Re: Predicting the future in the job market....

[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Russell Martin) wrote in message news:<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>...
> [EMAIL PROTECTED] (mystery man) wrote in message news:<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>...
> > Google's newsgroups servers don't get all the posts that I can see on
> > my ISP's newsgroups servers so I can't respond to severaal specific
> > posts that I'd normally like to.
> > 
> > One poster (I think "Marc", who alluded to himself being faculty) made
> > the comment about how impossible it was to predict the future job
> > markets and thus
> > washed his hands of the responsibility for passing on the useful
> > advice one needs today if one is to have a pension and health plan by
> > the time one reaches retirement age.
> 
> I doubt if such things, in the tradiitonal sense, will exist in the future,
> at least until the penulum has swung back.  One will either have to be
> independently wealthy when one retires, or one will be joining me under
> a bridge.

There are going to be more people under the bridge than independently
wealthy. Already employees are getting scaled back health plans,
smaller pensions, pensions not fully funded, and some state govt
employees getting scaled back or no longer pensions & health plans. It
will eventually snowball into expanded poverty and then the ranks of
lawyers and doctors will diminish as govt will not be able to pay for
programs because the tax base will be shrinking.

> > On the contrary, I see two extreems in career/job environments: i)
> > jobs/careers in rapidly and very rapidly evolving methodology (eg.
> > sci/tech/engineering fields),
> 
> Which means one slip in predicting what the Next Big Thing will be
> and getting trained in it, while doing one's present job, and one's
> career, if it can still be called that, is derailed.

One thing I'd be looking for is geographical areas where the
population is increasing AND bringing money with it (southern
Delaware, for example, is growing and its a retiree population; good
for the time being, but couple decades from now it might be a ghost
town, so to speak).

> > and ii) jobs/careers in slowly to very
> > slowly evolving fields (eg. building trades, transportation,
> > agriculture).
> 
> You left out burger flipping and pizza delivery, the very life-blood
> of a post-shrubbery economy. :-)

I wanted to not have to suggest that those jobs ($7-8ish per hour)
should be pursued by the people who go to a lot of college and grad
school and then they either can't get careers started or their career
bombs out after a short while.

> > 
> > A second issue that is not impossible to predict is age
> > discrimination. Its there and its more often present in rapidly
> > evolving job markets (eg. the so called IT fields). Another issue
> > involves the immigration and offshoring phenomena in business and
> > corporate infrastructures.
> > 
> > Today's young person would be very well advised to look hard at
> > educational requirements for the various pursuits and look hard at
> > where those targets will likely be in one or more decades. So far, the
> > USA has lost the manufacturing sector, and is in the process of losing
> > the service sector (to India and China), and the next thing we're
> > going to have is a post apocalyptic economy. What will its nature be?
> > 
> > Art Soweres
> 
> Pig farming for methane will be big, according to the Mad Max movies.
> That and lawless thuggery.  Sorry, I forgot we already have lawless
> thuggery in the form of Wall Street. ;-)

Lawless thuggery? I'd say "lawful thuggery" is more like it. All I'm
hearing from the IT and IP "industries" is that patent royalties and
lawsuits (eg. SCO suing IBM, Eolas suing Microsoft [are they going to
get that $500 mil settlement?], is where the money is. Whether there
will be enough high paid lawyers in the future or a lot of lawyers end
up flipping burgers will be determined after I'm dead and burried.

Art Sowers

invalid email address but the website is still up:

http://scijobs.freeshell.org
 

> Regards,
> Russell