this? Simply put, it isn't good business for people to know this and come face to face with it on a regular basis. Instead, unemployment benefits are extended to ridiculous lengths for a major nation, and there are a couple of less onerous whipping boys - the economic downturn, and the offshoring of jobs. Those are both real problems, but they also serve to mask the larger one of increasingly sophisticated technology taking jobs away at an increasing rate.
How do we know that technology is making inroads? Listen on the news and you may hear how the "American worker is becoming increasingly productive" along with some number indicating an increase in productivity PER EMPLOYEE. That increase in productivity is largely a statistical artifact. If you reduce half of your work force by purchasing sophisticated machinery to replace them, and maintain the same output of widgets, your productivity in "widgets per employee" has doubled.
The shrinking of the number of available jobs is real, and will be a continuing problem, no matter how the economy looks. Low paid illegal immigrant crop pickers are increasingly losing out, just like cotton pickers did to the combine, which creates huge "modules" of cotton which MUST be handled by machines. Repetitive tasks in particular are "easy pickins'" for technology.
If you think you can now find a single job or career that will last the 45 to 50 years from high school graduation to retirement (at an ever increasing age), I must inform you that you are dreaming. Entire industries have recently grown, grown old, and failed within less than that timespan.
Consider your career working in video arcades. That industry grew and shrank within a fifteen year period. How about video stores? That was a little longer, maybe twenty-five or thirty years. Remember that call a few years back; "We need more nurses, due to the increasing age of our population. Go to college and study nursing now for a great career opportunity." Ask any nurse about the current state of nursing. The lifespan of many careers is now short. If a career does last, it may require regular retraining to keep up with the changes in technology. Ask an old plumber about "Pex." Ask an electrician about the changes in circuit breakers. Ask a surgeon about robotic surgery. Ask a programmer about the changes in programming languages and techniques.
If that is not enough of a concern, there is something else that is just peeking over the horizon - the growth in real voice and speech recognition (as witnessed a while back when a computer won over champions at Jeopardy) and the beginnings of algorithms that approach artificial intelligence within specific areas. These developments mean that even decision-making jobs are beginning to be threatened. The automation of Wall-Street trading and the debacles there show the technology is not fully competent yet, but the key word is "yet." Technology is marching on, and as the Luddites discovered, there is no stopping it. More jobs will be lost forever.
While this all may seem like gloom and doom, that is not my intent. My intent is to caution people not to put all eggs in one basket, as many baskets can unexpectedly disappear over the course of a lifetime.
For most people just coming into the job market, the days of choosing a single career path are over. Even the concept of having a "plan B" may not be enough, and building the foundation of a plan C and D a wise choice. The speed of change is unprecedented and the need for flexibility more important than ever.
I agree, always be ready to see what more is out there. Cross training is key to surviving in the workplace, be not only able to do your job, but three other jobs as well.
Consider a career as a surgeon or mortician. They aren't exactly piling into the unemployment lines. They have had steady employment since Adam and Eve. As long as people get sick and die, they always have a job.
What you describe is all true. Technology makes a lot of work obsolete anywhere for that matter. As you know many workers under the age of 50 or so change careers because of such drastic changes in the economy within the span of their working years. I would say about 3 or 4 generations ago when America was more agricultural, many children took over the work of their parents in farming or such.
Now with so many choices, such things are not decided for the vast majority of young people in the US and some other places. Kids growing up today realize that they will have to be even more flexible with the changes ahead than the older people have gone through today and in recent times.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by harry chickpea
How do we know that technology is making inroads? Listen on the news and you may hear how the "American worker is becoming increasingly productive" along with some number indicating an increase in productivity PER EMPLOYEE. That increase in productivity is largely a statistical artifact. If you reduce half of your work force by purchasing sophisticated machinery to replace them, and maintain the same output of widgets, your productivity in "widgets per employee" has doubled.
Very well said. Even the number of application developers has been greatly reduced with a shift to the use of "business intelligence" products such as Tableau or Jaspersoft that allow users to do their own reports and analysis.
On the other hand, I do expect there to be a great shortage of workers in many kinds of jobs in about 10 years when the bulk of the boomers start to retire. We have 2,000 employees and the average age is 49.
The next generation is a significant decrease in numbers, so it will help balance off the decrease in workers needed due to technology. Not enough though, and the outsourcing could get even worse by then. Hopefully the Chinese and other low wage workers will continue to become more demanding and drive up their labor costs, so that combined with fuel costs, some manufacturing returns here.
There's always the skilled trades. Kind of hard to outsource an electrician, for example. But, that's a lot of hard work and the pay has gone to hell.
If you are a self-employed plumber or electrician, you can do quite well. There's a guy who is friends with my parents who has a nice car, two-story brick home, and goes on vacations all the time with his wife. He has a plumbing business.
I disagree with the doom and gloom. A lot of disciplines are standardizing across companies and industries, thus making it much easier for workers to go between them. Probably the best thing one can do is get certifications like PMP, LSS black belt or ITIL expert that work in a lot of envioronments.
A lot of people act like it's next to impossible to make a decent living nowadays and that no career field is worth pursuing. That's a load of crap.
Quote:
In the office, rows of desks of accountants were replaced by a different technology - the computer. In motion picture exhibition, the hand accounting of cashiers, managers, and corporate accountants has been replaced by a computerized ticket that is automatically tallied and properly reported without further intervention. Accounting departments of dozens of people are replaced by one or two people "supervising" the computer reports and checking for errors. In the accounting departments of all industries, tens of thousands of jobs have been lost.
I'm an accountant. I just got an 8% raise about a month ago and the company I work for has hired some additional accountants recently. BTW, our jobs haven't been replaced by a computer. We just use computers now to make our jobs easier. The computer can't audit by itself as there are many, many issues that we encounter on a daily basis that require human judgment. The number of brains needed to do the work has not gotten smaller.
Last edited by statisticsnerd; 02-23-2013 at 06:42 PM..
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