John, thank you for posting the Rand report. Very interesting. Makes one wonder if things will ever again settle down into the kinds norms that prevailed when I entered the labour force in the mid-20th century. Then, if you had any kind of quality education at all, you could get "a steady job" and, depending on performance, you could expect to be promoted from one level to the next. It was necessary at the time because women still stayed home to look after the kids and men brought home the bacon. The 60s, 70s, and 80s brought huge changes. By the mid-80s any woman who wanted a job and could hold one was working and the kids were being trundled off to daycare.
Now we're somewhere near but past the beginning of another transition. Ever so many more people have a "quality education" but the number of steady jobs per educated capita are not nearly as abundant as they were half a century ago. The necessary strategy may well be to combine with whomever you can for as long as you can and get what you can out of it. That's what I did after retiring from my "steady job" in the mid-80s. But I had banked a lot of experience by the time I retired and most young people are not in that position. And, as the Rand report points out, they may not have the right qualifications for the jobs that are going, whereas a rising part of the young population elsewhere has them. Jobs can be outsourced and participants can be brought into work via IT. While I hate being among the elderly, I'm not sure I'd want to be a young person right now. Ed P.S.: the Rand report can be accessed at http://www.rand.org/pubs/testimonies/CT273/ _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list Futurework@fes.uwaterloo.ca http://fes.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
