“There has been a lot of controversy surrounding the US employment situation over the past few months. The January data was particularly contentious, in part because that’s when the BLS, or Bureau of Labor Statistics, made its annual revisions to try to square its numbers with changes in the population. The BLS uses two different surveys, the Household Survey and the Establishment Survey, and sometimes it’s difficult to get the twain to meet. But the employment figures for March, released this Friday, had tongues wagging even without annual revisions” (from Seeking Alpha).
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In the last three years, 14 million people have joined the rolls of the “assisted”, what used to be called wellfare. What did these people do prior to getting assistance? I would guess they had jobs. Step right up – we have a program to fill all (almost) your needs, housing, heathcare, food, heat, electricity and maybe a cell phone or two! and it’s free!
I think one of the great subplots of this post-CDO era is that there’s tons of unfilled positions out there that businesses can’t find qualified applicants for. One of the industries that didn’t see a slowdown that other sectors suffered was the IT industry (don’t get me started on our local economy). All that manual labor that we hired for, human middleware, was replaced by automated systems. This is rightfully so. We haven’t been able to keep up with demand, especially since those new jobs didn’t just require deep technical skills but the ability perform business analysis, relationship management, project and program management, and vendor management. The challenge with these skills is that they require more than mere education, they require real world experience. The market will respond. The question is how?
Peter-I think the market\’s response so far has been to offshore professional jobs as well as manual labor. Accounting, software development, radiology (specifically reading X-rays taken in the US, but read by doctors overseas), medical procedures, research and development (like drugs, technology, and medicine), and engineering are all being done in places like China, New Zealand, India, and Brazil.