 David DeLong | |  |
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| DELONG REPORT-ARTICLES ON SKILLS GAP SOLUTIONS | |
| |  | | | The Class of 2017 | Economic Policy Institute | What this report finds: After years of elevated unemployment and depressed wages, young graduates’ economic prospects have finally begun to brighten. Members of the Class of 2017 have better job prospects than their peers who graduated in the aftermath of the Great Recession. Unemployment rates for young high school and young college graduates have returned to within one percentage point of their pre-recession levels and wages are continuing to slowly recover. While young high school graduates on average are still paid less than they were in 2007 (adjusted for inflation), the average wages of young college graduates have finally surpassed the 2007 level.
Yet the economy of 2007 is a low bar for economic opportunity. Relative to the full employment economy of the late 1990s and 2000, the shares of young graduates who are unemployed and underemployed, and generally “idled” by the economy (neither working nor in school), are still quite high. And economic growth has not yet reached all corners of the labor market. Unemployment rates for young black and Hispanic graduates entering the workforce are still substantially higher than that of their white peers. Young female graduates are paid less than their male peers directly out of school, when they have fairly comparable labor market experience. We need the economy to continue toward full employment in order to ensure healthy job prospects and decent wages for all young graduates. [More] | DAVID
This report has more detail than you want to read about the state of the job market for class of 2017 graduates -- both from college and high school. But here are some key takeaways:
--For young college graduates, limited job opportunities, stagnating wages, and the rising cost of higher education make college an increasingly difficult investment.
--There is a significant gap in employment between minority and white recent college grads.
--The number of recent college grads in jobs that don't require a college degree has remained higher than before the recession, but the quality of those jobs has continued to decline.
--The bottom line for college today is you can major in anything, but you better minor in job search from the beginning, if you want your college investment to pay off. |
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| |  | | | IBM, a Pioneer of Remote Work, Calls Workers Back to the Office - WSJ | International Business Machines Corp. IBM -0.10% is giving thousands of its remote workers in the U.S. a choice this week: Abandon your home workspaces and relocate to a regional office—or leave the company.
The 105-year-old technology giant is quietly dismantling its popular decades-old remote work program to bring employees back into offices, a move it says will improve collaboration and accelerate the pace of work.
The changes comes as IBM copes with 20 consecutive quarters of falling revenue and rising shareholder ire over Chief Executive Ginni Rometty’s pay package.
The company won’t say how many of its 380,000 employees are affected by the policy change, which so far has been rolled out to its Watson division, software development, digital marketing, and design—divisions that employ tens of thousands of workers. [More] | DAVID
Is IBM's action to relocate remote workers to centralized offices a new trend or an anomaly? It is worth noting the a few companies are deciding it is more important to have workers side by side than giving them the flexibility of telecommuting. But other CEOs I have been interviewing say they are no longer concerned where people live. A lot of firms are becoming much more open to employees who work remotely, particularly for hard-to-fill jobs. It will be interesting to see how this trend plays out, particularly in jobs where there are critical skill shortages. Which way is your organization heading? |
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| |  | | | Student Debt’s Grip on the Economy - The New York Times | After decades of rising college costs and tepid income growth, student debt has become a drag on graduates’ hopes and a threat to economic growth.
The cost of a four-year college education, adjusted for inflation, is two and half times as much as it was in the 1978-79 school year, while median family income has increased only 20 percent.
A new report by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York documents the hardship that has resulted from the soaring level of student debt taken on to cover those costs. About one in 10 student borrowers is behind on repayments, the highest delinquency level of any type of borrowing in the Fed’s survey, including home mortgages, auto loans and credit cards.
Loan payments are keeping young people from getting on with life, delaying marriage and homeownership, other data show. Research also suggests that student debt is crowding out other investment and spending that would otherwise occur. So the fallout from these burdens, afflicting those who are supposedly best prepared to face and shape the future, is not only a personal-financial issue but also a social and economic one. [More] | DAVID
I don't agree with the conclusions of this editorial that support more collective bargaining for white collar workers. That's not going to happen on a large scale. But this editorial is full of up to date statistics on the economic impacts of student debt. |
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| |  | | | Why Super-Efficient School Bus Routes Could Wreck the US Economy | Connecting the Dots Investment Newsletter | Mauldin Economics | Everyone is worried about robots. Elon Musk fears they will kill us all if we give them both deadly weapons and autonomy.
He certainly has a point, but the non-lethal scenarios are no picnic either. Robots are already taking over human jobs at a rapid pace. Any work involving predictable, repetitive activities is vulnerable.
Worse, artificial intelligence (AI) systems threaten even “knowledge worker” jobs now.
This is a troubling combination.
Robots can out-move us.
AI can out-think us.
What happens when those two get together?
Answer: the problem grows exponentially. To see how, consider the humble school bus. [More] | DAVID
Interesting article on the rapid progress being made toward driverless trucks. |
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| |  | | | America’s male employment crisis is both urban and rural | Brookings Institution | In the wake of the 2016 presidential election, many analysts have interpreted Donald Trump’s victory as the product of economic anxiety among the white working class—particularly in the smaller towns and rural areas that provided his electoral margin in closely contested states like North Carolina, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
This piece does not purport to explain why people voted the way they did, or what role economic factors played in their decisions. Rather, it acknowledges that the state of the economy in small-town and rural America highlighted throughout the campaign and after the election surely deserves attention. Economists such as David Autor have chronicled how increasing Chinese imports over the past two decades produced long-term economic dislocation in many of these communities. Anne Case and Angus Deaton uncovered alarming evidence that mortality rates have risen among white Americans with lower levels of education, paralleling a rapid increase in drug overdoses largely concentrated in non-urban areas.
Central to these discussions is the availability of work in such communities, particularly for men who have borne the brunt of manufacturing job losses. Research from President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers highlighted the trends and factors underlying the decline in labor force participation among prime-aged men (ages 25–54). Earlier this year, I examined the metropolitan geography of non-working, prime-aged men, finding that smaller industrial centers in Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio exhibited low rates of male employment, as did mining centers in West Virginia and Louisiana, and agricultural centers in Arkansas, Texas, and inland California. [More] | DAVID
When employers complain about the lack of talent available they often fail to consider the troubling macro trend that shows a decline in employment among prime working age men. This problem is particularly acute in rural areas, but also in urban centers. We have to find ways to bring these people into the workforce. |
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| |  | | | Closing the Healthcare Industry’s Skills Gaps | Healthcare Informatics Magazine | Health IT | Information Technology | The healthcare industry is hiring. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, healthcare jobs are projected to grow by 19 percent from 2014-2024. But, as in many other dynamic industries, healthcare is changing rapidly, driven by the increased use of technology and the aging population. Finding talent with the right skills to keep pace with these shifts is an ongoing challenge.
Unfilled jobs cost U.S. businesses $160 billion annually, according to a report produced by the UK-based research firm Centre for Economics and Business Research on behalf of employment search engine Indeed. Another survey by the staffing firm ManpowerGroup found that nearly one-third of employers in the U.S. expressed difficulty filling open positions due to talent shortages.
Identifying the Skills Gaps
Healthcare hiring managers are having a particularly challenging time filling positions that require information technology skills. A Skills Index analysis by Strayer@Work, which tracks supply and demand of particular skills across seven major industries using select data from LinkedIn, revealed that three of the top skills deficits in healthcare were enterprise software (74 percent gap), programming (65 percent gap) and database administration (45 percent gap). The gap represents how adequately the supply of a skill in the labor pool meets employers’ demands for that skill.
In addition to needing more people with technology skills, the healthcare industry also faces a growing need for leaders and strategists. Some of the largest gaps were for strategy (55 percent gap), program management (39 percent gap) and project management (39 percent gap) skills. People with clinical trials skills are also in relatively high demand and short supply (22 percent gap). [More] | DAVID
This article reports on skill shortages in a specific sector -- healthcare. While a lot of the skills in short supply are technical, there is also reportedly a shortage of leadership and strategy skills. C-level hospital execs have been telling me for years they have a very hard time finding emerging leaders who have a real systemic view of their organization. Too many executives are overly focused on their own service lines. |
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