 David DeLong | |  |
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| |  | | | The U.S. Occupations at Greatest Risk of a Labor Shortage - Real Time Economics - WSJ | The U.S. is at risk of running out of occupational therapists, railroad engineers, mathematicians, machinists and other workers, potentially leaving the economy in a long-term slump.
“In the next 10 to 15 years, we expect U.S. employers to demand more labor than will be available, which will, in turn, constrain overall economic growth,” the Conference Board said in a report to be released Tuesday.
It may seem premature to talk about a labor shortage while the Great Recession and its 10% unemployment rate are a recent, painful memory. Meanwhile, the share of Americans in the labor force is historically low and wages are barely showing signs of picking up.
But the corporate-research organization believes the U.S. is fast approaching full employment and sees few signs the population of working-age Americans will grow enough to fill the ranks left by retirees and rising demand from employers.
The Conference Board examined and ranked 457 occupations in its analysis. The full set and subindices are available at the group’s website. [More] | DAVID
This is a great overview of the evolving labor shortage in particular fields. It also discusses the many conflicting factors that are shaping and confusing the evolving picture of the labor supply in highly-skilled areas. The case can increasingly be made that shortages in specific fields, such as airline pilots, machinists, and nurses are having significant economic impacts in certain parts of the country. |
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| |  | | | Tufts Medical Center recruits college grads as nurses’ aides - The Boston Globe | What’s a philosophy-biology double major doing changing bed pans?
For Breeze Victor, a 23-year-old graduate of Bucknell University, working as a nursing assistant at Tufts Medical Center — and all of the unglamorous duties that come with it — is helping him figure out what he wants to do with his life. It’s not research or teaching, as he thought when he started college; it’s becoming a nurse anesthetist.
Tufts recently launched a program aimed at college graduates like Victor to bolster its staff of approximately 250 nursing aides, called clinical care technicians — a job that involves taking vital signs and moving patients and typically requires a certificate that can be earned in four to eight weeks.
Filling these jobs with college graduates gives young people exposure to the health care field and helps the hospital fill a chronic shortage of nursing assistants with high-quality workers, said Terry Hudson-Jinks, chief nursing officer at Tufts. The program has been so successful that Tufts now only hires aides with college degrees. [More] | DAVID
Are you a health care organization looking to address a critical skills shortage? This article reports on a creative program at Tufts Medical Center to fill the shortage of nursing assistants. But it raises as many questions as it answers. Why do recent college grads need to take these low-level jobs to launch their careers? Are colleges ignoring the fact that their students don't have enough job experience when they graduate? What does this new path to a career say about how the work world has changed? What is the impact of this program on less educated folks who might have filled these jobs in the past? What does this program say about the upskilling of work in general? I am not critical of the program. I think it is very creative, and seems like a win for the hospital and the new grads. But it does raise questions about the changing world of work. |
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| |  | | | Career Advice No One Tells You — Life Learning — Medium | Most people have “okay” jobs.
We go to work, do what we have to do from 9 to 5, come back home, maybe hang out with friends, and do it all over again the next day.
There’s nothing wrong with this.
But some people perform at a totally different level.
They’re the people who land executive level positions by their early 30s while everyone else is still trying to “work their way up.”
They’re the people who jump out of bed every morning, excited about the day ahead while everyone else drags themselves out of bed every Monday.
They’re the people who impact thousands of people through their work, while everyone else keeps themselves busy with pointless tasks at work.
Here’s what they understand, that most people don’t. [More] | DAVID
This post is full of very wise career advice that is not your standard stuff. I definitely would definitely recommend it for Millennials early in their career. For example, if the choice is between a higher salary or a better mentor, ALWAYS take the mentor. It will pay off much better in the long run. |
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| |  | | | Calculate Your Economic Risk - The New York Times | TWO economic issues loom especially large in the United States today: widespread economic insecurity and soaring levels of income inequality. These are not just issues of interest to academics and policy makers; they are a prime concern of ordinary citizens. “How much economic risk do I face in the future?” you may wonder. “How does my risk differ from that of others?”
Plenty of professors, including ourselves, analyze economic risk and publish the results in academic journals and other scholarly outlets. But Americans in general might also benefit from a tool that could help them personalize the vast amount of data that we have analyzed on this issue. So we constructed an economic risk calculator, now available at riskcalculator.org, that allows you to assess your chances of experiencing poverty in the next five, 10 or 15 years.
The idea behind our approach is similar to the idea behind a doctor’s ability to predict your risk of heart disease. Using several pieces of information (blood pressure, cholesterol, etc.), your doctor can make a reasonable estimate of your chances of having a heart attack in the next 10 years. These numbers are based on statistical patterns derived from a very large sample of families that make up the Framingham Heart Study, the longitudinal study of cardiovascular health that began in 1948.
Our predictions of economic risk work in a similar way. Using hundreds of thousands of case records taken from a longitudinal study of Americans that began in 1968, we estimate the likelihood — based on factors like race, education, marital status and age — of an individual’s falling below the official poverty line during the next five, 10 or 15 years. (The poverty line for a family of four in 2015 was approximately $24,000.)
We have discovered that, for many Americans, the future risk of poverty is far from trivial. Take someone who might be thought of as having a relatively low probability of poverty: an American who is in his or her later 30s, white, not married, with an education beyond high school. It turns out that the 15-year risk of poverty for such a person is actually 32 percent. In other words, one-third of such individuals will experience at least one year below the poverty line in the not-so-distant future. [More] | DAVID
What is your risk of experiencing poverty? It's almost nil if you are 45-49, white, married with more than a high school education. But it is 75% if you are 25-29, non-white, unmarried with only a high school education. This is one reason we must train all young people in the realities of the changing labor market and what it takes to get and keep a "good" job. |
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| |  | | | The 24/7 Work Culture’s Toll on Families and Gender Equality - The New York Times | The biggest obstacle to women in joining the highest ranks of the business world is a lack of family-friendly policies. That, at least, has been the conventional wisdom in recent years, and it has been embraced by progressive companies that offer flexible schedules or allow people to work from home.
But some researchers are now arguing that the real problem is not the lack of family-friendly policies for mothers, but the surge in hours worked by both women and men. And companies are not likely to want to adopt the obvious solution.
The pressure of a round-the-clock work culture — in which people are expected to answer emails at 11 p.m. and take cellphone calls on Sunday morning — is particularly acute in highly skilled, highly paid professional services jobs like law, finance, consulting and accounting.
Offering family-friendly policies is too narrow a solution to the problem, recent research argues, and can have unintended consequences. When women cut back at work to cope with long hours, they end up stunting their careers. And men aren’t necessarily happy to be expected to work extreme hours, either. [More] | DAVID
The findings of this research make a lot of sense. I continue to wonder how many unsustainable roles we've created in organizations today, jobs that people just can't continue doing for years without serious impacts on physical and mental health, not to mention family life. |
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| |  | | | A lesson in rebuilding - The Boston Globe | WATERVILLE, Maine — Vacancies outnumber tenants on Main Street. Graffiti mars the brick and stone on once-proud Victorian buildings. And much of the traffic, which used to teem with shoppers, barrels through downtown on its way to someplace else.
Mayor Nick Isgro does not pinpoint a specific date when Waterville hit bottom. Instead, he said, this blue-collar city has been near there for 20 years, a casualty of the job drain that has ravaged mill towns throughout New England.
But something is stirring on the banks of the Kennebec River, where a hard-charging newcomer has joined Isgro and other leaders to invigorate a mid-Maine community where the future did not look different from the sputtering present.
That newcomer is David Greene, the president of Colby College, who is reconnecting the liberal-arts institution with its host city in practical and intangible ways that are designed to benefit both.
Long viewed by many residents as detached and aloof — the 203-year-old college sits atop a hill two miles from downtown — Colby is buying distressed properties on Main Street, hoping to build a dormitory there, and talking about creating a fund to provide loans and grants to small businesses.
“Once we get things moving, a lot of other dominoes will fall,” predicted Greene, who took office in 2014. [More] | DAVID
This is an interesting story of how one college, Colby, located in a rural setting is trying to invest in rebuilding the economy of its home town. Colby's president recognizes that this investment is good for the college in many ways. In working with liberal arts college presidents, I am finding that the solution to their challenges recruiting students and preparing them for viable careers is very context dependent. Each school is going to need to react to the changing marketplace differently. |
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| |  | | | Robots will take your job - The Boston Globe | On Dec. 2, 1942, a team of scientists led by Enrico Fermi came back from lunch and watched as humanity created the first self-sustaining nuclear reaction inside a pile of bricks and wood underneath a football field at the University of Chicago. Known to history as Chicago Pile-1, it was celebrated in silence with a single bottle of Chianti, for those who were there understood exactly what it meant for humankind, without any need for words.
>Now, something new has occurred that, again, quietly changed the world forever. Like a whispered word in a foreign language, you may have heard it but couldn’t fully understand.
The language is something called deep learning. And the whispered word was a computer’s use of it to defeat one of the world’s top players in a game called Go. Go is a board game so complex that it can be likened to playing 10 chess matches simultaneously on the same table.
This may sound like a small accomplishment, another feather in the cap of machines as they continue to prove themselves superior in parlor games that humans invented to fill their idle hours. But this feat is about far more than bragging rights. This was considered a “holy grail” level of achievement, and it’s a clear signal that advances in technology are now so exponential that milestones we once thought far away will start arriving rapidly.
What’s more, humans are entirely unprepared. These exponential advances, most notably in forms of artificial intelligence, will prove daunting for as long as we continue to insist upon employment as our primary source of income. The White House, in a stunning report to Congress this week, put the probability at 83 percent that a worker making less than $20 an hour in 2010 will eventually lose his job to a machine. Even workers making as much as $40 an hour face odds of 31 percent. [More] | DAVID
This article shows why the job market and potential careers are going to change so dramatically in the next decade. Even if you think the author's claims of artificial intelligence creating massive unemployment are overblown, the impact is still going to be very big. This is one reason why I am so committed to helping young people launch their careers effectively. And the rise of AI is another reason aging workers need to be concerned about their continued employability. |
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| |  | | | Work in the Future Will Fall into These 4 Categories | Organizations are more boundary-less, agile, global, and transparent — and will be even more so in the future. Work and workers (yes, humans) will always be essential to organizations, but organizations themselves will be more diverse, and work will be organized, structured, and done in new ways, increasingly through arrangements outside of regular full-time employment. How can leaders navigate this new digital work ecosystem? How should your organization plan for the changes ahead?
Important clues are emerging from a unique consortium of human resource executives and other leaders. They have gathered through CHREATE (the Global Consortium to Reimagine HR, Employment Alternatives, Talent, and the Enterprise) to map how organizations must evolve to meet future challenges, to identify pivotal initiatives to accelerate that evolution, and to design the actions needed to make the future a reality.
To help frame where the world of work is going, CHREATE leaders identified five fundamental forces driving change: [More] | DAVID
The author of this post is leading thinker on trends in workforce development. I pay special attention to his ideas about where work and skill development are headed. |
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| |  | | | Baby boomer retirements may slow Mass. economic growth - The Boston Globe | The biggest hurdle to the state’s economic growth isn’t a slowing Chinese economy, collapsing oil prices, or gyrating financial markets. It’s your graying co-worker.
The long-predicted wave of baby boomer retirements — delayed by the recession of 2007-2009 — is beginning to hit companies in Massachusetts and across the nation, leaving employers scrambling to find replacements for their departing sixtysomething workers.
The oldest of the generation that has dominated the workplace for decades turns 70 this year, and about a quarter of the nation’s 79 million boomers have passed the traditional retirement age of 65.
Massachusetts, which has an older workforce than the nation, is already feeling the effects as industries from health care to manufacturing face worsening labor shortages. The state’s prime working-age population (24 to 55) is projected to shrink by more than 35,000 — about 1 percent to the total labor force — over the next three years and contract further throughout the next decade, according to the US Census.
By 2018, employment growth in Massachusetts is expected to plunge by more than half — not because there aren’t jobs, but because there won’t be enough workers to fill them, according to the most recent forecast by the New England Economic Partnership, a nonprofit group of business and academic economists. [More] | DAVID
This article provides latest details of how the aging workforce is impacting one state's economic growth. This pattern is going to repeat around the country. An interesting point in this article is how the demographics in the Boston area are considerably different (much younger) than in the rest of the state. |
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| |  | | | Why Students With Smallest Debts Have the Larger Problem - The New York Times | Politicians who complain about college costs frequently cite two numbers: one trillion and seven million. Student borrowers owe more than $1 trillion, and seven million borrowers are in default, according to the latest Department of Education data.
It’s natural for people listening to the politicians to connect the two facts with a causal arrow: More debt leads to more default. But the reality is surprising: Borrowers who owe the most are least likely to default.
The reason for this strange pattern? The biggest borrowers tend to become the highest earners.
In particular, borrowing is highest for those who go to graduate school. Forty percent of new loans go to graduate students. Among those earning law and medical degrees in 2012, median debt (undergraduate and graduate school) is $141,000 for lawyers and $162,000 for doctors.
Those holding graduate degrees tend to handle higher debt because they earn more. Over the past 50 years, workers with graduate degrees have enjoyed the largest gains of any education group, with their inflation-adjusted earnings nearly doubling since 1964. Some struggle, of course: The Department of Education estimates that 7 percent of graduate borrowers default. But this default rate is far lower than the 22 percent rate for those who borrow only for their undergraduate studies. [More] | DAVID
This is a useful article that shows out counter-intuitive thinking about student debt. The real problem is with those students who start college, borrow some money and then drop out. Not the big borrowing medical school or business school students who are likely to take on big debt, but have a big payoff later on. What the article doesn't address is those fields where grad students have to take on considerable debt -- like veterinary school or social work -- where salaries continue to shrink. Bottom line is student debt is a complex problem -- not all bad. But the most important thing is that potential grad students do their homework in detail about the real salaries being earned in their fields before investing in those advanced degrees. |
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| |  | | | Interim school chiefs in high demand - The Boston Globe | Communities across the state are struggling to find administrators to lead their public school systems, spurring some to hire retired superintendents — who can collect windfalls worth tens of thousands of dollars.
About one-fifth of the state’s 275 superintendents leave or retire each year, and there is a shrinking pool of qualified applicants to replace them. This year alone, eight formerly retired superintendents are leading school districts.
“We’ve got serious problems attracting highly qualified people who want to be a superintendent,” said Tom Scott, executive director of the Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents. [More] | DAVID
If ever there was an example of a growing example of leadership skills shortages, this job is it. Who the hell wants to be a superintendent of schools?? It is a politically charged job that requires all kinds of relatively sophisticated skills. This problem is only going to get worse for troubled school districts. |
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| | | | | Synthesis: Generations United - HBR-JanFeb-2016.pdf | n 1971, HBR asked 3,000 readers what they thought of the following
scenario: A capable young manager in a financial services company returns from a month’s vacation. Formerly clean cut and conservatively dressed, he’s now sporting a beard and long
sideburns. He also begins appearing at work in bright-colored sport-shirts and bell-bottom trousers. He resumes working with his accustomed vigor and sincerity.
Given a list of potential responses, 82% of those surveyed agreed that a supervisor should probably give the “hippie” a talking-to.
Today, of course, it’s not the shaggy, convention-flouting Baby
Boomers that bosses worry about. [More] | DAVID
Argues that the generations aren't that different. |
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| |  | | | How Demographics Rule the Global Economy - WSJ | | Ever since the global financial crisis, economists have groped for reasons to explain why growth in the U.S. and abroad has repeatedly disappointed, citing everything from fiscal austerity to the euro meltdown. They are now coming to realize that one of the stiffest headwinds is also one of the hardest to overcome: demographics. | DAVID
This is a great graphic illustration of changing global population demographics and its implications for changing workforce. |
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| |  | | | The Global Skills Gap Widens as U.S. Students Struggle - Bloomberg Business | The weekly journal Science features on its new cover a Babylonian tablet that calculates Jupiter's movement through the sky. The archeological find pushes the discovery of a rudimentary calculus back at least 1,400 years, from 14th century Europe.
Advisers to Babylonian kings were recording two facts—the passage of time and Jupiter's velocity—to project where the giant gas orb might pop up next. A more sophisticated version of the same analysis, painfully known to many as integral calculus, lets you look a year ahead from today's stock price and come up with the value of options.
But 2,000 years later, that kind of math remains far out of reach for many students in the developed world. In the U.S., the question is particularly acute. American students rank 35 among the 64 nations in the most recent international testing, well below the average for developed nations. And this week the news got worse, as three quite different voices expressed concern with the failure of educational systems to keep up with a dynamic economy that requires ever smarter participants.
The UN Global Compact, a group that encourages companies to pursue sustainability across governance, social, and environmental issues, published a report Tuesday that ranks the biggest worries of more than 5,500 leaders in business, universities, and civil society groups. Two of the top three were how to close the skills gap and groom people for the “digital labor market.”
Yesterday's graduates went off and founded today's companies; it's becoming clear that tomorrow's graduates may not be qualified even to apply for jobs with them. [More] | DAVID
More details of how the US education system matches up globally and what skills gaps look like in terms of an education gap. How can our kids be doing so poorly in math and reading? |
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| |  | | | What is it like to be poor at an Ivy League school? - The Boston Globe | | High-achieving, low-income students, often the first in their families to attend college, struggle to feel they belong on elite campuses. | DAVID
Nationwide only 11% of low income students who start a B.A. program actually finish college. This article paints an in-depth picture of what it is like to be poor in an Ivy League school. Despite the benefits of a full scholarship, these students are faced with an amazing set of obstacles. It is interesting to see how even schools like Harvard and Brown, with all their resources, are struggling to help these kids fit in and eventually succeed. Imagine what it's like for a kid at a much less well-funded institution. |
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| |  | | | Why Didn't Higher Education Protect Hispanic and Black Wealth? | College-educated families usually earn significantly higher incomes and accumulate more wealth than families headed by someone who does not have a four-year college degree. The income- and wealth-boosting effects of education apply within all racial and ethnic groups. Higher education may also help "protect" wealth, buffering families against major economic and financial shocks and mitigating adverse long-term trends. Based on two decades of detailed wealth data, we conclude that education does not, however, protect the wealth of all racial and ethnic groups equally.
Compared to their less-educated counterparts, typical white and Asian families with four-year college degrees withstood the recent recession much better and have accumulated much more wealth over the longer term. Hispanic and black families headed by someone with a four-year college degree, on the other hand, typically fared significantly worse than Hispanic and black families without college degrees. This was true both during the recent turbulent period (2007-2013) as well as during a two-decade span ending in 2013 (the most recent data available).
Why didn’t higher education protect Hispanic and black family wealth from either short-term turbulence or long-term competitive pressures? Job-market difficulties specific to Hispanic and black college graduates probably played a role, especially over the longer term. Financial decision-making appears even more important in explaining large wealth declines among Hispanic and black college-educated families during the Great Recession and its aftermath.
[More] | DAVID
Here's a mind blower. We tend to think that a college education is a great provider of economic security. But recent research from the St. Louis Fed shows that Hispanic and black college graduates have actually faired worse than non-college educated families during recent economic downturns. To me this suggests that a college degree is not enough in the new job market. Many First-Gens need even more support in career development. This squares with the findings of a book I've been reading "Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality." Highly recommended. |
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| |  | | | Gifts, Debts, and Inheritances: Why So Many Minority Millennials Can't Get Ahead - The Atlantic | | Without the financial support that many white families can provide, minority young people have to continually make sacrifices that set them back. | DAVID
This article makes a strong case for why it is so hard for working class and lower middle class students and grads to achieve upward mobility, despite a college education. In reality, the career opportunities for young people with limited economic resources are much more constrained than for peers who come from families with more resources and connections. For more evidence of this, see the book "Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality." |
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| |  | | | What Happens When Millennials Run the Workplace? - The New York Times | Joel Pavelski, 27, isn’t the first person who has lied to his boss to scam some time off work.
But inventing a friend’s funeral, when in fact he was building a treehouse — then blogging and tweeting about it to be sure everyone at the office noticed? That feels new.
Such was a recent management challenge at Mic, a five-year-old website in New York that is vying to become a leading news source created by and for millennials. Recent headlines include “Don’t Ban Muslims, Ban Hoverboards” and “When Men Draw Vaginas.”
“There’s 80 million millennials; we focus on the 40 that went to college,” said Chris Altchek, Mic’s 28-year-old chief executive.
But he is still working out how to manage many of the traits associated with his fellow millennials: a sense of entitlement, a tendency to overshare on social media, and frankness verging on insubordination.
Mic’s staff of 106 looks a lot like its target demographic: trim 20-somethings, with beards on the men and cute outfits on the women, who end every sentence with an exclamation point and use the word “literally” a lot. [More] | DAVID
This article strikes me as misleading in that it describes a Millennial-run business that is an incredibly small part of the work world. It is a non-tech, knowledge-intensive business in a shrinking industry --- journalism -- targetted at Millennials. Nevertheless, the article provides some interesting insights into human nature and the challenges of management, no matter what the generation. |
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| |  | | | Parents’ Fears Confirmed: Liberal Arts Students Earn Less - WSJ | For the first time, government data back up what some parents have long suspected: Students who choose elite liberal arts colleges don’t earn as much money early in their careers as those who attend highly selective research universities.
The disparity, determined by a Wall Street Journal analysis of the data, means that some liberal arts colleges may face tough questions about the potential payoff of their expensive tuition. That may be especially true for students needing financial aid, the group covered by the government’s figures.
The Education Department in September released salary numbers as part of its College Scorecard, an online tool that compares colleges on cost, student debt and graduation rates. For the first time, the government also paired information on federal student aid recipients with income tax records to compute median earnings figures for each school. [More] | | |
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Building a 21st Century Learning Ecosystem
