JOBS / Life / Career Changes / Income Expectations / TeleEverything / Retirement … and about those damned robots
by Bill Golden
CEO, USAJobZoo.com
aka IntelligenceCareers.com
Think different. Start yesterday. That is when the future arrived.
What made for success in the past is not a guarantee for the future … your market value no longer ‘always increases’ … expect some skills to remain popular but value to drop … some to increase … expect flat salaries over the next decade … wherever you go there you are: always have a Plan B as you will probably change your core ‘what I do for a living’ at least 5-8 times before you finally collect a retirement check … from your 401K or IRA which you funded throughout your life … right?
How often will you change jobs in life? Survey sez …
A Department of Labor report from summer of 2012 found that the average American age 18-46 would change employers an average of 11.3 times … half of those changes would be between the ages 18-24.
++++ This information is not based on our current generation but on the experiences of Boomers born between 1957-1964.
++++ I realize that the numbers are probably quite different for today’s age group of 18-24 … many of whom are still trying to find that first job.
For those ages 24 and under: employment in your age group has always been challenging. In the old days (like 20 years ago) we still had a lot of manual-based labor jobs that you could always slide into while figuring out what life meant and where it was taking you. Those same opportunities are far fewer today … but so is the requirement for education. Survey says that for those currently under the age of 30: college degrees matter, even when applying for jobs that do not pay well.
As for salary and income expectation, things have changed immensely since even the mid-2000s. For experienced professionals it was not uncommon for an employer to ask you for a salary history for either your last 2-3 jobs or for the last 10 years. The idea behind was that real talent is always growing in compensation — resumes can say anything but the proof is in the money that you get as to how good you are.
In a recent Atlantic Magazine article entitled Robots Won’t Steal Your Job Next Decade (They’ll Just Steal Your Raise), the magazine talks about income remaining flat through about 2017 and then a miracle happens where income just takes off … recovering to 2005 levels by 2020 … or almost recovering to 2005 levels … if the miracle happens — which Atlantic calls the Little Orphan Annie theory of recoveries — catchup growth is always just a year away, until it’s another year away.
Future Outlook
We do more with less. MUCH LESS … or perhaps more grammatically correct: many fewer … people … we can do more with many fewer people … and at higher profit margins, too.
The headline of the Atlantic Magazine article mentions ‘Robots’ but what we are really talking about is the ability of information technologies when combined with physical and organizational processes.
Automation of processes, collaboration, logistics integration and manufacturing are the challenges that our workforce faces today and in the immediate future; these are the folks whose primary role in our economic society is to trade services for a paycheck … and since they no longer live on a farm then they need that paycheck to buy food and they need that paycheck to do all the things which they can no longer do as when our culture was primary rural and small town … as it was just a generation or so ago.
We need a bigger conversation about JOBS JOBS JOBS … because the future has arrived.
Think different. Start yesterday. That is when the future arrived.
Best regards,
Bill Golden
WGolden@USAJobZoo.com
