Business 2.0 – Magazine Article – The Coming Job Boom
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No sentient adult could have made it through the past decade without developing a healthy distrust of forecasts like these. But the case for the worker gap differs from the usual economic entrail reading in one crucial regard: It’s based on demographics, a far more certain discipline. When Carnevale’s model, for instance, shows that within seven years 30 million people now in the workforce will be older than 55, that’s not a guess. It is virtually a certainty. “Any kind of demographic projection with respect to people who have already been born is notoriously accurate,” agrees former Treasury Secretary Summers.
Long (5 pages) article discussing the effects on the job market that will result from the baby boomers leaving the workforce: they claim there will not only be enough workers but they will not have the experience to step into those jobs. Not only will experience (or its lack) be an issue, but college enrollments in technology fields have been declining, giving hiring managers the vapors as they survey their aging cubicle dwellers.
The hiring managers interviewed have decided to take the counter-intuitive approach of investing in employees, making them happy, and helping them form some loyalty to the organization and their peers, in hopes of repelling the onslaught of HR poaching.
So on the one hand we have the commoditization of transient IT workers (who were car mechanics and handymen — tinkerers, in other words — a generation ago) and the prospect of a shortage of knowledge workers who understand an industry or organization.