Global jobs crisis: Demographics and disappearing jobs – Part 2

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Managing change in
the 2014-2020 Workplace

Video 3 continues here

You may know this guy – he talks about demographics too.

And I’m going to talk a lot about what he’s telling us as well. As we take a look at this, let’s think about what’s going on out there. I know this guy, he’s a database administrator.

Anybody in IT?

Any IT people?

Not as many IT people now as we used to.

Why is that?
Got outsourced.
Went overseas.

Database administrator was so excited he got a job at Ames. Isn’t that neat? Because he said to me, “Wow, there are six Ames within driving distance of my house!” And I said, “Sam, who goes to Ames and buys stuff at Ames?” “Well, old people do.” “Where are the old people going?” “Well, I guess they’re retiring at some point.” “And once they retire they don’t go to Ames any more. The place where they live now orders out, right? And it’s carry in.” And so within six months those Ames stores had closed. If you’re not aware of the demographics …

I’ve got a young man; who’s a client for about eight years now, since he graduated college and he’s a writer; he loves writing and he’s writing for third graders.

Third graders – he writes curriculum for third graders for the Institute for Reading Development. And I said, “Jacob, who pays for those third graders to learn this reading?” and he said, “Well, their parents do.” “And how long are they going to need to do that?” “Well, I’m not so sure,” I said,” If we look at the demographics of the United States we find out that we’ve got a ton of Millennials – 27 years old now and going back 25 years.

And if we go back there we start to realize that the number of young children are going down. Have you noticed we close schools? Have you noticed teachers are laid off every spring? It’s not because of the economy. We didn’t look at all the children and say, “Don’t you know there’s an economic problem? You go away!” We’re still educating them but there’s fewer of them and we get money from headcount and there’s fewer heads to count.

So we have fewer teachers and we’re laying them off.

And I said, “Jacob, how many third graders will there be where you live in two years?” Not very many. Jacob is now writing for seventh and eighth graders because there’s more of them. If you’re not aware of demographics, your destiny is shot. And I’m saying this to people, when I say destiny, I mean tomorrow.

So have you heard about STEM jobs?

Are you tired of hearing about STEM jobs?

Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. Yeah we seem to need those, don’t we? And the people writing the book said there’s a knowledge economy where we don’t have the talent that we need.

Does that irk anybody in this room besides me?

Just checking. Now this is something really remarkable here.

Interactions are going to change and you’re going to change something on your resume today before you go to bed because I’m going to give you a good hint. Are you ready?

We’ve identified three kinds of transactions – interactions in the workplace.

Some of them are transformational – moving raw materials from here to there – we make them into something else and manufacturing.
And some are transactional, which are rule based. Accountants do that, cashiers do that. Their decisions are rule based.
And then there’s tacit interactions – and this is a new term coming out – where you have to make decisions and you don’t have all the information.

Have you seen on any job postings “decision making?” And you said “yea, yea.” And “communications?” And of course, you said “strong communications skills,” right? Well, the jobs are moving towards this kind of interactions management, I don’t have all the information but I have my experience and I know what I know but I also have good judgment need to be moving there.

So, that’s where the jobs are coming.

Managers, managers, and managers.

So what’s happening to these jobs?

Well these are going away; we don’t need as many of them.

We’re figuring out how to do roads differently so we’re not carting as much salt and sand.
We have trucks that pull two trailers instead of one so we don’t need as many drivers.
Production lines are becoming efficient and robots are starting to take over putting things together – they do a better job.

Transactional rule-based things – what’s happening to cashiers?

Have you bought anything online lately?

Well every time you buy something online we need fewer cashiers.

On the other hand, a friend of mine went shopping, went into three stores in one day and you know three stores, two of them said, “You know, we don’t have that in house but we can have it at your house on Tuesday.” So, that’s going away too.