Where the Jobs Will BeDespite all the headlines about layoffs and lost jobs, the reality is that there is no shortage of jobs in America. In fact, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts there will be 10 million more jobs than workers by the end of this decade.
Why is this so hard for many people to understand? On the surface, it appears that American workers are being laid off from their old jobs. Eight million workers are unemployed. And companies are moving jobs overseas. If we only look at this part of the picture, it does seem like a growing crisis for the economy.
But the rest of the picture is much more positive. Jobs are being eliminated, and others are being off-shored. But even more new jobs are being created throughout the U.S. economy.
In fact, throughout history, there have been constant changes in the work that Americans perform. Consider that the predominant industries and occupations of the present ? and the future ? are different from those of 100 years, 60 years, or even 10 years ago:
? At the turn of the century, 40 percent of all U.S. workers were employed in agriculture. Today, fewer than 2 percent work in that industry. ? At their height during World War II, manufacturing industries employed nearly four of every 10 workers in this country. By 2002, the figure had fallen to one of every nine workers. ? In 1994, 1.4 million Americans were computer specialists. By the end of the decade, that number had more than doubled, rising to more than 2.9 million workers. ? Over the 2002-12 decade, the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that employment in healthcare occupations will grow by 2.9 million, an increase of about 29 percent.
Global competition is changing the nature of what Americans do. And, as always, opportunities are everywhere and people have to position themselves to seize them.
The pace of change may not always be so dramatic. But the American workplace is extremely dynamic due to the large and responsive American economy, the increasingly mobile workforce, the speed of technological innovation, and the changing demands for skills by employers. In this section, well reveal which jobs will be hot and which will not in the coming decade.
In February of 2004, the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics released the 2004-2005 edition of the Occupational Outlook Handbook reporting and forecasting the labor trends for the decade 2002 to 2012.2
By 2012, the total number of U.S. jobs is projected to reach 165 million, up from a current base of 144 million. Between 2002 and 2012, the economy is expected to add 21.3 million new jobs.
Sixteen of the 20 fastest-growing occupations will be related to health care or computers, including medical assistants and network and data communications analysts. Registered nurses and teachers are expected to gain the most new jobs ? more than 600,000 each.
The Bureau predicts that jobs in all 10 of the major occupational groups will grow in the coming decade. These 10 groups are:
1. Management, business, and financial occupations, including executives.2. Professionals, including computer software engineers.3. Service occupations, including child care workers.4. Sales and related positions, such as insurance sales agents.5. Office and administrative support occupations, such as secretaries.6. Farming, fishing, and forestry occupations, such as apple pickers.7. Construction and extraction occupations, such as mining machine operators.8. Installation, maintenance, and repair occupations, such as motorcycle mechanics.9. Production occupations, such as power plant operators.10. Transportation and material moving occupations, such as truck drivers.
It is especially worth noting that the Bureau predicts rapid growth at both the top and the bottom of the wage scale. The two groups expected to grow the fastest are professionals and service workers, which are at opposite ends of the education and income ranges. That is, professionals such as lawyers require years of higher education and earn hundreds of dollars per hour, while service workers, like cooks, often stop their education after high school and earn little more than minimum wage.
What these two broad occupational groups have in common, however, is that they will both be in high demand over the next several years. Jobs in the professions will grow by 23 percent, while the demand for service workers will rise by 20 percent.
Together, they will add the most new jobs to the economy, accounting for more than half of total job growth from now until 2012. Professional and related occupations will add 6.5 million jobs, while service occupations will add 5.3 million jobs.
Let’s focus on the fourth largest grouping of all current jobs ? management, business and financial occupations ? which will be of particular interest to our audience. These positions accounted for 11.5 million jobs, or 8 percent of the total workforce of 144 million in 2002.
By 2012, another 2.4 million positions will be added. Even with a growth rate of one half a percentage point greater than the total job growth rate, this group’s ranking and percentage distribution of the total will remain constant.
It is important to understand the difference between employment change and total job openings. Total job openings in the decade will be greater, because they include not only new positions but also replacements.
In other words, people often fail to account for the jobs that become open when workers drop out of the labor market. This constantly happens as employees retire, quit their jobs to care for their children full-time, or choose to go back to school to study for a different career.
Replacement needs are projected to account for 60 percent of the approximately 56 million job openings between 2002 and 2012. Thus, even occupations projected to experience little or no growth, or to decline in employment, still may offer many job openings.
There will be more than 5.4 million job openings in the management, business and financial occupational group over the period 2002 to 2012. This figure reflects both the increase in jobs and the need to replace 3 million people who will leave the occupation due to retirement and other reasons.
The Bureau’s statistics can be “sliced and diced” in many different ways. Using the job titles of our audience as a guide, we divided the management, business and financial occupations into six subgroups:
Top executives accounted for roughly 2 percent of the entire workforce in 2002. Nearly half a million top executive positions will be created over the next decade, increasing the ranks of this elite group by 17.6 percent, to 3.1 million positions by 2012.
The business operations specialists category includes buyers and purchasing agents, human resources specialists, and management analysts. This subgroup is expected to add three-quarters of a million positions in the decade, an increase of 23 percent, making it the largest and secondfastest-growing subgroup.
Financial specialists include accountants, budget analysts, financial analysts and advisors, and tax professionals. Nearly half a million financial specialist positions will be created in the decade, increasing the ranks of this subgroup by 19 percent, to 2.7 million.
In 2002, there were 1.8 million operations specialty managers. A third of a million new positions will be created over the coming decade ? although there will be twice as many job openings for specialty managers, since an equal number will need to be replaced.
Advertising, marketing and sales managers will remain the smallest subgroup, but will grow faster than the others. Nearly 185,000 new positions will be created, swelling the number of these managers by 17 percent, to 885,000 in 2012. However, there will be a larger number of job openings, since 128,000 of these managers will also need to be replaced.
The last subgroup, other managerial occupations, is a “catch-all” category. It includes nearly 5 million managers in agriculture, construction, education, food service, medicine and health services, and property and real estate. This subgroup constitutes roughly one-third of the management, business, and financial occupational group. While it is expected to grow by only 200,000 positions, the smallest growth rate of all six subgroups, it will have almost the same number of job openings, 1.5 million, as the second-fastest-growing subgroup, business operations specialists. This reflects the greater turnover rate of managers in the lodging, food services, and gaming industries.
Management, business and financial positions represent eight of the top 20 large-growth, high-paying occupations that usually require a bachelor’s or graduate degree. Almost all these occupations fall in the top earnings quartile.
In descending order, according to the number of new jobs that will be added, these occupations are:
? General and operations managers? Accountants and auditors? Management analysts? Financial managers? Sales managers? Computer and information systems managers? Chief executives? Medical and health service managers
Unsurprisingly, IT-related careers represent another six of the top 20 large-growth, high-paying occupations that usually require a bachelor’s or graduate degree. These IT-related occupations include:
? Computer systems analysts? Applications software engineers? Systems software engineers? Data communications analysts? Network and computer systems administrators? Computer programmers
Now let’s turn to those occupations with the largest numerical job declines. We will focus on the segments with the largest-declining number of jobs rather than fastest-declining occupations, because many with the fastest rates of decline are small, representing a small employment decline.
Thirteen of the occupations with the largest declines are in office and administrative support, eleven are in production, and three are in sales. Others include farmers and ranchers, fishermen and related fishing workers, and announcers.
Changes in technology will reduce the demand for many of these occupations.
For example, according to analysts, advances in technologies such as computing, optical scanning, and voice recognition will reduce demand for the following occupations:
? Word processors and typists? Stock clerks and order fillers? Secretaries, except legal, medical, and executive? Telephone operators? Postal service mail sorters, processors, and processing machine operators ? Loan interviewers and clerks? Data entry keyers? Order clerks? Other office and administrative support occupations
Other advances in technology ? such as faster machines and more automated processes ? as well as a shift of assembly and other production activities to other countries will lower employment for people in other fields, including:
? Electrical and electronic equipment assemblers? Team assemblers? Chemical plant and systems operators? Mixing and blending machine operators.
Jobs in every industry are threatened by new technologies that will displace manual labor. Prepress technicians and workers will be affected as electronic publishing and printing-ondemand limit the production of printed material.
Employment in the textile and apparel industries will decline, due to improved production technology, as well as greater imports as import quotas are lifted. This will cause employment declines in jobs such as sewing machine operators, hand sewers, and certain textile machine operators.
And, continuing a trend that started a century ago, the number of farmers and ranchers will decline as farm technology improves and market pressures cause farms to consolidate.
Meanwhile, as more travelers rely on the Internet to book airline flights and hotel rooms, the employment of travel agents is expected to decline. Jobs for telemarketers will decrease as more people opt out of receiving calls, as blocking technology improves, and as telemarketing operations are off-shored.
The number of door-to-door sales workers, news and street vendors, and related workers will decline due to competition from large stores and on-line outlets. Radio and television station consolidation, and improved editing and other off-the-air technologies are expected to lower employment of announcers. Fishermen and related workers are projected to decline as the stock of fish decreases and the technology for finding fish improves.
Thirteen of the 30 occupations with the largest numerical declines are in the second earnings quartile, sixteen are in the third earnings quartile, and five are in the bottom earnings quartile. Based upon the preceding discussion, we predict the following developments:
First, we expect a growth need for highly trained management professionals over the coming decade. Until the mid-1990s, there were always more people than jobs. Finding someone with a specific talent might have been difficult, but there was still an abundance of people in the workforce. The labor shortage of the late 1990s gave corporate leaders a taste of what is coming later in this decade. Many were overwhelmed by even those circumstances. The near future will be even more challenging.
Second, we anticipate rising criticism about increasing job creation at “the tails” of the labor force distribution, i.e. at either end of the earnings and education scales. We expect the dispersion of household income tied to wages and salaries to increase in the U.S. over the 2002-12 period. This will add fuel to the debate over “the disappearing middle class.”
Third, as the number of jobs shrinks in some occupations and grows in others, it will be more crucial than ever for workers to be retrained to do new jobs. Obviously, not many fishermen will go to business school, race up the corporate ladder, and become CEOs. But other workers can make a smooth transition from one occupation to another. For example, farmers can leverage their experience and become tractor salesmen, garden-supply managers, or landscapers.
Fourth, even within the same profession, workers will change jobs at an unprecedented rate. High demand for a limited labor pool will give people with the right skills a powerful incentive to jump to companies that offer more money or other rewards. This is already happening. For example, in 2001, a survey of 32-year-old workers revealed that their average number of jobs held was 8.6.
Fifth, we will see the role of human resources manager elevated to the status of other top executives to reflect the importance of recruiting, developing, and keeping the best people. In the book Impending Crisis: Too Many Jobs, Too Few People,3 Roger Herman, Thomas Olivo, and Joyce Gioia contend that this function should occupy a comparable position to the chief marketing officer, the chief financial officer, and other key members of the management team. If your senior HR professional isn’t sitting at your company’s strategic table, you will be at a serious disadvantage in the competition for a highly competent, stable workforce.
Sixth, companies will increasingly turn to temporary and contract workers, outsourcing, and off-shoring to get more done with fewer employees. We will discuss these options as individual trends later in this program.
Seventh, as the labor statistics reveal, the next two decades will be a “sellers’ market” for those with the necessary skills. But how will companies close the “skills gap” that threatens their productivity? We will discuss that trend in the next part of this program.
References List :
1. For information about employment projections, visit the Bureau of Labor Statistics website at:www.bls.gov/opub/ooq/2003/winter/art01.htm2. To access the 2004-2005 edition of the "Occupational Outlook Handbook," visit the Bureau of Labor Statistics website at: www.bls.gov/oco/oco2003.htm3. Impending Crisis: Too Many Jobs, Too Few People by Roger Herman, Thomas Olivo, and Joyce Gioia is published by The Herman Group. ⓒ Copyright 2003 by Roger E. Herman, Thomas G. Olivo, and Joyce L. Gioia. All rights reserved. The audiotape or CD summary of Impending Crisis is available from Audio-Tech Business Book Summaries. Ask for catalog #6031.
