Career Laboratory

For One of the Best Jobs, Get a Good Education

2012-01-17T11:51:00.000-05:00

One message that you will hear again and again from people who provide career information is that the importance of higher education has grown over the past several years. Today I’d like to offer one more piece of evidence supporting this argument.

This month, the sixth edition of Best Jobs for the 21st Century has been released by JIST Publishing. I have been involved in updating this book since the third edition, which came out in 2002.

I thought it would be interesting to see how educational requirements have changed, over 10 years and three editions, for the mix of occupations included in this book. You should understand that in all the editions of this book, occupations were not selected to represent a cross-section of the levels of required education and training. Instead, the occupations were selected (from a pool of those for which data was available) entirely on the basis of their economic rewards--specifically, their combined rankings on average earnings, projected growth, and projected annual job openings.

As it happens, most of the occupations with the very best economic rewards also require a high level of skill and therefore many years of education. However, Best Jobs for the 21st Century has always included several hundred occupations--not just the very best jobs, but also the good jobs. As a result, the book has always included many occupations that require only on-the-job training, work experience, or very short educational programs for entry.

But has the mix of entry requirements changed over the years?

Here’s what I found when I compared the educational requirements of occupations in the two editions, 2002 and 2012.

Level of Education/Training	Occs. in 2002 Edition	Occs. in 2012 Edition
Short-term on-the-job training	15%	10%
Moderate-term on-the-job training	15%	10%
Long-term on-the-job training	10%	6%
Work experience in a related occupation	7%	8%
Postsecondary vocational award	8%	6%
Associate degree	7%	7%
Bachelor's degree	17%	23%
Bachelor's or higher degree, plus work experience	6%	8%
Master's degree	11%	7%
Doctoral degree	2%	11%
First professional degree	3%	3%

You can see that the overall trend is toward increased education. All three categories of on-the-job training are not as well represented in 2012 as they were in 2002.

The lesson to take away should be clear: Earnings and job opportunity are declining in occupations that don’t require a college education. Higher education is the entry ticket to highly rewarding jobs.

Have a Less Stressful Year

2012-01-04T16:47:00.000-05:00

Today, my colleague Selena Dehne tweeted about an article on the AOL website called “10 Most Stressful Jobs of 2012.” Having written 150 Best Low-Stress Jobs, I was interested in what high-stress jobs would appear on the list.

The researchers who compiled the list say they looked at 11 different factors that invoke stress. Just for a comparison, I looked at the jobs for which the O*NET database gives “Stress Tolerance” the highest importance rating. Surprisingly, there was zero overlap between O*NET’s top 10 and the top 10 on the AOL website.

In fairness, I should point out that the most stressful job listed on the AOL website, Enlisted Military Soldier, is not rated for stress by O*NET. However, many of the other job titles, such as Firefighter (#2) and Airline Pilot (#3) are rated by O*NET but given considerably lower scores. In fact, Forest Firefighters comes in at number 170 in the O*NET ratings and Municipal Firefighters at 181. Airline Pilots, Copilots, and Flight Engineers comes in at 50. On the other hand, Police, Fire, and Ambulance Dispatchers comes in at third place among the O*NET ratings.

In case you’re curious, here are the top 10 from O*NET:

Psychiatric Aides
Anesthesiologists
Police, Fire, and Ambulance Dispatchers
Psychiatric Technicians
Telephone Operators
Dancers
Sheriffs and Deputy Sheriffs
Obstetricians and Gynecologists
Air Traffic Controllers
Surgeons

If your job is stressful, maybe one of your New Year’s resolutions should be to lower the level of stress. You’ll be a better worker and a healthier person if you follow through on this idea. Here are some suggestions:

Identify what’s stressing you and set priorities: You probably can’t defuse every stressful aspect of your work—unless you quit, which creates new stresses. So focus on the most severe stressors that you have the greatest likelihood of being able to change. Avoid perfectionism, which is a self-imposed form of stress; accept the fact that you make mistakes and view them as opportunities for learning. Be realistic about the goals you set for yourself.
Speak up: Don’t suffer in silence. (One survey found that 60 percent of workers do.) Often, your boss or co-workers can make adjustments to your work situation that may reduce or eliminate stressors. The key is for you to avoid whining and make the case that reducing the stress will increase your productivity. Ask for the resources you need and show appreciation for the support you get. If you’re self-employed, let your family know what’s causing stress and enlist their help in reducing it or in making leisure time more rewarding.
Put up a fence between work and the rest of your life: Avoid letting a cell phone or e-mail chain you to the workplace. Working partly at home can remove you from some office pressures, but it can also blur the line between work and free time. Cultivate friendships with people who aren’t co-workers.
Get organized: Sticking tightly (but not obsessively) to a schedule can help you separate work from leisure. It can prevent you from procrastinating and help you limit the amount of time you let yourself think about stressors. Deal with them when they’re scheduled, and then put them out of your thoughts. You can achieve a similar effect by reducing office clutter. Having dozens of papers lying around the office is like having dozens of voices nagging you to get tasks done and also makes it hard for you to find what you need. If you don’t have a job description, ask your boss for one. It will help you set boundaries on what is expected of you.
Exercise regularly: Leave time in your busy schedule for a workout of some kind. You may feel that stress leaves you too tired to exercise, but most people who take up a regular schedule of exercise finds that it invigorates them. It also drains away stress-induced hormones and contributes to your long-term health.
Eat sensibly and get enough sleep: Junk food and sleep deprivation can compound stress-related health problems. For example, caffeine and high-carbohydrate foods can increase the rush in blood sugar that stress produces.
Practice relaxation: Meditation techniques—even something as simple as slow, rhythmic breathing in a quiet setting—can help you decompress. Some people get similar benefits from extended prayer or a midday nap. Many people believe that bringing a pet to work is helpful (if the employer allows it).
Build a social life: Many people find the most rewarding time of the week is the time they spend with family and friends. Try to maximize these times. Social contacts distract you from workplace pressures and can provide support when you’re feeling blue. Meet like-minded people through volunteer work, a night class, a book club, a faith community, or a sports league.
Maintain a sense of humor: Try to find the humor in your situation. You can’t be afraid of something while you’re laughing at it. If you can’t find any humor in your workplace, find it in your leisure time.

Career News from 2011: The Year in Review

2011-12-28T12:57:00.000-05:00

For my final blog of 2011, I decided to repeat last year’s idea of looking back at the tweets I’ve issued on Twitter in order to follow up on some and comment on the significance of others. (If you’re not already following me, my handle is @LaurenceShatkin.)

Green career issues have been a frequent theme in 2011. In January, I linked to “Top 10 greentech predictions for 2011.” Now, looking back, you’ll find that most of these predictions have come true. (This was actually a retweet from @CarolMcClelland, whom you should follow if you’re interested in green careers.) Another tweet on this subject, in October, was about the Bureau of Labor Statistics page for Green Career Information. In March, I linked to survey results from the Solar Energy Industries Association, which projected 26 percent growth in solar jobs from 2010 to 2011, with a net of 24,000 new jobs. Among the jobs they reported on, the best combination of fast growth and low competition was for solar photovoltaic installers and technicians.

Another frequent topic has been recovery from the Great Recession. The news in 2011 has been mixed. In February, the National Association of Colleges and Employers reported that for the first time since 2008, a college class was beginning the year with average starting salary offers higher than the previous year.
One interesting feature of this recession was its uneven impact on different age groups. In March, The Wall Street Journal reported that 34 percent of men in their 60s were holding paying jobs, compared with fewer than 15 percent of males ages 16 and 17. I blogged on this same subject in July and speculated that perhaps Congress has been doing so little to create jobs because the most reliable voters have the lowest rate of job loss. This doesn’t mean, however, that job loss is not a problem for older workers. As reported on the Economix blog of The New York Times (a must-read site for anyone interested in the economy), the small percentage of older workers who do lose a job subsequently endure the longest stretch of unemployment. In fact, the graph that accompanies the blog posting shows that the close correlation between age and duration of unemployment covers the full spectrum of ages.

An important milestone in the recovery was the rebound experienced by the automobile industry, thanks to oft-maligned federal intervention. In February, General Motors reported its biggest profit in a decade and said it would give 45,000 union workers a profit-sharing check for $4,300. In May, GM announced that it had seen its earnings triple in the first quarter and reported that it would invest $2 billion in 17 automobile plants across 8 states, saving or creating 4,200 jobs. In September, a deal between GM and the United Auto Workers union saved or created 6,400 jobs. The deal was especially aimed at accelerating the hiring of entry-level workers and at reducing the leakage of jobs to Mexico.

Despite these positive developments for the auto industry, this has been largely a jobless recovery so far. In March, the Commerce Department reported (PDF) that corporate profits had increased 29.2 percent in 2010, the fastest growth they have experienced in more than 60 years. But a July report from JP Morgan (PDF) revealed that the main force driving the rebound in profits was decreases in employees’ earnings and benefits, thanks to an oversupply of workers and offshoring. This is not how a middle class recovers from a recession. Jobs in construction and manufacturing seem particularly stuck in a post-bubble slump.

The Occupy Wall Street movement drew a lot of attention to income disparities that have come into high relief as the well-off have shrugged off the recession while most of the rest of the nation continue to suffer either unemployment or wage stagnation. Just last week, I tweeted about a study by historians that demonstrates that the Roman Empire had more equal distribution of income than United States does now. A graph posted by New York Times columnist and blogger Paul Krugman shows the dramatic difference between the after-tax income growth of the top 1 percent of earners versus everybody else. Another graph in that same blog post points out the earnings advantage of higher education but also shows its limitations. The hourly wages of college graduates have increased substantially since 1980, in contrast to the flat or declining hourly wages of people with less education. However, those wage increases for college graduates stopped at 2000, and the gains by those with advanced degrees have slowed to a trickle over the past decade. It seems even the upper middle class is not served well by the economy we now have.

I don't want to end on a down note, and it’s always good to have a laugh, so if you missed Stephen Colbert on “The Audacity Of Hopelessness,” enjoy it now. He explains how the Department of Labor computes unemployment figures and why giving up your job search actually helps the economy.

I hope the coming year is a good one for you and for your career.

Time to Quit?

2011-12-21T09:23:00.000-05:00

Maybe your New Year’s resolution should be to quit your job.

During this past recession, those of us who were lucky enough to still have a job tended to hang onto them. Now that the nation is officially in a recovery, albeit a slow one, a sign of the upward trend is that workers are starting quit their jobs. The resignations are not coming in huge numbers, but the Labor Department reports that 1.9 million workers quit in October. This continues a trend that has been visible for much of 2011, as the number of resignations climbs slowly upward from its low point in late 2009 and early 2010.

In my career, I have quit only one job, but I have lost several for various reasons. In retrospect, I can see several occasions when it probably would have served me better to quit. Here are some signs that it’s time for you to start looking for a new job:

Your work has minimal impact on the business. Specifically, you may notice that your ideas get no traction in meetings or when expressed in memos. (It doesn’t matter that your ideas may be good ones if nobody heeds them.) Although you may be busy, you cannot identify any specific achievements that made or saved money for the company or otherwise helped its reputation. I once had a job in product development at a company where this function was peripheral to the company’s mission and didn’t fit into the corporate culture. It was only a matter of time before a budget crunch would come and make them realize that I was expendable.

You have almost nothing in common with your coworkers. Their lunchtime talk leaves you cold. Their life goals and values are very different from yours. Maybe you feel uncomfortable about their moral standards (either too shady or too prudish).

The core mission of the business doesn’t match your goals and values. This often accompanies the previous item, because organizations tend to attract and retain workers who fit in.

You resent the low level of pay (or benefits) you’re getting and see no likelihood of improvement if you stay.

You resent the low level of autonomy you have and see no likelihood of improvement if you stay. This may result from having either a control freak for a boss or a rulebook that hogties you.

The hours at work or on the road are eroding your family life. Some people thrive on work or business travel and either don’t have a family or don’t need a lot of contact with it. But others find their job draining away one of their main satisfactions in life.

Your heart is not in what you’re doing. You find it difficult to concentrate on your work. You wing it much of the time. You no longer try to improve your work.

You realize that the industry or the employer’s business is doomed. Market forces or technology may be sending your industry into obsolescence. Superior competition may be stealing market share from your enterprise. Inept leadership may be making bad decisions that will send the business into decline.

In some of these situations, you are not under immediate threat of a layoff, but because it’s usually easier to get a job when you have a job, it’s advisable to plan your escape before you’re laid off. In situations where the problem is your rising level of dissatisfaction, it’s better to look for a new job before you gain a reputation as a malcontent or a slacker.

If your resume is out of date, fix it up. Make efforts to build your network or refresh your contacts with people already in your network. (The holidays provide you with the perfect reason and medium for doing that.) Start working on your elevator speech, focusing on your desire for new challenges rather than the negative aspects of your situation.

When you get a job offer, it may possibly provide enough leverage to convince your current employer to remedy what you don’t like about your job. But if the problem is something inherent in the nature of your current job--for example, it doesn’t fit into the corporate culture and mission, or heavy travel is inescapable--then it really is time to move on.

Values of Men and Women, Part 2

2011-12-14T12:00:00.000-05:00

Last week I blogged about differences between the career-related values of men and women. I used data from the 2003 National Survey of College Graduates, which was conducted by the Census Bureau on behalf of the National Science Foundation. Respondents were asked about the importance of various factors (which may as well be called values) that they consider when they think about a job.

Last week I looked at which values male and female respondents most often identified as very important. This week, I’m looking at what the different college major choices of men and women indicate about their value differences.

Of course, the values that the survey covers are not necessarily the only considerations that men and women bear in mind when they make the choice of a major. Some of these values, such as salary and job location, are expressed in job-related terms and therefore can influence the choice of a major only insofar as students consider the relationship between their prospective major and their future job. On the other hand, the job-major relationship is a very significant (often paramount) influence on many students’ major decisions, so it’s understandable that men’s and women’s feelings about careers would be related to their preferences for certain majors. Furthermore, some of these values, especially intellectual challenge, apply equally well to a major as to a job. Therefore, it seems likely that any male-female differences choosing between these values will be reflected in their choices of majors.

I thought it would be useful to look at the correlation between (a) the percentage of graduates of a major who say a value is very important and (b) the percentage of male and female graduates of a major. In other words, I’m asking which values tend to be rated highest by graduates of the majors with the most female graduates and lowest by graduates of the majors wit the least female graduates (and the same question for men). This is another way of getting at the question of which values characterize each sex. It may even be more meaningful than the results I looked at last week, which were based solely on professed preferences. This time, I’m also looking at behaviors--the college majors that were chosen and completed.

Here are the results for women, in descending order. Keep in mind that a score of 1.0 would mean a perfect correlation.

Contribution to Society: 0.60
Benefits: 0.17
Location: 0.12
Security: 0.11
Responsibility: 0.05
Challenge: –0.01
Independence: –0.20
Advancement: –0.53
Salary: –0.59

Now, compare this to the very different order I found last week, looking only at expressed opinions:

Benefits: 64%
Security: 62%
Challenge: 59%
Independence: 59%
Location: 59%
Salary: 54%
Contribution to Society: 53%
Responsibility: 43%
Advancement: 37%

Next, here are the correlations for men. These are actually the same as for the women but in the opposite order. That is, the minus signs change to plus signs and vice versa.

Salary: 0.59
Advancement: 0.53
Independence: 0.20
Challenge: 0.01
Responsibility: –0.05
Security: –0.11
Location: –0.12
Benefits: –0.17
Contribution to Society: –0.60

Finally here are last week’s very different results for men, in descending order:

Benefits: 65%
Security: 61%
Independence: 59%
Salary: 58%
Challenge: 55%
Location: 48%
Advancement: 45%
Responsibility: 44%
Contribution to Society: 38%

What strikes me is that when the two sexes are compared, the rankings I compiled last week (the percentages saying a value is very important) are a lot more similar than the rankings I compiled this week (the correlations). Specifically, the values associated with the majors that the men and women chose (and completed) adhere much more closely to the stereotypes of women as nurturers and men as strivers.

What explains these different findings? Last week, I created only two pools of graduates, one male and one female. Taking the averages of the two pools, as I did last week, washed out a lot of the differences that were present among subpopulations within each pool. But I was able to tease out some of these hidden differences by breaking up these large pools into smaller sets based on their past behaviors--the majors that they chose and completed. In addition, using correlations allowed me to detect the values profiles of those graduates who had gravitated toward majors that were dominated by one sex or the other. These grads may have been a minority--their opinions are hard to detect when you look at overall averages--but they show that the sex-stereotypical values profiles remain a reality for a significant group of people.

The larger lesson to take away is that the simple percentages one sees in many survey results (for example, what percentage of voters is currently backing a certain candidate) can disguise some information that would valuable to know about subpopulations in the sample.

Work-Related Values of Men and Women

2011-12-09T10:19:00.001-05:00

One topic that never gets stale is the difference between the career-related values of men and women. The group that I worked in at Educational Testing Service had done some research on that topic in the 1970s, before I arrived, and a graduate student intern did some further research while I was there in the 1990s. Each time this was studied, the general finding was that, on average, men tend to be strivers and women tend to be nurturers.

I recently became acquainted with a dataset that has the potential of providing another look at this question. Ever since late July I have been working on creating the third edition of College Majors Handbook with Real Career Paths and Payoffs. I turned in the manuscript this week. The book is based on the 2003 National Survey of College Graduates, which was conducted by the Census Bureau on behalf of the National Science Foundation.

One set of questions on the survey form asks respondents, “When thinking about a job, how important is each of the following factors to you….” The values (factors) are the following:

Salary
Benefits
Job Security
Job Location
Opportunities for Advancement
Intellectual Challenge
Level of Responsibility
Degree of Independence
Contribution to Society

Respondents are asked to score each value as very important, somewhat important, somewhat unimportant, or not important at all.

I thought it would be interesting to see how men and women scored these values differently, so I looked at what percentage of each sex scored each value very important.

Here are the results for women, in descending order:

Benefits--64%
Security--62%
Challenge--59%
Independence--59%
Location--59%
Salary--54%
Contribution to Society--53%
Responsibility--43%
Advancement--37%

And the results for men, in descending order:

Benefits--65%
Security--61%
Independence--59%
Salary--58%
Challenge--55%
Location--48%
Advancement--45%
Responsibility--44%
Contribution to Society--38%

You won’t notice a great amount of difference between the two sexes, but a few things stand out. The biggest difference is their attitude toward Contribution to Society; 15 percent more women than men rated this as very important. Another large difference applies to Job Location; 10 percent more women than men rated this as very important. The priorities of the sexes are notably reversed regarding Opportunities for Advancement, which 7 percent more men than women rated as very important.

You can find slight differences in their attitudes toward Salary and Intellectual Challenge. The former was very important to more men than women by a margin of 4 percent, and the latter more important to women than men by the same margin.

All other differences were trivial--1 percent or less.

These results largely confirm the traditional images (confirmed by the ETS research) of men as strivers and women as nurturers, although the difference of opinion on Salary is not as great as I expected from the ETS research. It may be that women in 2003 perceived themselves as playing a more vital role as wage-earners than they did at the time the ETS research was conducted in the 1970s and 1990s.

The difference in the ratings for Job Location may have a connection to the nurturing role; women may place more importance on working near home so they can more easily respond to family emergencies. However, that’s just speculation on my part. Location may be a stand-in for some other need, popular among women, that I don’t recognize.

Let me stress that these are averages and don’t describe every man or woman. In fact, the ETS research found that in each sex, there was a subset of respondents whose constellation of top values closely matched the one that was characteristic of the opposite sex.

If this general topic interests you, you may want to see what I learned from my research on the work-related values of male students in Saudi Arabia in 2002.

Job-Hunting Tactics to Match Your Personality, Part 2

2011-11-23T10:51:00.001-05:00

In my previous blog, I explained how your personality type can be the key to job-hunting tactics that will be effective for you. I gave examples of tactics appropriate for Realistic, Investigative, and Artistic types. This time, I’d like to consider the other three types in the Holland taxonomy.

If you’re a Social type, you want to make the most out of personal interactions, because you’re good at them and enjoy them. It’s clear that you should join one or more organizations related to your job target. Find a role that is not being filled; communications roles are particularly valuable, because they put you in touch with the largest cross-section of members. For example, you might offer to start a Twitter feed for the organization and encourage members to come to you with news. Also, be sure to leverage your existing social contacts. Make sure that all of them know about your job hunt and have several copies of your JIST card.

Enterprising types may find it useful to start a small business related to the career goal. For example, find out what low-price consumables your targeted industry uses and start selling them on eBay. A sandwich route can get you past the front door of a business and into the offices of people who will be useful contacts. Develop a brief business plan for a small project related to your targeted industry and be ready to explain it. Along with your resume, carry this plan with you, so people who are interested in the former can learn more about your skills from the latter.

Conventional jobs often depend on demonstrating a particular competence, such as typing speed or accuracy with figures. Volunteer work, such as keeping the books for a club, can give you opportunities to develop and document your competencies. Also consider that Conventional types tend to be highly organized and methodical, so you should bring these strengths to your job hunt. Study and follow techniques that are recommended for scheduling your job-seeking efforts, compiling lists of contacts, tracking the progress of the job hunt, and following up on contacts. Conventional-minded people in your network will be impressed with your organizational skills.

Keep in mind that Holland himself emphasized that most of us are not purely of one personality type. Your job-hunting efforts should not and probably cannot conform to the skills and work habits of any one personality type. Artistic types need to impose some organization on their tasks, Enterprising types need to use creativity in their tactics, and Realistic types need to use social skills to build their network. Nevertheless, by paying special attention to the tactics that are best suited to your personality type, you can mount a job-hunting campaign that minimizes discouraging situations and is more effective.

Job-Hunting Tactics to Match Your Personality, Part 1

2011-11-16T08:49:00.001-05:00

People making career decisions often find it useful to think in terms of personality types. I have written two books about this: 50 Best Jobs for Your Personality and 10 Best College Majors for Your Personality. In additional to these two, several of my other books also use the Holland taxonomy of personality types (Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising, Conventional) as an introduction to career exploration.

But personality types are helpful for more than just making a career decision. They can also guide you much later in the career development process, by suggesting strategies for the job hunt.

One reason your personality type is relevant to your job hunt techniques is that you probably are looking for a job in an occupation that is related to your personality type, and different kinds of jobs demand different job-hunting strategies. For example, in a job-hunting process with an Artistic job as the target, a portfolio showing examples of creative work is almost always required. Although portfolios are being employed in job campaigns aimed at other kinds of jobs, such as Enterprising jobs, the people who do the hiring for those jobs tend not to expect them.

There’s something to be said for running counter to expectations—for example, using a portfolio when seeking an Enterprising job precisely because it will set you apart from other job-seekers. However, your job-hunting activities should be the kinds of tasks that best suit your personality. If you’re a Social type, you’ll be more skilled at using strategies that maximize your personal contacts with others. If you’re an Investigative type, you’ll be more comfortable emphasizing research techniques that uncover job openings.

Here are some ideas for how to match your job-hunting tactics to your personality. At their foundation, all of them share the highly effective strategy of networking, but they go about the network-building process in different ways.

If you’re a Realistic personality type, you like hands-on involvement. You should visit workplaces related to your career goal or perhaps an eatery where the workers can be found, so you can interact firsthand. Dress accordingly; you may not need to wear steel-toed boots, but you should avoid wearing an expensive suit. You may want to bring a model or sketch or photograph of an idea you have for how to do the work better or how you have done it in a previous job or school project. Use this as a prop when you start up a conversation with a worker. A related strategy is to do volunteer work of a kind that is related to your career goal and that, ideally, allows you to work alongside people who do that kind of work for a living.

If you’re an Investigative type, you probably have good research skills. Use them to identify important employers for your career goal and compile a list of people who work there with whom you can make contact through intermediaries. Savvy users of LinkedIn and Twitter can search these databases to identify potential contacts. Another tactic is to find the blog where people in your targeted industry exchange news and ideas. (Every industry has at least one.) Become a conspicuous presence there; if you can’t contribute useful comments, at least ask intelligent questions. When you eventually get a chance to meet with a useful contact, bring a chart or diagram that analyzes an industry issue or a plan for solving a problem.

Artistic types, as I noted earlier, will certainly want to develop a portfolio and bring it to any meeting with a contact. You may want to brainstorm and develop an original, media-based way of representing the industry or an industry-related issue, such as an animation, a collage, or a Web page. This representation of your ideas may be easier to distribute than a traditional portfolio. The kind of job you’re aiming for may be more open than most to gimmicky methods of making cold contacts, such as printing your resume on a piece of paper shaped like a shoe and sending it attached to a sticky note saying that you’re trying to get your foot in the door.

In my next blog, I’ll cover the remaining three Holland types.

STEM Careers--and STEM Skills in Other Careers

2011-11-09T10:07:00.000-05:00

One indication that an idea is catching on is that the President of the United States refers to it frequently. In recent remarks by President Obama, I’ve been pleased to hear mentions of STEM careers and STEM education (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics). Two recent articles have pointed out the rewards of STEM careers and the barriers to them.

Last month, my former ETS colleague Anthony Carnevale and his research team at Georgetown University released a report about the career experiences of people who majored in STEM subjects. Analyzing Census data, they found that, on average, 65 percent of those holding a bachelor’s degree in a STEM subject out-earn those with a master’s degree in a non-STEM subject. And an associate degree in a STEM subject brings in a higher income than a non-STEM bachelor’s for 63 percent of those surveyed.

The Georgetown researchers also found that STEM degrees are excellent on-ramps for careers in medicine and in management, career changes that can lead to higher income than staying in a STEM work role. They note that although the traditional STEM career fields employ only 5 percent of the workforce, the need for STEM competencies keeps increasing in other fields. For example, along with the rapid growth in the number of technology products, there’s a growing need for an appropriately skilled sales workforce. So, even though the STEM career field is growing at a pace exceeded only by health-care careers, the careers that are competing for STEM-competent workers (including many health-care occupations) are among the fastest-growing and highest-paid in the economy.

Given this growing need for STEM-skilled workers in a broad range of occupations, it is not necessarily alarming that (as Carnevale et al. found) 43 percent of STEM grads immediately go off to work in non-STEM careers. To be sure, I’d rather see engineering graduates go on to engineer bridges instead of financial derivatives. Nevertheless, market forces will divert STEM talent to many non-STEM work roles, and many of those roles will benefit our economy.

What is alarming, however, is how many young people don’t even get as far as the initial STEM degree. Carnevale and his team estimate that our K–12 educational system turns out enough students with initial STEM skills to fill the labor market’s need for STEM-skilled workers, but more than 75 percent of them do not go on to develop their potential by majoring in STEM subjects. Furthermore, of those who do major in STEM subjects, 38 percent switch to another subject or drop out of college. This is twice the combined attrition rate for all other subjects.

An article last week in The New York Times investigated the reasons for this massive leak in the collegiate STEM pipeline. The main reason seems to be the inherent difficulty of the STEM curriculums. This is not helped by the high level of competition often found there. It’s significant that the highly selective colleges, which get the best students, also have higher STEM attrition rates. Evidently, the problem is not that the students are poorly prepared or lack good work habits.

GPAs tend to be lower in the STEM majors, and grade inflation in the non-STEM majors may be part of the reason. Another factor discouraging STEM majors may be the emphasis on theory, especially in the lower-division courses. Some STEM faculty members are experimenting with using project-centered curriculums to sustain the interest of the students. The traditional engineering major leads to a senior design thesis, but for many students this opportunity to turn STEM skills to practical applications comes too late.

It’s important to understand that a specific college degree, while it provides useful quantitative evidence for researchers, does not tell the whole story about the skills a young person acquires. A friend of mine dropped out of the engineering curriculum at a highly competitive engineering school and graduated with a degree in a humanities field. He would be considered a STEM dropout, but the STEM skills he acquired in high school and during the two years of engineering curriculum that he completed served as the foundation for a very successful career in technical sales.

You may also consider me a STEM dropout. Although I gave up on a STEM career goal well before entering college, I have had a lifelong interest in science and managed to acquire enough STEM skills to hold my present job, in which I spend a lot of time (sometimes days on end) working in databases and spreadsheets, even occasionally writing programs.

As Carnevale and his team found, the need for STEM skills in non-STEM occupations (even writing!) keeps growing. Educational policymakers need to do more than just encourage students to get STEM degrees. They need to ensure that the curriculum of everyone in high school and college includes STEM subjects and imparts STEM skills.

Who Pays the Price for Globalization?

2011-10-26T16:08:00.001-04:00

Along with automation, the force that has caused the largest number of U.S. job losses is globalization. Jobs that used to be done by American workers are being shipped overseas, in a never-ending quest for lower-paid workers. But some American workers are being hurt by this more than others.

To understand who is suffering the most from globalization, it helps to consider what makes this economic environment possible. A major reason is free trade agreements with foreign countries, removing tariffs that used to shelter American industries. The argument for international trade is that it lowers costs for everyone, and I must agree that much (though not all) of the Chinese-made merchandise that fills the shelves at WalMart is priced lower than equivalent American-made goods.

On the other hand, even if you set aside the arguments against globalization (for example, the problem of China’s manipulation of its currency to depress the dollar cost of its goods), you cannot pretend that globalization has no adverse effects within the United States. Even if it’s too late to reverse globalization, policy-makers must recognize whom it damages and take appropriate measures to mitigate the damage.

Therefore it’s significant that last week Congress issued a little-noticed report (PDF here) on this topic, called “Nowhere to Go: Geographic and Occupational Immobility and Free Trade.” The report was written by the staff of Sen. Bob Casey for his role as chairman of the Congressional Joint Economic Committee.

The report notes that the chief American victims of free trade are older workers and those with less education. These two groups are concentrated in the manufacturing sector of the economy, the sector that has been undermined the most by competition from foreign countries.

These older workers are closer to retirement and therefore may be reluctant or unable to invest the time required to acquire the new skill sets needed for the industries that remain in the U.S., such as high technology, finance, and health care.

Occupational mobility often requires physical mobility: the ability to relocate to find work. Physical mobility also can allow workers to find new jobs in the same occupation as the job that was eliminated. But older workers are the least likely to move, both locally and over long distances. One important reason for this is that older workers are more likely to be homeowners and therefore may be tied down by the slow-moving real estate market we have been experiencing for several years now. Many are stuck with a mortgage that exceeds the market value of their house. And although older workers tend to have better-developed networks than younger workers, useful for finding work, the networks usually are anchored in the workers’ local community. If the community has few jobs, the network is of little help, but the displaced worker is reluctant to attempt to find a job in another location where he or she has no network in place.

The congressional report outlines the problem well but gives short shrift to solutions. I would suggest the following:

Education has to be made more affordable, especially at community colleges. During the Cold War, aid to education was considered a matter of national defense. That has not really changed.
We need to invest more in our infrastructure, which supports manufacturing (and, for that matter, all aspects of the economy)
We need to run our manufacturing sector more on the German model, as I wrote in a blog a few weeks ago.
We need to require that banks renegotiate mortgages for properties that are underwater. Most of these homeowners did not take on mortgages larger than they could afford but rather are victims of a general decline in real estate values. If homeowners can pay off their mortgages, they can relocate to where the jobs are.

Will Congress move on any of these measures? That seems unlikely, but it’s worth remembering that older workers are also the most likely voters.

Steve Jobs and American Jobs (part II)

2011-10-12T16:32:00.000-04:00

Last week I used the iPod as an example of how innovation creates jobs, some of them offshore, but many of them--especially those that pay well--here in the United States. Steve Jobs, who died last week, was one of America’s greatest innovators, and we may well wonder where the next innovator of his caliber will come from. But another question is how and where that person’s skills for innovation will be refined and implemented.

We hear a lot of talk these days that the key to job creation is getting out of the way of the private sector. Tax it less, regulate it less, and it will nourish innovation and create the jobs that our economy so desperately needs right now. Let the marketplace discover and reward breakthrough technologies.

But there’s also a case to be made for the role of the public sector, especially at a time when the private sector is unwilling to invest in jobs and in basic research. I was impressed by the video of Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren that recently went viral, in which she says, “There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there? Good for you, but I want to be clear: You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn't have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did.” It’s useful to remember that Steve Jobs was the product of a public school education.

Political demonstrators who invoke an earlier era by wearing three-cornered hats seem to forget that this country has a long legacy of innovation that was fostered by the public sector. Samuel Morse developed the electric telegraph in response to a prize that Congress offered for a better form of long-distance communication than the semaphore signals that were in use at that time. His first demonstration of long-distance telegraph transmission, from Baltimore to Washington, was financed by a federal grant.

At last night’s Republican debate, one of the questioners asked, “From the Erie Canal to the Internet, . . . innovation is what’s always fueled economic recovery. So shouldn’t the focus now be on trying to create the innovative jobs of tomorrow?” None of the candidates present commented that the Erie Canal, which transformed New York City into the paramount port on the East Coast, was financed entirely by the public sector. So was the development of the Internet, by what’s now the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

The integrated circuit, which made all of Steve Jobs’s products possible, was invented by Jack Kilby, also the product of a public school education. He was working at Texas Instruments, a private-sector company, but TI morphed from a company that served the oil industry to an electronics powerhouse because of contracts from the Signal Corps and the Navy. Development of the computer chip got a massive boost from the space program.

In fact, the Cold War and the space race that grew out of it were responsible for a wide range of innovations that continue to shape our economy. This push also resulted in federally funded improvements to the infrastructure, notably the interstate highway system (which is officially called the Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways), along which Steve Jobs’s products were shipped to your door. This effort also expanded federal funding of education through the National Defense Education Act. The accelerated academic program that I was enrolled in while in (public) junior high school was initiated in direct response to Sputnik. And the fathers of many of my classmates had gone to college on the GI Bill and were working at a federally funded New Jersey laboratory that supported the work of the Signal Corps.

The recent collapse of the Solyndra company, recipient of a half-billion-dollar federal loan guarantee, has been used by some as evidence that government support of innovation is misguided at best and corrupt at worst. But when private-sector investment is focused on complex derivatives and arbitrage rather than on basic research and infrastructure, the government becomes the innovation investor of last resort. The money that the treasury lost on Solyndra is miniscule compared to the funds that the private sector lost investing in subprime mortgages.

It will never be cheaper to borrow money than now. We can find workers more easily and hire them for less money than in normal times. What are we waiting for?

Steve Jobs and American Jobs

2011-10-07T09:32:00.000-04:00

As the nation mourns the death of Steve Jobs, it’s interesting to look at the role that his company plays in job creation, because Apple is one of the highest-achieving firms in one of the outstanding American industries: high tech. I came upon a fascinating analysis of the employment impact of just one Apple product, a device that Steve Jobs essentially invented: the iPod. An article in the Journal of International Commerce and Economics (PDF) looks at how many jobs were directly created by the iPod.

It’s well known that the device is assembled offshore, mostly of foreign-made components, and the authors of the study estimate that the number of foreign jobs in the iPod value chain outnumbered domestic jobs in 2006 by 27,000 to 14,000. In fact, they estimate that only 30 production jobs and a similar number of professional jobs are created by the manufacture of a few iPod chips here in the U.S. However, in 2006 the iPod also accounted for “7,789 nonprofessional jobs (primarily in retail and distribution) and 6,101 professional jobs (primarily at Apple’s headquarters), including management, engineering, computer support, and a variety of other categories.”

More important, in their analysis of the earnings of the 41,000 iPod workers, the authors estimate that here the balance tilts decidedly toward the United States, where the workers earned nearly $750 million in 2006, compared to only about $320 million earned by the foreign workers. “Over two-thirds ($525 million) of the earnings in the United States went to professional workers, and an additional $220 million to nonprofessional workers. While most of the nonprofessional jobs were relatively low-paying retail positions, we estimated that nearly $50 million went to administrative jobs at Apple for which we used the national average wage of $38,000 a year; actual Silicon Valley wages were probably even higher.”

In drawing conclusions, they hold up the iPod as an example of the opportunities and risks that globalization has created. “Apple’s tremendous success with the iPod and other innovative products in recent years has driven growth in U.S. employment, even though these products are made offshore. These jobs pay well and employ people with college degrees. They are at the high end of what might be considered middle-class jobs and appear to be less at risk of vanishing from the United States than production jobs.”

However, these high-value jobs require that future workers coming out of U.S. schools get a really good education. In addition, there is the risk that creative jobs, such as engineers and designers, will be taken by overseas workers as foreign governments and even American companies invest offshore in education and in cultivating creative industries.

The authors of this study don’t address the question of how many jobs the iPod indirectly created--or destroyed. The invention of the iPod set off a revolution in the way music is distributed. As people shifted to buying music on the Web in the form of MP3s, many record stores had to close, and as pirated MP3s circulated widely, record companies suffered declining sales even as the amount of music being consumed probably continued to rise. Although the shift to MP3s probably caused a net loss of jobs, the iPod also sparked the invention of the podcast, which created many jobs, not only for podcasters themselves, but also for the sound engineers who are involved in production of the glossier podcasts. Radio broadcasting has been consolidating into a few megacorporations, such as Clear Channel, but podcasting has helped keep many local sound-production businesses afloat.

Of course, the iPod is only one Apple product that sprang from the fertile imagination of Steve Jobs. The iPhone created a whole new platform for which creative programmers could devise new applications. Many of Steve Jobs’s other inventions will continue to create employment for American and foreign workers who are still to be born.

Use Common Sense with Assessments

2011-09-21T14:54:00.000-04:00

I worked for 19 years at the nation’s premier testing company, and one thing I learned was not to be dogmatic about assessments. Even the makers of the mighty SAT exam freely admit that their scores do not predict college achievement as well as high school grades do. The SAT scores still have value, however, because when combined with high school grades, they give a better prediction than the grades could alone.

Something similar can be said about assessments that are designed to help you with career choice: Alone, they probably are not the best way to identify a promising career. But combined with other sources of information, they can be very helpful.

Incautious assessment users sometimes forget that psychological instruments are not as precise as a yardstick. Every assessment has a certain margin of error, meaning that although its scores put you into category x, there is a chance that you really belong in the neighboring category y. In baseball games, it’s usually pretty obvious whether a ball has landed in fair or foul territory. But imagine what accuracy would be possible if the ball were ten times as big as a beach ball and even more squishy: Even the instant replay would not resolve a borderline hit.

In baseball, it’s also helpful that the foul lines are at the edges of the area that the batter is aiming for. Now imagine what the game would be like if a line ran right down the middle of the field, and the score of the game depended on which side of the line the enormous beach ball fell on. For good measure, imagine that both right-handed and left-handed batters tended to hit the ball towards the middle. Now you have an idea why I’m reluctant to use the Myers-Briggs assessment. It attempts to place you on one side or the other of a bipolar range (e.g., introvert or extravert), although the normal distribution that is so typical of psychological characteristics clusters most people near the middle. There’s a very high likelihood that your actual location on this continuum is close enough to the middle that the inevitably imprecise measurement of the instrument will assign you to the wrong side of the middle.

Although I prefer to use assessments based on the Holland types, I have to caution that they also are unable to achieve a pinpoint focus. For the Holland types, let me change the metaphor from baseball to hopscotch, where a lot depends on which square your marker lands in. On the playgrounds where I grew up, the squares tended to be at least 10 inches across, but imagine how the game would be if they were only 3 inches across and your marker were a beanbag the size of a dinner plate. Fortunately, the Holland rationale is conceptually more forgiving of ambiguity than is the Myers-Briggs rationale, because it is not bipolar and accepts the notion that bordering types (for example, Realistic and Investigative) share some characteristics. If I can’t tell for certain whether my beanbag fell in the Realistic of Investigative square, I probably would not err greatly by favoring occupations coded RI, IR, or even just R or I.

But the really big mistake would be to rely solely on the assessment, whatever its rationale. Here are some other indicators of your interests and preferences that you should consider:

In what school subjects did I get the most enjoyment and the best grades?
What activities am I reluctant to drop at dinnertime?
What are my favorite sections of the newspaper or of news websites?
At a party, what kind of people would I be able to sustain a conversation with?
If you could meet the world’s greatest ____________ and get that person to share his or her secrets of success, what field would that person’s achievement be in? (Romance doesn’t count.)

Still another indicator is the opinion of a family member or of a friend who knows you very well. Explain the concepts that the assessment is designed to measure and ask this person which characteristics describe you best.

Making decisions is hard. People naturally tend to seek the quickest and easiest way to decide between x and y. This is one reason why people often perceive an assessment as the beginning and ending of the decision-making process. Instead, use an assessment as the start of a gradual process of self-discovery.

Manufacturing and the German Model

2011-09-07T10:18:00.001-04:00

I’m writing this blog two days after Labor Day and one day before President Obama’s job-focused speech to a joint session of Congress, so I’m thinking a lot about the problem of high unemployment and underemployment. But the job-related story that caught my eye in today’s paper was the obituary of someone you’ve probably never heard of: Keith Tantlinger.

Tantlinger, who died on August 27 at age 92, was the engineer who designed the modern shipping container in the 1950s. His crucial innovation was a locking mechanism on the corners of the containers that allowed them to be stacked on ships, trains, and trucks. He also designed the corners to be easily grasped by cranes. I once watched a ship being loaded in the port of Hamilton, Bermuda, and marveled at the way the containers were being piled high on the deck rather than just being lowered into the hold, as I thought cargo was supposed to be stowed.

So what did this innovation have to do with jobs? It drastically reduced the costs of shipping goods by simplifying the process of transferring the goods from one carrier to another. Specifically, it reduced the costs of labor, damage, and pilferage. Cheaper shipping made it possible for us to stock our WalMarts with Chinese-manufactured goods and thus was one of the key factors causing the loss of manufacturing jobs in the United States. In 1969, about one-quarter of U.S. jobs were in manufacturing, but that number is now down at around 9 percent. It contributes to about 11 percent of our economy now.

But it’s important to understand that manufacturing doesn’t have to be a dead industry in the United States. In Germany, it accounts for about 25 percent of the economy and helps Germany’s keep trade balance second only to China’s. What can explain the difference?

One factor is the German emphasis on vocational education, including widespread apprenticeship, even for white-collar jobs.

Another is Kurzarbeit, which allows companies to cut workers’ hours while keeping them on the payroll, with the government making up a portion of the lost wages. Companies thus don’t lose their skilled workers during temporary downturns, and employees don’t lose good work habits and their relationships with bosses and coworkers.

Still another factor is the German banking system, which includes Sparkasse banks owned by local governments rather than private investors and functioning like savings and loans to provide funding for local businesses and homeowners. Their high collateral requirements (at least 20 percent for a mortgage) prevented these banks from engaging in the risky home loans that American lending institutions still have not recovered from.

Perhaps most intriguing of all is the role of workers in the management of German companies. This takes three forms. First, unionization is high, at about 20 percent, compared to our rate of less than 7 percent. Labor unions in Germany tend to influence policy at the industrywide level. At individual worksites, workers influence decisions about wages, hiring, and work conditions through “works councils,” which consist of employees (not necessarily union members) elected for four-year terms. Finally, under the policy of codetermination (Mitbestimmungs), corporate boards are required to include representatives of workers as well as representatives of shareholders. At corporations with 500 to 2000 employees, one-third of the board represents the workers; at larger companies, it’s half of the board.

Although low-skill American manufacturing jobs continue to be lost to overseas workers, advanced manufacturing processes are creating high-skill jobs. I detail some of these jobs in 200 Best Jobs for Renewing America. But manufacturing could regain even more of its lost role in our economy if we borrowed some ideas from the German model.

Teach in a Department of Defense School

2011-08-31T14:52:00.003-04:00

In my new book, 150 Best Federal Jobs, I focus mostly on jobs in the 50 states. I did this so that I could combine data from the Office of Personnel Management--which covers all federal employees, foreign and domestic--with data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics--which covers only employment on these shores.

However, I knew there would be interest in overseas federal jobs, so I included an appendix about two important offshore federal employers: Department of Defense schools and the United States Peace Corps. It’s the former that I want to discuss in this week’s blog, partly because a lot of American teachers have lost their jobs recently and may be looking for opportunities elsewhere.

The federal job with the largest civilian foreign workforce is teachers, covering some 8,000 workers in September 2010. Most of these workers (and a few thousand in other occupations) are employed by the Department of Defense in schools that DoD operates overseas for minor dependents of active-duty military and civilian personnel. The schools enroll students from kindergarten through grade 12 and are modeled on American public schools.

Some of these workers are spouses of military or civilian DoD employees stationed overseas; typically they begin in time-limited appointments and may be able to move to a permanent position with experience and appropriate teaching licensure. Others have no marital connection to a DoD employee and apply from the United States.

To qualify for one of these positions, you need a teaching license from one of the 50 states. The DoD certifies you in a field and level that match the certification in your original state as closely as possible. You usually need to sign a mobility agreement that says you are willing to work wherever the DoD needs you. To apply for a teaching position that starts with the following school year, you generally begin the process between September and January 15.

If you are an education major at a college that has an agreement with the Department of Defense Dependents Schools (DoDDS), you may be able to do your student teaching as a federal employee. Some students majoring in school psychology, counseling, nursing, library media, vocational education, or school administration are also eligible for student teaching for DoDDS. Ask your academic advisor about such opportunities. If you apply for spring placement, the deadline is October 31st; for fall placement, April 30th.

For further information about opportunities at DoD Dependents’ Schools, visit the DoDEA Recruitment website or phone DoDEA’s Recruitment Center at (703) 588-3983.

Does the U.S. Face a Skills Shortage?

2011-08-24T10:48:00.002-04:00

One subject currently being disputed by economists and educational planners is whether or not the American workforce will possess the skills required for the economy of the future. I’ve been particularly interested in the subject of skills, having recently finished the manuscript for the second edition of 150 Best Jobs for Your Skills, so I have been intrigued to find so much disagreement on this question of America’s future skills readiness.

One of the leading pessimistic analyses can be found in Help Wanted: Projections of Jobs and Education Requirements Through 2018, by Anthony Carnevale (a former colleague of mine at Educational Testing Service) and others at Georgetown University. These researchers predict that “by 2018, we will need 22 million new workers with college degrees--but will fall short of that number by at least 3 million postsecondary degrees.”

In a critique of this analysis, Paul Harrington (a fellow JIST author) and Andrew M. Sum argue that this predicted skills shortage is illusory. They point out that the Georgetown researchers predict the need for college-educated workers by looking at the number of college graduates in each occupation, with the assumption that these college grads in the workforce will need to be replaced by a new cohort of college grads as the occupations expand or lose workers through turnover. Harrington and Sum prefer to look at the actual skill requirements of each occupation. They maintain that college-educated bartenders and other misplaced college graduates in low-skill occupations will not need to be replaced by similarly high-skilled workers because the nature of the occupation does not require college-level skills.

But perhaps it’s a mistake to focus only on the requirements of occupations; another factor is the rewards of occupations. Additional education produces additional pay, on average, even in low-skill occupations. For example, a bartender does not need a college degree, but survey data shows that a bartender who holds such a degree earns more. As a result, college grads will continue to be diverted from high-skill occupations as effectively as if they will actually be needed in low-skill occupations, creating the potential for skill shortages in high-skill occupations. Such is the argument in still another analysis, by three California economists, David Neumark, Hans Johnson, and Marisol Cuellar Mejia.

However, these three economists do not expect actual skill shortages in the high-skill occupations within the 2018 horizon of the current Bureau of Labor Statistics projections. Compared to the Georgetown team, they count far fewer college grads in the workforce. The California economists base their projections on data from the American Community Survey (ACS), whereas the Georgetown researchers base theirs on the Current Population Survey (CPS). As the California team point out, the CPS overstates the number of people who hold associate degrees by including everyone who gets any kind of postsecondary training short of a bachelor’s. The Georgetown researchers also base their estimates of the mix of college grads in various occupations by looking at figures from 2000 to 2008; the Californians observe that the educational mix of workers in 2008 was anomalous (because of the onset of the recession?) and use the period from 2000 to 2007 instead.

The California researchers are less sanguine about trends beyond 2018, however. By 2030, all the baby boomers will have passed 65. They predict that if high-skill occupational growth and the college graduation rate continue along their current lines, we will face a shortage of appropriately skilled workers.

Employee or Contractor?

2011-08-17T17:10:00.002-04:00

In June, I blogged about the theory that the employer-employee relationship is being replaced by a relationship in which workers are hired guns. I argued that the “Hollywood model,” much hyped in the 1990s, still has not caught on and is unlikely to because workers value the security and the continued health insurance they get from regular employment and employers value the creative workers they have identified and cultivated.

On the other hand, there is a definite trend toward the pretense of this arrangement--that is, a relationship in which the employee acts like a salaried worker but contractually is a hired gun. The workers behave exactly like salaried employees, putting in the same 40-hour weeks, working at the same site, answerable to the same supervisors, maybe even wearing a uniform with the company logo, but on paper they are independent contractors. As I acknowledged in the earlier blog, this arrangement helps employers avoid carrying the overhead of a large staff of salaried employees. The company also can prevent its workers from unionizing by arguing that most are independent contractors who have no right to collective bargaining. This actually happened last summer at an Ohio company, Baker Communications.

The Government Accountability Office reported in 2007 that 10 million workers were classified as independent contractors, an increase of more than 2 million in just six years, and certainly many of these new contracts were phony. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has estimated that the number of workers misclassified as independent contractors is as high as 30 percent in some states. One reason the government is concerned about this trend is that it cheats the tax collector of funds that normally would go to the accounts of Social Security, Medicare, and unemployment insurance.

Therefore, the IRS is scrutinizing the tax returns of people who file as independent contractors to make sure that the employment relationship is legitimate. If you are an independent contractor, you need to be sure that your work relationship meets the legal requirements. For example, you can’t be working for the same employer and doing the same work you did on payroll or doing the same work under the same conditions as people who are on payroll.

Ironically, one industry has recently begun to attempt the opposite pretense: that independent contractors were actually regular employees. There’s an obscure provision in United States copyright law, effective this year, that allows musicians to regain control of their work 35 years later, provided they have applied for such control at least two years in advance. You may or may not remember the music of 1978, but it was a very fruitful year for American musicians such as Bruce Springsteen and Billy Joel, and the record companies stand to lose a lot of revenue if they lose the rights to the masters of these performers’ songs.

Therefore, the record companies are arguing that the musicians who recorded for them were not independent contractors and that the recordings were “work for hire,” like the books that I write for JIST as a salaried employee. I don’t know whether there are any other industries that face a similar hazard from using independent contractors. It’s likely that most of them write contracts with explicit work-for-hire terms, as I have sometimes signed in my days as a contractor, so this situation is probably uncommon.

On the other hand, even when contractors are unable to carry away the output of their labors, employers need to consider that the contractors may take their talents and work experience to a competitor. Some employers of contractors attempt to prevent this by inserting noncompetition clauses into contracts, but a contractor with very valuable skills may be able to have such clauses removed. (I was able to do so with a former employer, something that I was unable to do while still a salaried employee of the same company.) Furthermore, noncompetition clauses sometimes don’t hold up in court, or the employer sometimes is reluctant to attempt enforcement, because such a clause undermines the pretense that the employee is a hired gun.

High-Skill Cities

2011-08-10T14:47:00.003-04:00

I just sent my editors the manuscript of the second edition of 150 Best Jobs for Your Skills, and the research I did for the book turned up some interesting information about cities. Specifically, I identified several metropolitan areas where high-skill jobs are particularly concentrated.

Let me explain a little about my research methodology. I started by collapsing the 35 skills used in the O*NET database into 9 large skills, based on the correlations between the ratings of occupations in the database. For example, I was able to collapse Reading Comprehension, Writing, Active Listening, and Speaking into one skill called Communication Skills because no two of them had a correlation lower than 0.89.

Next, I looked at the range of ratings that O*NET gives to occupations on each of these skills. For each skill, I divided this range into five equal zones and identified the occupations with ratings that caused them to fall within each zone. Then I took the occupations in the two highest zones (the high-skilled occupations) and computed the total number of workers in each of 300 metropolitan areas. I divided this figure by the total workforce within each metro area to find, for each skill, a percentage figure for the high-skilled occupations in that metro area.

So, for example, here are the top 10 metropolitan areas for occupations with a high level of Communication Skills. The percentage of workers in these high-communication occupations ranges from a high of 39.1% to a low of 28.7%:

1. Durham, NC
2. Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV
3. Trenton-Ewing, NJ
4. San Jose–Sunnyvale–Santa Clara, CA
5. Boston-Cambridge-Quincy, MA-NH
6. Hartford–West Hartford–East Hartford, CT
7. Gainesville, FL
8. Bridgeport-Stamford-Norwalk, CT
9. San Francisco–Oakland–Fremont, CA
10. Rochester, MN

In the book, I offer the top 20 metro areas for each skill. And I notice that certain metro areas come up repeatedly in the top-20 lists.

Most frequent of all is Boston-Cambridge-Quincy, MA-NH, appearing on 7 of the 9 lists. Everyone knows that this metro area is home to a thriving high-tech industry, plus numerous world-class universities. The two lists where I don’t find this metro area among the top 20 are the lists for what I call Equipment Use/Maintenance Skills and Installation Skills, which tend to characterize blue-collar jobs.

Another high-skill metro area is Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV, the seat of government and host of many companies that serve defense and other government interests. It also encompasses several universities. This metro area appears on 6 lists.

Also appearing on 6 lists are two metro areas in North Carolina, Raleigh-Cary and Durham. Not long ago, these neighboring districts were actually counted as parts of a single metro area. Together, they contain many prominent universities, plus the Research Triangle, famous for its high-tech and bioscience industries.

On 5 lists, you can find the neighboring California metros San Francisco–Oakland–Fremont and San Jose–Sunnyvale–Santa Clara. This region is well known for the Silicon Valley and for the world’s highest concentration of start-up companies.

But you’ll also find 5 lists with the metro area where I live, Trenton-Ewing, NJ. New Haven, CT, also appears on 5 lists. Both of these regions are home to outstanding universities (Princeton and Yale) and many research companies that feed on the brainpower that these universities foster. Also, they are both state capitals (as are Raleigh and Boston).

Probably the most important lesson to take away from this analysis is that high-skill jobs tend to cluster around university towns, and therefore one of our national priorities should be to encourage higher education. Although all politicians give lip service to higher education, it may suffer from false economies in this era of budget-cutting.

I hope I can find the time to take this analysis one step further and try to identify metro areas that have a high density of college students but--unlike the metro areas that made my lists--have a low density of workers in high-skilled occupations. Other research I have read, especially the work of Richard Florida, indicates that the presence of universities contributes to economic success but is not sufficient to guarantee it.

Federal Jobs: Pros and Cons

2011-08-04T08:59:00.001-04:00

In the wake of this week’s agreement about the national debt ceiling, you may be wondering what impact this legislation will have on careers in the federal government. As it happens, I recently wrote a book called 150 Best Federal Jobs, which is now in the final stages of editing. To prepare this book, I studied the outlook for federal careers and their other advantages and disadvantages. I’ll be interested to see how the Bureau of Labor Statistics revises their projections for federal jobs when their new figures come out early next year.

A lot of people mistakenly believe that the federal workforce has been expanding rapidly and is expected to grow by leaps and bounds. In fact, the paychecks of federal workers make up only a small fraction of our federal expenditures that are running up unprecedented levels of debt.

More important, even before the current round of cuts (plus those that are to be enacted by the “Super-Congress”), the federal workforce was not expected to be a fast-growing industry. Two years ago, the Bureau of Labor Statistics projected 0.5 percent growth from 2008–2018, compared to 10.1 percent for all industries. If you don’t count Postal Service jobs, federal growth was projected to be a somewhat healthier 3.5 percent, but that still does not compare well to the 10.1 average across all career fields.

On the other hand, I should mention the many factors that make federal employment desirable. This is one of the few industries that were not badly hurt by the recent recession. It continues to offer jobs in a wide variety of fields, jobs that have many advantages compared to jobs in the private sector:

Federal jobs tend to be more secure. When agencies need to reduce their size, they usually do so by attrition (that is, not replacing people who leave). Employees can challenge termination or other personnel decisions through a formal appeals process.

Hiring and promotion in federal jobs are guided by a stronger commitment to diversity and inclusion than you’ll find in most private-sector worksites.

Federal jobs offer a wider selection of health-insurance plans than do private-sector employers. Retirees can continue their health-insurance coverage for the same fee they paid while working.

Federal jobs offer better retirement benefits than many jobs in the private sector.

Federal jobs offer 10 holidays per year.

Federal jobs offer 13 vacation days per year to beginning workers, 20 days after 3 years, and 26 days after 15 years. To this, add 13 days of sick leave per year.

Federal jobs often permit flexible work arrangements. For example, you may be able to work four 10-hour days per week or do some work from home. Workers are rarely required to work more than 40 hours. This can make a huge difference in some fields, such as law and accounting.

High-quality day care for children is often available at federal job sites or sometimes is subsidized at off-site centers.

Federal jobs can give you the satisfaction of serving the nation.

Federal employment is not a worker’s paradise, however:

The advantages listed above mean that competition for some federal jobs is intense.

A few federal jobs require security clearance, which may require background investigations that can drag on for months.

The workplace structure tends to be more bureaucratic than in small private-sector businesses. In high-tech jobs, the workplace may be slower to adopt the newest technologies.

Sometimes political pressures prevent workers from doing their jobs as they see fit.

Jobs may be affected in arbitrary ways by national political trends. For example, last year President Obama froze federal workers’ pay as a political gesture that actually had a minimal impact on the budget.

Although the many rules are designed to promote fairness, some workers find ways to manipulate the rules to gain an advantage.

What about pay? The answer depends on how you analyze the data. Federal workers earn more than private-sector workers, but they also are better educated. Most individual federal workers would earn more in an equivalent private-sector job. On the other hand, federal pay is extremely fair. In many private-sector jobs, you have to negotiate your salary and don’t know what other workers’ salaries are based on. The pay for federal jobs is supposed to be comparable to what is current in the private sector, with adjustments for local cost of living, and it is based on your salary grade.

The high level of competition for federal jobs, though listed here as a disadvantage, is an indication that work for the federal government is, on balance, very rewarding.

High-Paying and Low-Paying Skills

2011-07-27T11:15:00.001-04:00

The book I’m trying to finish right now is the second edition of 150 Best Jobs for Your Skills. (I’ll be able to complete the manuscript once release 16.0 of the O*NET database becomes available.)

Like all of my other books in the Best Jobs series, this one will include a lot of lists. I intend to include some lists that show the relationship between skills and earnings, because readers can learn a lot from considering this relationship. For example, consider readers who have not decided on a particular career goal but want to prepare for a high-income career. These readers can focus on developing these high-payoff skills and feel they are doing something positive toward advancing their careers, even though their goals are not sufficiently crystallized to allow them to work on developing occupation-specific skills.

Recently I came upon an astute analysis of the relationship between skills and earnings. The urban theorist Richard Florida asked his colleagues at the Martin Prosperity Institute (at the University of Toronto) to combine data from the O*NET database about the skill requirements of occupations and data from the U.S Department of Labor about the earnings of occupations, with the goal of seeing how an increase in a skill contributes to an increase in earnings.

For the purpose of their analysis, they collapse several O*NET skills into three large skill categories: analytical skills, social intelligence skills, and physical skills. (I do something similar in my book.) Then they look at how differences in level of skill affect level of income. For example, how do the earnings for occupations requiring the 25th percentile level of analytical skill compare to earnings for occupations requiring that skill at the 75th percentile level? In this case, they found that income increased by $25,600. The difference for analytical skills is charted in the graph below. Note that the x-axis is not a time scale, as it is in most line graphs; it represents a difference in level of skill.

For social intelligence skills, the difference in income is even more dramatic. Occupations at the 75th percentile level average $34,600 more in pay than occupations at the 25th percentile level.

But note how different the effect is when the researchers look at physical skills. It turns out that working in an occupation requiring physical skill at the 75th percentile level actually reduces your income by an average of $13,600 from what it would be at the 25th percentile level.

In his blog on The Atlantic website, Richard Florida uses these findings to explain why the economic prospects of men have stagnated recently. The Great Recession threw many more men out of work than women, and even though men have been getting rehired faster than women, their long-term outlook is not as good.

For the previous edition of 150 Best Jobs for Your Skills, “I computed the average growth and job openings of the jobs with the highest percentage of women and found statistics of 14.3% growth and 59,608 openings, compared to 10.2% growth and 29,421 openings for the jobs with the highest percentage of men. This discrepancy reinforces the idea that men have had more problems than women in adapting to an economy dominated by service and information-based jobs. Many women may simply be better prepared, possessing more appropriate skills for the jobs that are now growing rapidly and have more job openings.” I expect to find a similar discrepancy when I analyze the male- and female-dominated sets of occupations that I assemble for the new edition.

This difference in skills also helps to explain some of the narrowing of the male-female wage gap. In his blog, Florida posts two graphs by the blogger Alex Tabarrok that compare changes in per capita gross domestic product (GDP) to changes in male and female wages. Both male and female wage variations track pretty closely with GDP variations until about 1975, when the male increases level off even as the female earnings continue to climb in parallel with the GDP increases. Although some of this difference can be explained by the increase in female participation in the labor force, a lot is probably caused by the better match between the skills of female workers and the requirements of the new economy.

The lesson here for both men and women is that it pays to develop analytical and social intelligence skills. For greater detail about the skill requirements of high-paying jobs with good outlook, see the next edition of 150 Best Jobs for Your Skills.

Senior Citizens at Work

2011-07-20T15:18:00.003-04:00

Everybody knows someone who is still out of work because of the Great Recession. But you may not know many senior citizens who are. A blog entry by the economist Casey B. Milligan on The New York Times website points out that per capita employment of people ages 65 to 74 actually rose between 2007 and 2010, whereas in the population as a whole it fell by 7 percent. On the blog, you can see a nice chart illustrating this contrast, with one line for people ages 65 to 69, one line for people ages 70 to 74--both of these zigging and zagging a little, but ending up at a higher place--and another line for all ages, showing a steady downward slide. Mulligan notes that for those age 75+, the increase is even higher, but this is such a small group of workers that it is left off the chart.

I found this news fascinating because I recently finished working on the manuscript of 150 Best Jobs for a Secure Future, in which I look at career fields and occupations that have more security than most. I also look at the factors that contribute to job security and give suggestions for how you can make your job more secure.

One of the studies (PDF) that Mulligan cites to help explain this phenomenon, by economists at Boston College, looks at unemployment figures for young men and senior men over six past recessions and finds that older men used to have greater job security during slumps but this difference has been eroding. This makes it all the more noteworthy that older workers are bouncing back from unemployment so well. On the other hand, I want to point out that older workers still remain a little more secure, and this seems consistent with my finding, in the research for my book, that the more secure occupations tend to have greater-than-average concentrations of older workers. My own theory, which I have no way of proving, is that over the course of a career, workers in insecure jobs tend to lose them, whereas workers in secure jobs tend to be able to hold on, resulting in a gradual sifting of older workers out of insecure jobs and into secure jobs.

Another factor that may be in play, which was noted by some people who commented on the blog, was that older workers are likely to have better networks for finding jobs.

Mulligan explains the relatively high employment of elderly people by saying that they’re more willing to work. The Boston College study notes that older workers are less discouraged by the physical demands of work than previously because the economy now offers fewer physically demanding jobs. Now that more women are in the workforce, older men may be postponing retirement until their wives (who are, on average, three years younger) reach retirement age. Finally, those workers too young to get Medicare may be motivated to work because of the lack of post-retirement health-care benefits, which used to be a common benefit of employers but has diminished greatly over the past two decades, even as health-care costs have risen dramatically. Several of the people who commented on Mulligan’s article took up this argument, such as the elderly person who wrote, “I would not say that the elderly are ‘willing’ to work so much as they are forced to work.”

Others who left comments noted that the figures don’t indicate which workers are full-time and which are part-time. Many of these employed senior citizens may be holding part-time jobs to supplement retirement income. One wrote, “My spouse and I are senior citizens and we both work part time at two jobs. Employers would rather hire part-timers because they are less expensive. Young people have to find full-time work; empty nesters like us have fewer expenses and can just about make it on two (four all together) part-time jobs. We realize we are being exploited, but what can we do? We must supplement Social Security.”

Here’s the lesson I take away from this: The politicians who would cut back unemployment benefits and slash funding for workforce development want to believe that unemployed young people simply are not trying hard enough to find jobs. But I believe that’s a mistake. Unemployed young people tend to lack job-finding resources and, at the same time, they need jobs that they can build a life on. Their need for work is very different from the need for work experienced by senior citizens.

Career Inspiration

2011-07-13T16:05:00.001-04:00

I recently returned from a trip to New Mexico, where I had occasion to visit several old mission churches. In their gift shops, I noticed several items related to saints, many of whom were identified as patron saints of various occupations. For example, St. Thomas the Apostle is the patron saint of architects; St. Lawrence of Rome is the patron saint of cooks (apparently because he was martyred by being roasted on a gridiron); St. Martha is the patron saint of dieticians. On one website I found an amazingly thorough listing with about 400 occupational entries.

For me, this saint-oriented way of looking at careers is something entirely new, but its implications are not all that different from the implications I wrote about last year in a blog that discussed the traditional Jewish way of classifying forms of work. (That blog appeared on a page that has since been taken down, but I have re-posted it on this site.) Both of these traditions are reminders that all work has the potential of being sacred.

This notion has attracted some interest from career development practitioners and in the general culture. At this month’s meeting of the National Career Development Association, I attended a roundtable presentation on applying logotherapy to career counseling. Although not an explicitly religious approach, logotherapy is based on the principle (developed by the psychiatrist Victor Frankl) that the fundamental human need is to find meaning in one’s life. Career choice, therefore, should be based on finding meaningful work. Another presentation, which I did not attend, was about finding “a sense of calling in our work life.” Still another was about “the implications spirituality poses for career counseling.”

JIST offers a book that is explicitly about applying spiritual insights to career decisions: The Christian's Career Journey, by Susan Britton Whitcomb. The larger issue of seeking a deeper purpose in life is the theme of the colossal best-seller The Purpose Driven Life, by Rick Warren. A less explicitly religious and more metaphorical treatment of this theme is the novel A Dog’s Purpose, by W. Bruce Cameron, which I would particularly recommend to anyone who loves dogs.

May you find purpose in your work and in your life.

Two Occupational Taxonomies

2011-07-13T16:01:00.001-04:00

Note: This blog originally appeared in 2010 on another site, where it has since been taken down.

We humans love to classify things. Show us a diverse collection of objects or concepts--be they animals, cloud formations, rocks, literary works, beers, shoes, or personalities--and we’ll devise a taxonomy to classify them. This is certainly true of the world of work; several classification schemes are presently in use. Today’s blog is about one that has recently been revised and one that is over 1,500 years old (and still being used).

Federal law mandates that all occupational information be reported under the Standard Occupational Classification. Before the initial release of the SOC in 1980, the Census Bureau and the U.S. Employment Service used different taxonomies, and information could not readily be compared between the two without the use of crosswalk tables. This disconnect continued even after the release of the SOC, until the SOC was mandated as the one standard taxonomy.Because the world of work does not stand still, neither can the SOC taxonomy. As the U.S. economy changes and creates new occupations, the SOC needs to be revised regularly. Of course, revisions affect many departments in the government, so each time the SOC is revised, an interagency committee meets and deliberates over what should be added, removed, combined, split, or renamed. The 2010 release of SOC has recently been published, and I was curious to see what indications of our changing economy I could see in the revisions from the previous release.

Advances in technology are responsible for several new occupations in SOC 2010: Solar Photovoltaic Installers; Wind Turbine Service Technicians; Radio, Cellular, and Tower Equipment Installers and Repairers; Magnetic Resonance Imaging Technologists; and Genetic Counselors. Because health-care duties formerly handled by physicians are now being shifted to lower-cost workers, the new taxonomy needed to add Ophthalmic Medical Technicians and several advanced practice nursing occupations: Nurse Anesthetists, Nurse Midwives, and Nurse Practitioners. The category of Therapists now includes Exercise Physiologists. Audiologists, formerly part of Therapists, now is a category in its own right, on a par with Pharmacists and Podiatrists and indicative of its increased level of professionalism. (The doctoral degree has become the standard qualification.) The graying of America is reflected in the addition of Hearing Aid Specialists. Our increased concern with homeland security necessitated adding Transportation Security Screeners.

It’s interesting to contrast the SOC with another occupational taxonomy that was finalized roughly during the time of King Arthur and has not been changed since: the 39 categories of work according to traditional Jewish law. Everybody knows that the Sabbath is supposed to be a day of rest from work. What you may not know is that this prohibition necessitated a definition of what constitutes work. It happens that the same word, melakha (which translates roughly as “workmanship”) is used in the Torah for what God rested from on the seventh day and also for the work that went into the construction, furnishing, and provisioning of the Tabernacle that the Children of Israel created in the wilderness, following the exodus from Egypt. Therefore, Jewish law defined the different kinds of work (the plural, melakhot) by itemizing the tasks that created the Tabernacle. So, for example, the taxonomy includes carrying, igniting a fire, knotting, harvesting, grinding, shearing wool, writing, and building, among other tasks.

As I noted earlier, this taxonomy has not been changed in all these years. But neither has the highest level of categories in the SOC, which consists of 23 groups, such as Management Occupations and Protective Service Occupations. The difference is that the SOC taxonomy specifies lower levels of detail, whereas Jewish law leaves the specifics open to interpretation and therefore does not create a structure that has to be updated in response to changing social conditions and technologies. For example, after the invention of electricity, the category of igniting a fire was interpreted to include using electric power, because electricity is equivalent to a spark or because using it means closing a circuit, which is taken to be a kind of construction or completion. In this example, we can also see the problem that emerges when the taxonomy’s specifics are left open to interpretation, because some progressive scholars of Jewish law reject the equation of electricity with fire and permit its use on the Sabbath.

But let’s set aside these squabbles over interpretation and reconsider the basis of the taxonomy of the 39 melakhot. You may think that the traditional religious attitude toward work is that it’s a curse that was imposed on Adam, and my previous two blogs (about job dissatisfaction) indicated that for many people it is. However, the basis of the 39 melakhot suggests that all work has the potential for holiness. It can serve a purpose greater than just putting bread on the table. I think that many workers are dissatisfied because they feel the work they’re doing lacks a larger purpose. I would advise these workers to think about a job change or a career change that provides that purpose.

To that end, I guess this is as good a place as any to plug one of my books, 150 Best Jobs for a Better World.

The Hollywood Model of Employment

2011-06-22T12:00:00.000-04:00

In 2011 Career Plan and many other books, I write mostly about careers that people pursue by going to work for someone else. To be sure, freelance or self-employed work is not uncommon in some occupations I describe. When I write about job-hunting, however, I generally write in terms of getting hired. However, some people who write about the future of work suggest that this kind of work arrangement is soon going to fade away. It’s an intriguing theory, but I don’t buy it.

The argument is that the “Hollywood model” will become the new norm. In the days of black-and-white movies, Hollywood studios kept writers, directors, cinematographers, editors, set designers, and other workers--even actors--under contract as full-time employees. But nowadays a movie producer brings together a team of workers with no commitments beyond the project at hand.

Some futurists argue that this will become the model for other industries--all the more likely as we see decreases in noncreative work, such as mass manufacturing, and increases in more creative work, such as research and development. Teams of creative workers will come together for a project and disband when it’s completed.

This new work arrangement is supposed to make the creative industries more competitive. It gives the project manager (in Hollywood, that would be the producer) the ability to put together the most appropriate team for the particular project and gives the talented workers the freedom to choose which projects to work in. This is supposed to increase the creativity of the output, because flexibility in the makeup of the team should avoid a cookie-cutter approach to the creative process. Moreover, this arrangement is supposed to save money, because the organization (in Hollywood, that would be the studio or production company) is not carrying the overhead of a large staff of salaried employees.

This alleged trend toward ad-hoc work arrangements should be encouraged by modern telecommunications technology. Nowadays you don’t even have to be on the same continent as your teammates to collaborate on many types of projects. In addition, traditional notions of loyalty to one’s employer have long since crumbled and no longer present a barrier to a more tentative employment relationship.

In the late 1990s, I had been reading several books that argued that this was the emerging model for work. At the time, I was convinced by this reasoning, and I even drafted an article arguing in favor of this prediction.

But I no longer believe that this change will happen anytime soon. One reason for my skepticism is the passage of time: Almost all of these factors have been present for the past 15 years, yet no paradigm shift has occurred so far.

You, too, may become a skeptic after visiting your local multiplex. Has the Hollywood model really contained movie production costs? And after the umpteenth movie in which an odd couple hits the road, an irresponsible schlubby guy woos a hot gal, or a superhero battles the forces of evil, do you really think Hollywood is more creative now than in the heyday of Louis B. Mayer and the Warner Brothers?

In the current model for the film industry, word of mouth quickly kills off every movie except a few blockbusters. Seeking a blockbuster, then, producers spend megabucks to inject larger-than-life stars or larger-than-life special effects into a predictable concept that has been pre-sold to the public, such as a formulaic plot, a sequel, or a 30-year-old television show. I wonder whether other creative industries can achieve any better results by following the Hollywood model. Software publishing may be the dominant industry of this kind, and almost all the applications on my desktop are only cosmetically improved over what I was running a decade ago. Most of the advances in software have resulted from breakthroughs in hardware platforms.

Here are some important factors that I believe will continue to discourage project-based work arrangements in the near future:

Health insurance costs continue to climb, and we’re seeing only slow movement at best away from a system that is employer-based and that can deny you coverage easily when you’re not a full-time worker.

Job security has become a much greater concern since the onset of the Great Recession. (This is why the book I’m working on right now is called 150 Best Jobs for a Secure Future.) People realize that we are a long way from recovery of the jobs lost and that few safeguards have been put in place to prevent a repeat of the financial collapse. Because job loss means loss of health insurance, couples increasingly want at least one partner to have steady employment.

The trend toward creative work means that an increasing number of companies are engaged constantly in creative projects and do not need to dismiss their workers after one project is finished. Creative workers are needed now more than ever, and so the companies that have identified and used their talents are reluctant to let them scatter to the four winds.

Companies that only occasionally need creative workers can sometimes fill these needs by finding full-time employees who work elsewhere but are willing to moonlight. Moonlight income is very welcome these days of stagnant salaries in most industries.

The project-based work arrangement requires creative workers to spend part of their work time lining up the next project. Many creative workers find this a drag on their ability to focus on the project at hand.

I am living proof of what I’m describing. After I was downsized in the late 1990s by a company that had only intermittent need of creative workers (at least in my area of expertise), I worked as a consultant for some years, doing project-based assignments. One such assignment, from JIST Publishing, turned into a series of assignments, then a half-time job, and finally a full-time job when JIST discovered that my skills were a good fit for the company’s needs and would be in constant demand. The same modern communications media that allowed me to work for JIST from home on a project-by-project basis enable me to work for JIST from home now as a regular employee.

The Great Recession has made me even more convinced than before that the traditional work arrangement remains preferable to a project-based scheme. I believe that my view is not idiosyncratic but is shared by most workers who theoretically should be able to work in a project-based arrangement.

Licensure Affects Health-Care Costs and Earnings

2011-06-15T09:28:00.001-04:00

Three years ago I blogged about a study of occupational licensure. (The blog appeared on a site where it has since been taken down, but I have reposted it on this site for your perusal.) The study found that in 2006, 29 percent of the national workforce was licensed by some level of government, a percentage much higher than I expected. The economists also found that licensure provides a pay boost roughly equivalent of that of union membership: about 15 percent. One reason it does this is by limiting occupational entry, thus reducing competition.

Last week I came upon a more recent study (PDF) by two labor economists--Morris M. Kleiner of the University of Minnesota and Kyoung Won Park of Case Western Reserve University--that focuses on just two licensed occupations: dentists and dental hygienists. The research caught my eye partly because of my continuing interest in the effects of licensure and partly because dental hygienists is an occupation that I frequently include in books about highly rewarding occupations, such as Best Jobs for the 21st Century. In the sixth edition, which I just finished writing, it ranks sixth among the best 400 occupations, with average annual income of $68,250, projected growth of 36.1% from 2008-2018, and 9,840 annual job openings projected. To these rewards, add the attractions that one can enter this career with only an associate degree, and it offers many opportunities for part-time work.

But another unusual fact about dental hygienists is that the occupation’s licensing standards in almost all states are set not by its own practitioners, but rather by practitioners of another occupation, dentists. Dental hygienists were created as an occupation that would help dentists by taking over certain routine tasks of patient care, especially cleaning teeth and teaching patients techniques of good preventive dental care.

As the occupation has evolved, some dental hygienists have attempted to increase their autonomy and get out from under the supervision of dentists. So far, this effort has been only partly successful. In 1988, Colorado became the first state that allowed dental hygienists to practice without the direct supervision of a dentist. As of 2007, only seven states allowed dental hygienists to be self-employed other than as independent contractors, and only three of these states allowed them to own a dental hygiene practice. These independent practitioners can do various tasks besides cleaning, such as application of sealants, fluoride treatments, or X-rays, but the particular mix of tasks varies between states. As a result of the legal restrictions in most states, only 0.1 percent of dental hygienists are self-employed, compared to 28.0 percent of dentists.

The economists who researched these two occupations found a good reason for dentists to restrict the autonomy of dental hygienists, entirely apart from the best interests of patients: It turns out that in states where dental hygienists can practice independently, their hourly earnings are approximately 10 percent higher, and those of dentists approximately 16 percent lower, than in other states. In addition, employment growth for dental hygienists is about 6 percent higher where they can practice independently, whereas for dentists it is about 26 percent lower.

One finding with implications for public policy is that allowing dental hygienists to practice independently reduces a state’s dental-care costs by 1 percent. It also broadens employment options for women, because dental hygienists are about 98 percent female, whereas dentists are about 78 percent male. Furthermore (and here I’m just speculating), it may provide additional opportunities for social mobility, because a career as a dental hygienist may appear attainable to young people who come from families that have no history of college completion and who (rightly or wrongly) rule out the goal of becoming a dentist. In other words, the independent practice of dental hygiene may provide an on-ramp to the middle class for some people.

As for dental hygienists, so for nurse practitioners: you will also find great variation in state laws regulating their ability to work independently. In some states, especially Western states with a lot of rural territory where doctors are scarce, nurse practitioners can act as primary-care providers. It would be interesting to see a similar study of how these state-to-state differences correlate with the earnings of nurse practitioners and physicians--and also the impact on health-care costs, which are currently the focus of much political discussion.

Prosaic Licenses

2011-06-01T11:30:00.000-04:00

Note: This blog originally appeared on another site in 2008, where it has since been taken down.

In a book that I’m presently working on (Your $100,000 Career Plan: Match Your Personality to a Six-Figure Job), I classify a group of occupations under the heading “professional,” and one common characteristic I note among them (they include architects, lawyers, physicians, dentists, and veterinarians, among others) is that they are all licensed. However, it seems that licensure is not as exclusive an occupational characteristic as it once was. One recent study, “The Prevalence and Effects of Occupationhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifal Licensing,” estimates that 29 percent of the national workforce is licensed by some level of government.

That figure surprised me. Evidently the percentage is so much higher than I expected partly because past estimates have been based solely on state licensure requirements and partly because the number of licensed occupations has grown in recent years. The researchers who conducted this study in 2006, Morris M. Kleiner of the University of Minnesota and the prolific Alan B. Krueger of Princeton, based their finding on a specially designed Gallup survey asking respondents “Does your job require a license by a federal, state, or local government agency?”

It’s important to remember what a license is and is not. Some occupations, such as pet groomer, are open to anyone who wants to offer his or her services. (The results of this free market are evident in the unpredictable appearance of my neighbor’s West Highland White Terrier.) Registration is a requirement that some jurisdictions impose on workers in some other occupations. For example, to keep bees in Rhode Island, you must register with the state. This requirement probably is in place so that the state’s Department of Environmental Management knows where the beehives are and thus is able to conduct inspections for communicable diseases. Certification is usually awarded by a professional organization as recognition that the practitioner has met certain standards, such as a specified level or kind of education, a specified amount of work experience, or a passing score on a test of occupational skills, knowledge, and perhaps professional ethics. By definition, certification usually is not a legal requirement, but in many occupations it is a sign of professionalism. Licensure usually imposes entry requirements similar to those of certification, but it differs in that it is required by law.

In many foreign countries, registration means the same thing as licensure; this meaning survives in our term “registered nurses,” who actually are licensed. In some foreign countries where all professional workers are educated at state-run universities, there is no distinction between licensure and certification in these occupations because professional status is awarded by the universities.

So what is the benefit of licensure that has caused it to become so widespread? Occupational licensure began as a way to ensure the competence of workers who make life-and-death decisions—for example, doctors. For many years, it has been extended to other occupations that might have great impact on people’s lives and well-being, such as structural engineers and lawyers. But the function of licensure has slowly changed, largely because of the nature of the people who control it. Licensure is enforced by government, but inevitably the people who set the standards of professionalism, who specify the contents of the licensing exam, and who determine the wording of the code of ethics are the practitioners. And, for the most part, these are the same people who have encouraged licensure in fields where previously it did not exist. In most fields, practitioners have a vested interest in minimizing competition, so licensure benefits them—but not necessarily the public—by creating a barrier to occupational entry. Kleiner and Krueger found that licensure provides a pay boost roughly equivalent of that of union membership: about 15 percent.

In Maine, for example, you need a license to dig for marine worms. The state imposed this license not because careless worm-digging could endanger anyone’s life, but rather to protect Maine’s worm-diggers from having to share their beaches with out-of-state diggers.

I’m not a market fundamentalist, and recent events in the financial sector have underscored the important role government needs to play in the economy. I wouldn’t want to be operated on by a doctor who lacked a physician’s license. However, I’m not sure that the expansion of licensure is always a good thing.

A Graphic Look at Secure and Insecure Industries

2011-06-01T10:40:00.005-04:00

Right now I’m working on a book called 150 Best Jobs for a Secure Future, which is intended to take the place of 150 Best Recession-Proof Jobs. I received a lot of media coverage, including face time on several TV networks, when Recession-Proof came out, thanks to the efforts of JIST’s crackerjack publicist, Selena Dehne, and also because the book came out just as the recession was taking its heaviest toll and the subject of the book thus had newsworthiness.

Now that I’m working on a similar concept, I’m trying to benefit from hindsight. Did all 150 occupations included in the book weather the recession with no layoffs? Of course not. In fact, almost every occupation you can think of has a certain number of layoffs and dismissals, even in good times. Think of layoffs as like body temperature: There’s a certain rate, like our normal 98.6 degrees, that can be considered healthy. A better question to ask is whether some of the occupations in the earlier book experienced a considerable uptick in layoffs, a feverish recessionary level. Sadly, some did, but that’s not surprising. The Great Recession was ever so much worse than any we have experienced since the 1930s, and some occupations that are barely affected by normal recessions did experience a higher level of job loss.

One lesson that I learned from the previous book is that in considerations of job security, it is helpful to think not only in terms of occupations but also in terms of industries. Some industries are much less sensitive to the ups and downs of the economy than others. That’s something I stated in the earlier book, but this time I’m constructing the lists of best jobs based on industry-specific data for occupations. So, for example, a given occupation may appear as tenth on the list of best jobs in educational services but as twenty-second (or maybe not at all) on the list of best jobs in government.

I’ve used several lines of research for selecting the most secure industries, but perhaps the most dramatic is the graphic that appears below. (This ties in nicely with my blog of two weeks ago, in which I discussed the importance of graphicacy--skill with using and understanding visual representations.)

Layoff and Discharge Rates (Percent) in Selected Industries

Source: JOLTS database, BLS

I created this graph from data I downloaded from the Department of Labor’s Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS). It shows the average annual percentage rate of layoffs and discharges in several major industries over the previous decade. The first thing you should notice is the bold black line, which represents all private-sector industries. You’ll note that over the course of the last decade, it starts out flat (at around 1.7%), coasts down along a very slight mid-decade dip, trends upward beginning in 2007, hits a peak in 2009, and then slopes downward, reaching about the lowest point of the previous decade. The impact of the Great Recession is obvious, and this is the line against which you should compare the other lines in the chart.

Now let’s focus on the lowest and flattest lines on the chart. The star performer here is the bold robin’s-egg blue line that represents education and health care, which maintains a steady rate of between 8.0% and 9.0% over the course of the decade. You can barely see the recessionary uptick that appears along almost all the other lines. You can be sure I’m going to include this industry (actually, the two smaller industries it subsumes) in the book I’m working on now.

Government, the pink line, is another interesting industry to observe. It begins the decade with the lowest rate of all, 0.5%, and maintains the lowest rate until the very end of the decade. Note that it actually slopes downwards slightly from 2007 to 2008, when almost every other industry is beginning to see increased layoffs. It parallels the other industries in sloping upward after 2008, but it is unique in that it continues this upward slope even after the private-sector industries start seeing diminished layoffs. It’s not hard to understand why you’re seeing increasing government layoffs here: reduced tax revenues and politicians who have experienced an overnight conversion to deficit hawkishness. Nevertheless, I’m going to include government as one of the industries in the new book, because there are several kinds of government workers (such as in law enforcement) that are essential and will not be dismissed unless we are prepared to model our country after Somalia.

Note also the green line that partially overlaps with the robins’-egg blue education and health care line. This is finance and insurance. You’ll observe that it’s a little more volatile than education and health care, but it still shows fewer perturbations than most of the other industries and overall maintains one of the lowest rates of layoffs and discharges.

The most sensitive industry on this chart, with the widest swings and a very high layoff rate to begin with, is construction, the red line. But the one that particularly fascinates me is the yellow line for arts, entertainment, and recreation, which keeps changing places with construction as the industry with the highest layoff rate. This industry is the most countercyclical of all those shown here, actually doing better as the recession sets in. I’m not going to include either of these two industries in the book.

Big Data: The Next Career Field?

2011-05-25T11:12:00.002-04:00

Yesterday I completed the manuscript for the next edition of Best Jobs for the 21st Century. The book actually focuses on the next ten years, but I often wonder about longer-term prospects for career growth in the United States. Where will tomorrow’s jobs come from? Here’s one possibility.

Early in the 20th century, geologists discovered a huge pool of oil beneath the ground near Beaumont, Texas. Other petroleum deposits soon were identified in California and Oklahoma, and these natural resources led to thousands of jobs and billions of dollars of revenue. Our economy has exploited many other natural resources, such as timber, fish, and fresh water, sometimes creating shortages when demand exceeds supply. But perhaps the next huge resource that will be exploited is not a natural resource, not even something tangible, but rather massive quantities of data. This is what a recent report (PDF) from McKinsey Global Institute argues, and the report makes a good case.

It’s estimated that the volume of business data doubles roughly every 1.2 years. Every time you order something online, you’re generating data about your purchasing and payment behavior. The logistics process of getting the product to you generates additional data. Postings on Facebook, geotagged photos on Flickr, items on eBay or Craig’s List, media that stream on YouTube or Internet radio, all these and countless other quantities of data are generated every minute of the day, and the way (including the location from which) people respond to each of these items creates more data.

This pool of data, like a pool of oil, can be exploited for economic value, but it has the additional benefit of never running dry. Not only is new data constantly being generated, but consumption of data doesn’t use it up. It can be analyzed and reanalyzed. Any number of users can exploit it simultaneously.

The most successful current users of big data are Google, Bing, Yahoo, and other search providers. They use it two ways: (1) They create an index of Web content that is ranked according to how many links exist to the content, and (2) when you use this index, they sell information about your clicking behavior to advertisers. But these search providers only scratch the surface of all the data that’s out there.

The authors of the report (try as you may, you just can’t avoid calling a bulletin from McKinsey a “McKinsey report”) emphasize that what makes big data a new resource, different from past uses of business data, is its size: We already have business tools that exploit various databases, but the potential for innovative work lies in finding ways to analyze data at larger scales than have ever been attempted before. In fact, the authors make a point of defining “big data” as a kind of moving target rather than as a fixed number of terabytes, because as the volume of data doubles and redoubles, the scale of the analytical task will continuously create new challenges. Success in this field is not a matter of being able to analyze data, but rather being able to analyze bigger data sets than ever before.

Another dimension of the analytical challenge that defines this new resource (and the occupations that it will spawn) is the speed with which the big-data analysis can be done. We’re already gotten used to being able to track the delivery route of a package within a few hours of real time or the actual arrival time of an airline flight within a few minutes. Wall Street has developed ways to react within milliseconds to fluctuations in the value of securities. Some of the innovations that will be developed for use of big data will be methods of accomplishing instant analysis and response--and doing so in ways that have controls to prevent snowballing events such as the “flash crash” of 2010, in which the Dow Jones plunged about 9 percent within minutes, only to rebound just as quickly.

It’s obvious that marketers will have uses for the outputs of this work. So will governments, which can improve services by better segmenting the population. Law enforcement and defense are already reaping the benefits of using large-scale, real-time monitoring of events to trigger and coordinate a rapid response.

This kind of work will be done by teams that are highly creative and have outstanding technical and communications skills. In other words, it is the kind of work that America has always been good at. The major hurdle that needs to be overcome is the projected shortage of skilled workers. As the report notes, we face “a shortage of 140,000 to 190,000 people with analytical expertise and 1.5 million managers and analysts with the skills to understand and make decisions based on the analysis of big data.” So here is another reason why we need to improve STEM education and career development, make higher education more meritocratic, and (if Americans fail to step up to the plate) facilitate immigration of skilled foreigners.

Do You Mind If I Get Graphic?

2011-05-18T12:31:00.000-04:00

This week I was alerted to a skill that I had not thought about or heard about before. I was actually starting to think about this skill when I discovered that someone had already given it a name.

A journalist asked me to respond to some questions about what’s involved in career changes. In the response I composed, I wanted to call attention to my recent book The Sequel, so I emphasized the importance of accumulated knowledge. One of my purposes in that book is to balance the conventional emphasis on skills with this emphasis on knowledge, which is particularly relevant to career changers (as opposed to young people just starting out).

But the journalist specifically asked about important transferable skills, so I included a discussion that began by identifying communication skills as a key to employability. I mentioned that nonverbal skills are a significant part of these skills. When I first wrote that, I was thinking in terms of body language: being able to interpret the physical cues given off by people in conversation (or even when they’re not speaking) and being careful to project the right cues.

However, as I reread this discussion a day later I started thinking about other forms of nonverbal communication--specifically, graphics. If you follow my Twitter feed (LaurenceShatkin), you know that I’m very fond of Web postings with graphs and maps that communicate information about jobs and the state of the economy. A good example is a webpage at the Bureau of Labor Statistics that uses several kinds of colorful graphs--bar, line, pie, and scatter plot--to convey the latest statistics about women in the workforce. Because I use graphics in conference presentations and occasionally in my books, I appreciate that deciding on the most effective use of graphics is not as easy as it appears to those who haven’t tried it. Interpreting graphs also is not as easy as it sometimes appears. Interpretation obviously is a challenge if a graph is poorly composed, but even a well-organized graph can be challenging when it is based on complex concepts, such as the bar chart I found on Paul Krugman’s webpage this week, comparing the projected health-care spending of 65-year-olds under three scenarios, one of which is the budget proposed by Representative Paul Ryan. (The graphic is taken from a report by the Congressional Budget Office—PDF.)

In addition to data-based graphics, pictorial graphics can be very useful in communication. If you’ve ever played the game Pictionary, you know that levels of skill with this kind of graphic can vary widely. People who want to use this type of graphic have access to several styles, from highly realistic portraits to stylized cartoons to symbolic glyphs.

Even as I was thinking about these other nonverbal forms of communication, by pure chance I received a tweet from a friend, Nancy Millichap, about a skill called “graphicacy,” which was exactly the skill I had in mind. Think of graphicacy as analogous to literacy or numeracy. Nancy’s tweet linked to a blog entry by a geographer, Diana Stuart Sinton, which in turn referenced an article written in 2000 by two British psychologists, Frances Aldrich and Linda Sheppard: “Graphicacy”: the Fourth “R”? (PDF). The two psychologists make the case for teaching graphicacy to all schoolchildren to “equip them with a communication skill that will be useful throughout their lives.”

Obviously, some occupations require a high level of graphicacy than others. The need is greatest in occupations that involve the graphic arts or lots of data. But, like reading and writing, this is a fundamental communication skill that is needed at one level or another in all kinds of work. You will not find this among the skills in the O*NET database, but there is a case to be made for adding it.

Why College Drags on So Long

2011-05-11T10:00:00.000-04:00

In Anton Chekhov’s play The Cherry Orchard, one of the memorable characters is Trofimov, a student who is crowding thirty but seems to have no pressing desire or need to leave the university (although he preaches the need for Russians to work). The student who graduates and then moves back to his parents’ home is the more familiar stereotype, but the perpetual student remains a well-known image. In fact, there is evidence that college students are taking increasing amounts of time to complete their bachelor’s degrees. This behavior runs counter to the expectation that students would seek faster completion because of the steadily increasing value of a college degree. Having recently written a book about college majors, Panicked Student's Guide to Choosing a College Major, I wondered whether there is a connection between lengthy college stays and indecisiveness about choice of college majors.

Elongation of college attendance in Saudi Arabia actually brought me some work about 10 years ago. College students there pay no tuition and even earn a stipend while they are enrolled, so these students lack some of the pressures toward degree completion that most American students feel. In the wake of the first Gulf War, which the kingdom had largely financed, and as the result of a period of low oil prices, the Saudi government was facing financial difficulties and wanted to reduce the expenses of supporting the large number of slow degree completers. A Saudi university asked me to develop a computer-based program, which eventually took shape as Career Oasis, to help college students decide on a career and a major. I don’t know whether or not Career Oasis actually resulted in speedier degree completion, and I have reason to be skeptical, because indecisiveness seems not to have been the major reason Saudi students were tarrying on campus.

Recent research suggests that indecisiveness also is not the major reason for delayed degree completion in the United States. Ironically, the situation here seem to be opposite of what I found in Saudi Arabia. The problem here is not the generosity of the university and the financial security that students feel; rather, it’s the paucity of university resources and the lack of student financing.

In “Increasing Time to Baccalaureate Degree in the United States” (PDF), three researchers (John Bound, Michael F. Lovenheim, and Sarah Turner) looked at longitudinal data about American college students and their rate of degree completion. The researchers found that most of the slow-down in the rate of completion can be attributed to students “who begin their postsecondary education at public colleges outside the most selective universities,” especially low-income students. The reason was not that these students are more poorly prepared to complete college.

One important reason the researchers found is the crowding that occurs when the student-to-faculty ratio climbs at financially strapped universities. Students find that they cannot enroll in the next course they need to take for their major, either because it is not being offered or because they are at the rear of the queue.

The other major reason for delayed graduation is the financial pressures on students to work to pay for the ever-increasing costs of college. Every hour spent working is an hour not spent on completing degree requirements.

Even if indecisiveness is not the main cause of delayed degree completion, I know that it is a factor for some students, so I expect that my Panicked Student’s Guide will help shorten some undergraduate stays. Perhaps more important, the book can motivate students by steering them towards more satisfying majors, and it can make their time in college--however long that is--turn out to be a better investment by leading to a more satisfying career.

Arts Grads Find Fulfilling Careers

2011-05-04T10:41:00.001-04:00

Young people considering a career in the arts can take some encouragement from a survey (PDF) that was released this week, showing that arts degrees can lead to satisfying careers. The Strategic National Arts Alumni Project (SNAAP), which conducted the survey, is a research project of the Indiana University Center for Postsecondary Research, in collaboration with the Vanderbilt University Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy.

The researchers surveyed 13,581 alumni of 154 arts high schools, arts colleges and conservatories, and arts schools and departments within universities. The disciplines included all of the arts: fine arts, theater, dance, music, creative writing, media arts, film, design, and architecture.

The respondents felt good about their education, with 90% reporting that their overall experience at their institution was either good or excellent and 76% saying they would attend the same institution again.

Perhaps the single most heartening finding was that 92% of those who wish to work currently are employed, and most found employment soon after graduating. Two-thirds said their first job was a close match for the kind of work they wanted. And almost three-quarters (74%) of those who intended to work as a professional artist had done so at some point since graduating.

However, professional artists don’t work under the same arrangements as most accountants or insurance agents. More than six in ten of them were self-employed at some point, and more than half of those currently working as professional artists hold at least two jobs. (Contrary to the stereotype, only 3% of them are working in food service.)

Job security is a problem, with only one-third of the professional artists reporting satisfaction with that aspect of their work. On the other hand, many said they were very satisfied with the opportunities their job offered them to do work that reflected their personality, interests and values: 80% of fine artists, 71% of photographers, 68% of dancers or choreographers, 68% of actors, and 61% of musicians. By contrast, only one-third of art directors, graphic designers, and Web designers reported the same sense of satisfaction. Apparently working against deadlines for clients is not as fulfilling, although it can offer more employment opportunities.

Although many of the alumni are not working in the arts industry as such, 54% of these said their arts training is relevant to the job in which they spend the majority of their time. Their main reason for not working as artists was lack of employment. Another important factor was debt, including student loans. Of those who had worked as professional artists but later changed course, more than half said they did so because of higher pay or more job security outside the arts. It’s significant that 71% of those not currently working as professional artists nevertheless continue to make or publicly perform their art.

Arts alumni also transmit their skills and knowledge to others. Slightly more than half have taught in the arts at some time in their careers. Thirty-seven percent of them have volunteered at an arts organization, compared to 2% of the general population.

I admit a personal interest in this survey because my daughter is an art school graduate who decided to make her career in a completely different field, teaching English as a second language (ESL). It’s significant that in the classes she taught as a teaching assistant in her master’s program, she incorporated some of the concepts she learned in art school, showing her students examples of artistic rhetoric as well as verbal rhetoric. She has applied for a job teaching ESL at an art institute, and even if she doesn’t get that job (although it’s hard to think how anyone could be more qualified--okay, I’m not objective about this!), I’m sure her work and leisure activities will benefit from her skills and interest in art.

If you are the parent of a child who is planning to study the arts, I hope this survey reduces some of your parental anxieties. Your son or daughter is not necessarily fated to starve in a garret.

Career Decision Making and Career Planning Are Not the Same Thing

2011-04-27T12:00:00.002-04:00

People sometimes use the terms “career decision making” and “career planning” almost interchangeably. One reason may be that both the decisions and the plans are supposed to be based on predictions. The decision is based on foreseeing what career choice will be satisfying and will offer opportunities. The planning is based on foreseeing the best pathway for reaching the career goal. However, as Niels Bohr once remarked, prediction is very difficult, especially about the future. Many people who are happy and successful in a career can say truthfully that their choice makes sense only in hindsight and would have been difficult or impossible to predict or plan for.

I offer my own career as a case in point. I showed an early flair for writing and was intrigued with the idea of writing books ever since the children’s author Beman Lord spoke to my fourth-grade class. However, I was even more obsessed with collecting. I started with a rock collection and later branched out to seashells and, to a lesser extent, stamps. I learned all the minutiae of the things that I collected and devised new ways to organize and display them. My parents sometimes speculated that I had a future career as a museum curator.

With adolescence, however, my interest shifted toward collecting odd facts. I remember that after I mentioned some obscure bit of trivia, my eighth-grade wood shop teacher declared me the Official Keeper of Useless Information. In the perfect vision of hindsight, it now appears inevitable that I would find satisfaction and success in writing books that draw heavily on databases of information. What is a database, after all, if not an organized collection of facts?

But it’s important to realize that the word “database” was known to only a few hundred computer scientists and programmers in the early 1960s. In those days, most people didn’t know any databases other than the phone book and the daily stocks-and-bonds listings. Hardly anyone at that time expected that databases would become easy and inexpensive to access and use.

In my first job at Educational Testing Service, I started writing career information for a database, and within a few years I learned how to create and manipulate new databases. My managers recognized my interest and ability with these tasks and encouraged me. Although I learned some programming skills to accomplish my tasks, the programming never interested me as much as finding ways to make the databases helpful to users. Later, JIST Publishing gave me the opportunity to build books around databases of career information.

It was not inevitable that the particular subject matter I would focus on would be careers. (One database I helped design and assemble at ETS was about books for young people.) But one appeal of career information is that it touches on almost every aspect of life and therefore appeals to my broad range of interests.

The main lesson to draw from this account is a recognition of the limitations of career planning. To the extent that planning can be successful, it depends on prediction, and predictions are very unreliable. Occupational specializations that we can’t foresee will emerge in the coming years, and each one will prove to be a good choice for the right kind of person. Like generals planning to fight the previous war, most young people are planning for yesterday’s careers, not knowing what new opportunities will be available. So learn to accept the reality that career decision making and career planning are not the same thing. A lot of career decisions that get made are unplanned, and there’s nothing wrong with that, as John Krumboltz argues.

This does not mean that career strategizing is impossible. The best strategy for facing uncertainty is to be (a) prepared for many contingencies and (b) alert to emerging opportunities. With regard to careers, being prepared for a range of outcomes means getting a broad-based education that equips you with skills for communicating, problem-solving, critical thinking, calculating, and (above all) learning. Being alert to career possibilities means keeping abreast of trends in demographics, technology, popular culture, and business practices and (above all) having a network of contacts in many walks of life. I can’t think of a better way to summarize this two-pronged strategy than the words of the second century sage Simon ben Zoma: “Who is wise? The person who learns from all people.”

College Loans: The Next Bubble?

2011-04-14T10:09:00.000-04:00

Last year, for the first time, the level of student debt ran higher than the level of credit card debt. This happened partly because credit card use has been on a downward slope ever since late 2008 and partly because the upward slope of college tuition loans shows no sign of leveling off. The two trends are, of course, related. The recession has caused consumers to use credit cards less and has also caused more people to seek higher education to compete for scarce job openings (or to take a leave of absence from the discouraging job market), taking out loans because they and their families are less able to pay their own way.

This trend worries me for several reasons. One is the big-picture worry that we’re seeing the growth of a bubble. Like the housing bubble, this one involves people taking on lots of debt to acquire a commodity that they desire because it keeps increasing in value.

The present situation differs from the housing bubble, however, in some important ways. The value of houses kept increasing because of constant demand from home buyers and then crashed when the market became glutted with houses that were foreclosed on. The value of a college degree, however, keeps increasing because of the demands of employers. Even for positions where bachelor’s-level skills are not needed, employers tend to prefer job applicants with a degree, and it seems unlikely that this behavior will change. Unlike a house, a college degree is something the banks can’t repossess and throw on the market, so it’s hard to foresee a scenario in which bachelor’s or associate degree suddenly loses its value. Yes, there are a lot of people with college degrees who are unemployed right now, but the recession has hit those without degrees much harder.

The way this bubble might pop would be if massive numbers of college loan holders defaulted on their loans, like the homeowners who walked away from their houses after the value of the houses sank below the value of the outstanding mortgage. Many tuition borrowers have technically gone into default. Last year, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported that one-fifth of the loans that went into repayment in 1995 were in default. With college loans, however, precisely because there is no real estate that can be repossessed, lenders can continue to extract repayment from borrowers who have fallen behind in their scheduled payments. Bankruptcy does not generally free tuition borrowers from their repayment obligations. Lenders can garnish wagers; for federal loans, the government can also garnish tax refunds and even disability checks and Social Security payments. The danger is that in a future wave of college loan defaults, even these methods of extracting payments would not be sufficient to save lending institutions from a crash similar to what happened when the housing market collapsed.

Although there is reason to worry about what might happen at the macro level, I’m more concerned about what’s already happening at the micro level. Tuition borrowers who fall behind in their payments take a severe blow to their credit ratings and may be unable to borrow to buy a house or car. Even those who are able to keep up may find that the burden of loan repayments cuts into their disposable income for many years. Young people sometimes talk about the problem of when to tell a potential mate about your college loan. Second date? Third date? With rueful humor, they sometimes compare it to having a herpes infection or a family history of insanity.

From my perspective as a writer about career development, I’m particularly concerned about the effect of college debt on career choice. I fear that the burden of college debt sways too many students to elect majors that are potentially lucrative but ill-suited to them. An article on the Yahoo! site mentioned a student who graduated from Northeastern University with $200,000 in debt. She probably could have managed her college planning better (for example, starting at a community college and not taking a semester abroad), but it’s interesting to note how many people who commented on the story assailed her for majoring in sociology. For example, one person wrote, “I would pick a major with a higher ROI if I knew I was gonna rack up that much debt.” I would hate to see the day come when only students from well-off families can major in the liberal arts or social sciences.

Workers Who Make House Calls

2011-04-06T13:18:00.000-04:00

I think I may be perceiving a new trend in business: house calls. I don’t have any statistics to back up my conjecture, but I believe that we will see an increasing number of businesses that come to your house to perform various kinds of service. Businesses that adopt this practice will have a competitive edge over the services that require you to come to their shop or office. This business arrangement may also provide unique job satisfactions for the workers making the house calls.

I became conscious of this trend a couple of weeks ago, when a van pulled up in front of my next-door neighbor’s house. A man from the van wheeled my neighbor’s lawn tractor out of her garage, upended it, and proceeded to give it the kinds of service that are needed now that the grass is starting to sprout: changing the oil, spark plug, air filter, oil filter, and fuel filter, sharpening the blades, and lubricating where needed. Last year, she arranged for a shop to pick up the lawn tractor on a trailer and service it in their shop. It took this shop a whole month to return the tractor, and that business charged more than the man who made the house call this year. I was so impressed with my neighbor’s experience that I had the man with the van come back two days ago and to service my lawn tractor.

Several other industries are finding house calls a useful business model. You may have seen Geek Squad cars in your community or may know of a similar service that comes to people’s homes to fix computer problems. You may have seen a van-based worker replacing a cracked windshield. (They can also do that at the parking lot of the business where you work.) I know of a pet groomer who parks her van in your driveway so Fido can get a wash and a trim just a few steps from the front door. Some physicians are reviving a practice that was common in my childhood, the doctor’s house call.

House calls have always been standard for service technicians who work with appliances that are not portable, such as your furnace or washing machine, but several economic factors are converging to encourage more occupations to adopt this business model. One is the increasing number of retirees (like my neighbor) and people who work at home (like me). We appreciate the convenience of not having to leave home and have considerable flexibility about the times when the house call can happen. Computer technology, perhaps combined with a geographical database, is making it easier to schedule house calls and route the van to your door with maximum efficiency. Cell phones and wireless network capability allow the business to change the service professional’s appointments in mid-day, perhaps in response to emergencies, whether this is coordinated from some central office or from inside the van itself. Smart phones allow the service professional to consult online manuals, order parts, or consult records of past service (such as your medical records) from your driveway or bedside. Miniaturization is allowing increasingly complex tools to be taken on the road. Did you know that a doctor can now do a skin biopsy in your driveway?

Admittedly, this business model may remain uncommon in many service occupations that are capable of using it. But, besides giving a competitive edge to some businesses, it can offer workers some job satisfactions they would not get in a shop- or office-based setting. It provides a constant change of scene, a form of workday variety that many people enjoy. It allows the worker to interact with clients in a more casual and emotionally warm environment. It gives the worker greater autonomy. While traveling between calls, the worker may need to deal with the annoyances of traffic jams and adverse weather conditions, but this interval may also provide a chance for the worker to decompress between appointments.

The Post-Interview Thank-You Note

2011-03-30T12:02:00.001-04:00

The post-interview thank-you note (in scope, it should be more of a note than a letter) serves at least three purposes. First, it shows courtesy, thus adding to whatever rapport you accomplished in the interview. This is important, because a major question in the interviewer’s mind, entirely apart from your technical skills, is whether you’ll be a nice person to work with. You can reinforce this impression by handwriting the message on attractive note stationery, rather than on a sterile 8 by 11 sheet of paper. If your handwriting is truly atrocious, get someone else to pen the note; or perhaps you can figure out a way to feed the stationery into your printer and then hand-write your signature. Don’t use stationery that’s so flowery or cutesy that it’s inappropriate for a business setting.

The second purpose the note serves is to give you a chance to make comments that might reinforce the interviewer’s impression of your technical skills or that might dispel some negative information about you that came out during the interview. Every job-seeker comes out of an interview thinking, “I wish I had remembered to say x,” or “I wish I had answered that question better.” In the context of a note, you have limited space to correct these omissions or gaffes, so choose your words carefully and don’t overburden the note. The note can’t be an after-the-fact substitute for an inadequate resume or cover letter, although it may refer to what was written there.

The third purpose for the note is to indicate your interest in and enthusiasm for the job. Tone is important here. You have to project confidence in your qualifications and not come across as needy.

One other purpose this note sometimes serves is to mention any relevant information that has come out since the interview. For example, if you received another job offer or the Employee of the Month award, this is something you would want your interviewer to know.

Unless you know that the hiring decision will be made very quickly (and usually it takes longer than the interviewer says it will), you should wait a few days before sending the note, lest you appear to lack confidence in your performance at the interview.

These comments apply equally well no matter what your industry is or what level of job you were interviewed for. The only exception worth mentioning is the graphic arts industry, which would call for special attention to the visual appeal of the note.

Reducing Stress on the Job

2011-03-23T13:00:00.000-04:00

Constant workplace stress can take a physical toll: high blood pressure, ulcers, and a weakened immune system, among other woes. One study found that health-care expenditures are nearly 50 percent greater for workers who report high levels of stress compared to workers who report low levels. Workplace stress also causes work output to suffer, which reinforces the stress. Home life also suffers. A survey by the Anxiety Disorders Association of America found that of workers who said that stress affects their work, 81 percent said it interferes with their relationship with their spouse or significant other and more than a third said it affects their relationship with their children.

What can you do about workplace stress? My main advice would be to identify what is most stressful about your present work situation and shape your career-development efforts to change that. The process of change will itself create some stresses, but your goal can be to achieve a lower level of stress.

First, set priorities: You probably can’t defuse every stressful aspect of your work--unless you quit, which creates new stresses. So focus on the most severe stressors that you have the greatest likelihood of being able to change. Avoid perfectionism, which is a self-imposed form of stress; accept the fact that you make mistakes and view them as opportunities for learning. Be realistic about the goals you set for yourself.

Speak up: Often, your boss or co-workers can make adjustments to your work situation that may reduce or eliminate stressors. The key is for you to avoid whining and make the case that reducing the stress will increase your productivity. Ask for the resources you need and show appreciation for the support you get.

Put up a fence between work and the rest of your life: Avoid letting a cell phone or e-mail chain you to the workplace. Working partly at home can remove you from some office pressures, but it can also blur the line between work and free time. Cultivate friendships with people who aren’t co-workers.

Get organized: Sticking tightly (but not obsessively) to a schedule can prevent you from procrastinating and help you limit the amount of time you let yourself think about stressors. Deal with them when they’re scheduled, and then put them out of your thoughts. If you don’t have a job description, ask your boss for one. It will help you set boundaries on what is expected of you.

Exercise regularly: Leave time in your busy schedule for a workout of some kind. You may feel that stress leaves you too tired to exercise, but most people who take up a regular schedule of exercise finds that it invigorates them. It also drains away stress-induced hormones and contributes to your long-term health.

Eat sensibly and get enough sleep: Junk food and sleep deprivation can compound stress-related health problems. For example, caffeine and high-carbohydrate foods can increase the rush in blood sugar that stress produces.

Practice relaxation: Meditation techniques—even something as simple as slow, rhythmic breathing in a quiet setting—can help you decompress. Some people get similar benefits from extended prayer or a midday nap. Many people believe that bringing a pet to work is helpful (if the employer allows it).

Build a social life: Many people find the most rewarding time of the week is the time they spend with family and friends. Try to maximize these times. Social contacts distract you from workplace pressures and can provide support when you’re feeling blue. Meet like-minded people through volunteer work, a night class, a book club, a faith community, or a sports league.

Maintain a sense of humor: Try to find the humor in your situation. You can’t be afraid of something while you’re laughing at it. If you can’t find any humor in your workplace, find it in your leisure time.

If all of these strategies fail, you may decide that your best course of action is to leave your present job and find a less stressful situation. You won’t be the only person who is doing this; one survey found that almost one in five respondents had quit a previous position because of job stress. Another estimate is that 40 percent of job turnover is caused by stress.

The clearer your understanding of what you find most stressful in your present job, the easier it will be for you to identify a new position that avoids these stressors. Try to find a way to ask about potential stressors in your interview for the new job and, if possible, speak about them to people working for your prospective employer.

Sometimes, it’s not enough simply to change employers. What’s stressing you may be something essential to the nature of your occupation. Perhaps you’ve been able to tolerate the stressor for several years but have reached the point where you’re ready to move on to a different occupation--a second career or a retirement job.

If so, you may be interested in the occupations that I include in 150 Best Low-Stress Jobs.

How STEM Career Plans Get Derailed

2011-03-16T12:20:00.002-04:00

Careers in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) are an interest of mine. I have blogged about them several times, have presented about them at conferences, and have written a book about them (Quick STEM Careers Guide). Next month, JIST will publish my STEM Careers Inventory.

The United States needs a steady supply of STEM-prepared college grads to fill the many technological jobs that our economy has created and will continue to create. In fact, if we fail to meet this need, our economy is threatened.

So I was intrigued to come upon a paper (PDF) by two economists, Todd and Ralph Stinebrickner (brothers?), “Math or Science? Using Longitudinal Expectations Data to Examine the Process of Choosing a College Major.” The researchers used data from a longitudinal study at Berea College to investigate how students go through the process of choosing a college major. They focused on large groups of majors, especially the group that they call “math/science.”

The usual assumption about how students choose a major is that students have a self-concept and a concept of the careers that the major leads to. Students are likely to change their planned major if they feel that one of these has changed so that what previously seemed like a good match now appears to be a bad fit. For example, students’ self-concept may change if they discover that they are no longer interested in the major or if they find that they lack the ability to do well in it. Their concept of the career outcomes may change if they learn that an industry associated with the major is not as promising as they previously thought it was or if an internship experience in a related career reveals work tasks or worksite conditions different from what they previously expected. The researchers sought to discover which of these changes were mainly responsible for students’ abandoning their plans to major in math/science.

The survey instrument at Berea College elicited four attitudes that students held toward their planned major: their percent chance of sticking with the major, their expected GPA, their expected income (in dollars) at age 28, and their interest in the major (on a five-point Likert scale). The research report notes that one unique advantage of this survey instrument as a window on the students’ career decision making was its frequency: “Each student was surveyed approximately 12 times each year while in school, with the first survey taking place immediately before the beginning of the student’s freshman year.”

A change in the first of the survey’s scales (chance of persistence) would indicate a change of heart toward the major. An accompanying change in the second scale (expected GPA) would indicate a change in self-concept, whereas if there were a better correlation with expected earnings or with interest in the major, this would indicate a change in students’ perception of the career.

The researchers found that expectations of persistence in the major changed differently for students planning to major in math/science: Expectations tended to decline precipitously in the freshman year (even though students did not have to formally declare their major that year), whereas students planning other majors, if they scaled back their expectations, did so more gradually over several years. And the decline in expectations for the math/science major showed a stronger correlation to anticipated GPA than to anticipated earnings or current interest. In other words, students’ experiences in their freshman year caused them to revise downward their estimates of their math/science abilities, and that’s why they expected to drift away from a math/science major.

I saw examples of this behavior in my own freshman year at a school with a large proportion of math/science majors (The Johns Hopkins University). Several friends of mine abandoned plans for math/science careers after experiencing the rigorous chemistry and calculus classes that freshman math/science majors at JHU are required to take.

The researchers conclude that we need “policies at younger ages that lead students to enter college better prepared to study math or science.” I agree. It’s not enough to get students interested in STEM careers. We need to be sure that in high school (and probably starting earlier than that) young people learn the skills they will need to succeed in a STEM college major.

Unhappy, Staying, but Not Stagnating

2011-03-10T09:52:00.000-05:00

The consulting firm Accenture drew some attention recently with a survey of 3,400 business professionals in 29 countries that found that fewer than half of the respondents were satisfied with their current jobs. Men and women showed a similar level of discontent: only 42 and 43 percent reported job satisfaction.

The respondents showed a slightly greater gender divide when they identified the reasons for their frustration: being underpaid (cited by 47 percent of women versus 44 percent of men); a lack of opportunity for growth (36 percent versus 32 percent); no opportunity for career advancement (33 percent versus 34 percent); and feeling trapped (29 percent versus 32 percent).

For me, the most interesting finding was that nearly three-quarters (70 percent of women and 69 percent of men) plan to stay with their companies. The headline that many news services used for their coverage of the survey was something like “Unhappy Workers Do Little About It, Says Survey.”

But the research actually found the workers showing quite a bit of initiative. More than half of respondents (59 percent of women and 57 percent of men), say that, this year, in an effort to enhance their careers, they will work on developing their knowledge and/or a skill set to achieve their career objectives.

It’s no surprise that so many are planning to stay with their present employer. The economy is not offering a wealth of job openings in many, perhaps most of the countries surveyed. But another factor that is easily overlooked is the size of the companies that were surveyed: medium to large. Such employers may be expected to offer a modicum of opportunities for internal job movement, even in a slow economy. I expect that a survey of people at small companies would find more workers who are looking elsewhere for green grass.

Dissatisfied workers like the ones uncovered by this survey were some of the people I had in mind when I wrote 2011 Career Plan. My boss at JIST Publishing, Sue Pines, suggested that I model it on Suze Orman’s Action Plan, and I made a point of using a tone that is much more pushy (although I prefer the more positive and classier-sounding “hortative”) than I’ve ever used in my previous writing.

The idea is to goad readers into taking action. I want readers to commit to a specific career goal, whether it is achieving greater security in their present job (“Safeguarding”), seeking a promotion (“Climbing”), moving to another employer, but in the same occupation and industry (“Decamping”), moving to another employer and industry, but in the same occupation (“Revamping”), or switching to a new employer and a new occupation (“Reinventing”). For each goal, I suggest a strategy and specific action steps for pursuing that strategy.

For example, if acquiring better skills is part of the strategy (as it should be for the many Accenture-surveyed workers who want to climb the ladder at their present company), I identify ways to build skills, with tools that readers can use, such as the text of an e-mail that requests a skill-testing work assignment.

One of the premises of 2011 Career Plan is that this is a good year to take career-building action because job opportunities in the United States are finally starting to improve. When I wrote the book, in 2010, there was still a considerable amount of fear that a double-dip recession would reverse the few employment gains that had materialized by then. Since that time, however, my optimism is starting to look warranted. This month we are seeing much more encouraging news about job growth. The unemployment rate finally fell below 9 percent in February. The drop of almost one percent over the previous three-month period was the largest our economy has seen in nearly 28 years.

There are still some worries that rising oil prices will dampen economic growth (one more reason we need to shift to a green-energy economy!), but on balance 2011 looks like the time when dissatisfied workers--or anybody concerned about job security--should be making an action plan and taking steps to put it into effect.

The Greatest Hits Collection

2011-03-03T10:29:00.001-05:00

Like careers, music is an important part of my life. I rarely get a chance to combine the two, but I sometimes think of making a mixtape of songs about careers. Here’s what I would include:

“Get a Job” by the Silhouettes. This song came out in 1958, during a recession. The lyrics are slurred quite a bit and therefore hard to follow in places, but someone has compared them to the opening chapter of Native Son.

“Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys,” by Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson. This 1978 release by the two country outlaws is one of the few songs that deal specifically with career choice. It points out one career development issue that is often overlooked: the effect of career choice on one’s significant others.

“Dark as a Dungeon,” by Dolly Parton. This is from a whole album with careers as a theme: 1980’s “9 to 5 and Odd Jobs.” The song was written by Merle Travis, who was born and raised in Muhlenberg County, Kentucky, the heart of coal-mining country. He has said he was trying for a folkish sound with the opening, something like “Come all ye fine and tender maidens.”

“When I Grow Up (To Be a Man),” by The Beach Boys. This song from 1965 deals with some of the issues, including career choice, that adolescents face. The backup singers count off the years “18, 19, 20, 21” in a way that is a little bit ominous.

“Take This Job and Shove It,” by Johnny Paycheck. David Alan Coe wrote it and recorded it in 1978, which unsurprisingly was not during a recession. This was a brilliant idea for a song, because everybody has fantasized saying this at one time or another. I remember having this go through my head when I actually did quit a job.

“Working in the Coalmine,” by Lee Dorsey. This 1966 hit was written and produced by the New Orleans great Allen Toussaint. It’s a reminder of how soul-killing some work can be. I’ve always loved the spoken line, “Lord, I’m so tired! How long can this go on?”

“Detroit City,” by Bobby Bare. This 1963 song points out that the ability to move from place to place in pursuit of a career is a great asset but also can be the source of a lot of stress. “By day I make the cars,/By night I make the bars.”

“Deportee (Plane Wreck At Los Gatos),” by Joan Baez. This song, from her 1971 album “Blessed Are…,” was written by Woody Guthrie in response to an actual plane crash that killed several undocumented farmworkers who were being deported to Mexico after the harvest was over. It’s a reminder that, for all they are demonized by some politicians, border-crossing farmworkers are not only vital to our economy but are fellow humans with families and dreams of their own.

“Welcome to the Working Week,” by Elvis Costello. This song is remarkably brief, reflecting the aesthetic of Costello’s 1976 debut album, “My Aim Is True,” and also the fatalism that is its theme: “You gotta do it till you’re through it so you better get to it.”

“Don’t Talk to Me About Work,” by Lou Reed. This song was originally on his 1983 album “Legendary Hearts” and is a sardonic look at some of the stresses of the workday.

“Big Boss Man,” by Elvis Presley. This is a 1967 recording. Jimmy Reed originally popularized the song, but it was written by Al Smith and Luther Dixon. It highlights some of the tension between managers and the workers they supervise, who sometimes wonder why their boss is in a position of authority. Speaking of The Boss....

“Jersey Girl,” by Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. Tom Waits wrote this song, but Bruce made it one of the most famous B-sides of all time. This is the obvious choice for me to end this mixtape, partly because I’m a fellow native of the Jersey Shore, and partly because the song is about the joys of being finished with the workday. (“I know that job you’ve got leaves you so uninspired.”) I might have included The Beatles’ “A Hard Day’s Night” for a similar theme.

It’s significant that resentment of work is the overwhelming theme of these songs, and it would be difficult to find a collection that emphasized the more positive aspects of work. I think this may happen because popular songs are appreciated mostly as entertainment, as diversions from such practical matters as making a living.

I welcome any suggestions for additional career-related songs that deserve inclusion.

Myths About Public-Sector Employment

2011-02-24T11:17:00.000-05:00

I’ve been thinking about public-sector employment for several reasons. Right now I’m working on a book to be titled 150 Best Federal Jobs. And in Wisconsin, New Jersey, Ohio, and many other states, governors are making noises about their states’ obligations to public-sector employees. So this is a good time to dispel some myths about work in the public sector.

One myth is that public-sector employment is increasing. This myth fits nicely into a broader narrative of creeping socialism. For example, last week, Speaker Boehner asserted that President Obama has added 200,000 federal workers since he took office. However, the facts don’t bear out such claims. The FedScope database of the Office of Personnel Management (a goldmine of data about federal jobs and an important source for my current project) reports a total of 107,057 nonpostal jobs added in fiscal years 2009 and 2010. Even with the addition of postal jobs, that’s well short of 200,000. Evidently the Speaker’s aides were also counting temporary Census jobs, so the Speaker was talking about cutting some federal jobs that actually are already gone.

The other factor to bear in mind is that the overall number of jobs increases as the population increases (except during recessions), so what counts is not the total number of government workers, but rather their fraction of the nation’s population. The Office of Management and Budget projects (PDF) that the fraction representing federal employment will decline slightly, continuing the trend of several decades. The OMB report notes, “In 1953, there was one federal worker for every 78 residents. In 1989, there was one federal employee for every 110 residents. By 2009, the ratio had dropped to one federal employee for every 147 residents.”

Another myth that is particularly current right now claims that public-sector workers earn more. The is true only if you look at all public-sector and all private-sector workers. But the two workforces are not comparable. For example, only about half as many federal workers are on part-time schedules as those in the private sector. On average, federal workers are also older and better educated. Most important, public-sector employees tend to work in higher-skilled occupations than private-sector workers. Think of all the fast-food workers, groundskeepers, home health aides, and other low-skill workers in the private sector. Some of these jobs do get done in government-run facilities (for example, the cafeteria in the state house), but these positions are few compared to those in the private sector, and the trend is toward contracting this work out to private businesses.

One interesting study by the Economic Policy Institute (PDF) focused on state and local government employees, who are receiving special attention in these times of drastic budget shortfalls. The study used data from the Current Population Survey to match comparable workers in public-sector and private-sector jobs. The researchers found that low-skill workers do have an advantage in jobs for state and local government, probably because they are more likely to be unionized than in the private sector. When total compensation (including pensions and other benefits) are quantified, “High school graduates received total compensation of $53,880 on average working for state and local government compared to $50,596 for workers employed by private employers, a public employment compensation premium of 6%.” However, more-educated workers actually pay a penalty in total compensation for taking a job with state or local government: 25% for those with bachelor’s, 31% for a master’s, 21% for a doctorate, and 37% for a professional degree.

Let’s not forget that many of the statements we read in the newspapers about public-sector employees are motivated by politics rather than by economics. Wisconsin is a perfect example of this. If the governor were concerned only with dollars and cents, why did he target only the public-sector workers who opposed him politically (the teacher union) and not the public-sector workers who supported him (the state police union and one powerful firefighter union)?

One advantage that public-sector workers definitely have, on average, over private-sector workers is job security. Some of this result from the higher unionization rate of public-sector workers. Some results from civil service regulations that are designed to prevent government workers from being favored or targeted for their political loyalties. And some results from the inertia of public-sector positions; private-sector businesses are more nimble at both creating and terminating jobs.

Occupations with Many Part-Time Workers

2011-02-18T10:37:00.010-05:00

People work part-time for many reasons. Some can’t find a full-time job. Some need a lot of free time for nonwork responsibilities, such as school or care for a dependent child or parent. Some use this work arrangement as a way to try out a career or to break into one; others use it to gradually back out of a career into retirement. Still others combine it with another job (perhaps also part-time) that doesn’t pay enough.

After 2006, the Bureau of Labor Statistics stopped publishing figures about the percentage of part-time workers in each occupation. However, these percentages are unlikely to have changed greatly. That’s why the following table is probably still accurate in its selection of occupations with more than 50 percent part-time workers, based on 2006 figures.

The figures for employment 2008 are for all workers, not just part-timers (but you can do the math with the percentage of part-timers to get a rough idea of how many there are). The figures for projected growth, projected annual job openings, and median annual earnings are also for all workers. Note that part-timers in most occupations earn a lower hourly rate than do full-time workers. The exceptions are a few highly-skilled health-care occupations, in which the part-timers tend to be night-shift workers, who earn a premium.

Dental Hygienists is the obvious winner in terms of both earnings and job growth, and it’s also the one requiring the highest level of skill. The occupations with the highest number of job openings have both a large workforce size and a lot of turnover. Most of these occupations tend to be held by younger workers. In some cases, there are physical demands that young people can more easily meet (e.g., Models or Lifeguards, Ski Patrol, and Other Recreational Protective Service Workers). In other cases, the low pay and low skill requirements make the job attractive to young people with limited work experience and low income needs.

The main exception is Crossing Guards, which attracts many retirees. Municipalities like to hire them partly because they can be trusted with greater responsibility than younger workers. They enjoy the ability to find part-time work within walking distance of home. In addition, their roots in the community allow them to learn about job openings.

[Note: On some browsers, you may have to scroll down a bit to see the table.]

Title	Empl 2008	Part- Time	Growth 2008- 2018	Annual Job Openings	Median Earnings 2009
Library Technicians	120,560	65.0%	8.8%	6,470	$29,570
Hosts and Hostesses, Restaurant, Lounge, and Coffee Shop	350,680	63.9%	6.5%	26,680	$18,110
Crossing Guards	69,930	62.0%	9.4%	2,560	$23,390
Counter Attendants, Cafeteria, Food Concession, and Coffee Shop	525,400	60.9%	9.3%	43,490	$18,180
Dental Hygienists	174,060	58.7%	36.1%	9,840	$67,340
Demonstrators and Product Promoters	102,790	56.1%	7.1%	3,690	$22,510
Models	2,240	56.1%	16.0%	100	$27,330
Lifeguards, Ski Patrol, and Other Recreational Protective Service Workers	115,230	55.3%	11.2%	9,080	$18,700
Protective Service Workers, All Other	87,680	55.3%	14.0%	7,150	$29,420
Library Assistants, Clerical	121,980	52.5%	11.1%	6,420	$22,980
Ushers, Lobby Attendants, and Ticket Takers	106,120	52.4%	13.7%	8,190	$18,050
Motion Picture Projectionists	10,830	52.4%	0.6%	470	$20,420
Dining Room and Cafeteria Attendants and Bartender Helpers	420,650	50.6%	5.5%	20,570	$17,700

The Importance of Soft Skills

2011-02-02T16:04:00.001-05:00

I just finished reviewing JIST’s second online workshop. The first one we created, Job Search Advantage, is about job-hunting skills. The new one, still in development, is about mastering soft skills.

During a session at last week’s Careers Conference, one participant said he regretted that many people consider soft skills something extra, something nice to have but not essential. He argued that they should be recognized as the most important skills of all.

I agree, and I believe that everyone needs to take stock of his or her soft skills. One important reason is to decide which careers and job openings to pursue. It helps to have a good understanding of your ability with and interest in such work requirements as reading other people’s feelings, being persuasive, accepting criticism, and being supportive. So, for example, a person with both ability and interest in being persuasive might consider a position in sales; someone good at being supportive might consider health care or a team-oriented work environment. Someone who feels inadequate at reading other people’s feelings or just lacks interest in doing so might want to avoid team-oriented work and look for careers or positions where the work is done solo, for example in some mechanical repair jobs.

If you already know what your job target is, you have an entirely different reason to think about your soft skills: to be able to sell yourself as the best person for the job. Nowadays one reason why some jobs are not being sent to a foreign shore is that they depend on a human touch. For example, although some help-desk jobs are being done abroad, many companies are maintaining an American staff to do this work because they find that American workers achieve a better rapport with American customers. These workers need to be able to ask the most effective questions of the people who call and rapidly detect any confusion that may arise. Other jobs that are not in danger of being offshored, such as many health-care jobs, nevertheless need workers who are able to interact well with the public and work well as a team.

It’s not enough to identify the soft skills you have mastered that make you a good job candidate. You need to go further to think of ways to demonstrate your mastery of these skills to the potential employer. The job interview gives you only a very limited opportunity to demonstrate these skills, and you may not even get that far if your resume shows no signs of your soft skills. So you need to indicate your soft skills on your resume and do so in ways that go beyond mere assertions. For example, instead of merely saying that you are skilled at negotiating, you might identify a particular instance of a difficult negotiation you accomplished. You can demonstrate your teamwork skills by giving an example of a collaborative accomplishment. You may think that achieving something as part of a team somehow dilutes your credit, but you can make it count as an achievement for the teamwork skills it shows.

One additional reason to take stock of your soft skills is to recognize which ones you need to work on--and then get started on doing so. As with any skills, with these there is the problem that you can’t get the job without the skills but seemingly can’t get the skills without the job. The solution is to find ways to build the skills in nonwork situations, such as volunteer activities. Volunteer with a community organization to serve on a project that requires you to work with other people. It may help for you to become more active in a group you already belong to, because you’ll be less shy about working with people you already know. As you get involved in projects requiring soft skills, it’s vital that you ask for constructive feedback from your co-workers and accept it without being defensive. Alternatively, you may be able to build these skills in your current job by asking your supervisor for a low-stakes, limited assignment that uses these skills; again, ask for feedback and make use of it to improve your skills.

Soft skills are not really soft when you consider the impact that they can have on your career.

The Joys of Working at Home

2011-01-20T13:31:00.001-05:00

My wife and I both work at home. She is a technical writer, and I write books about careers. According to the Center for Clean Air Policy, the number of telecommuters increased from about 3 million in 1993 to 6 million in 2008. That’s only a small slice of the total U.S. workforce of 150 million, but the growth is impressive and is likely to continue, for several reasons.

The shift to a knowledge-based economy is one factor that has encouraged work-at-home arrangements. An increasing number of jobs (such as our writing jobs) don’t depend on access to factory-scale machinery, so they can more easily be done where the worker lives. To be sure, some knowledge-based jobs such as laboratory research still require facilities that few people have in their homes. Workers in some highly collaborative jobs benefit from close contact with co-workers. And health-care jobs require a lot of personal contact with patients, either in an office or in their homes.

However, technology has the potential to make a work-at-home arrangement easier for many of these jobs, too. As computing power has increased, more and more tasks that have traditionally required a physical laboratory can be performed in a virtual laboratory, through a simulation that stay-at-home workers can run from their desks. Computer networking also makes it easier for workers to collaborate remotely. With video contact (such as Skype) and remote desktop access, you and the other worker can feel very much as if you’re in the same room even as you work from your home offices. Telemedicine is being used to bring some health care tasks (mainly diagnosis) to underdeveloped countries, but we may see its use growing here. A relative of mine with heart problems has her vital signs checked remotely from home several times per day. The workers who interpret these signs could also be at home.

Work-at-home arrangements are not just more feasible now; they are also more desirable to employers. One former employer of mine encouraged workers to spend one day per week at home because of traffic increases in the township where the company was located. This policy allowed the company to expand its workforce without a commensurate increase in the number of cars on the township roads. The arrangement also reduced the burdens on company facilities such as janitorial and cafeteria services, not to mention electric power. Of course, these costs were shifted to the workers, but most workers are willing to take on the burden of running a home office for the benefits that the work-at-home arrangement offers.

And that is yet one more reason why the arrangement is growing: Many workers are more satisfied this way. From my own experience, I can list several reasons that the arrangement is so satisfying. The home setting is less stressful than a corporate office. I am rarely interrupted except when I want to be. I have the companionship of my wife, my dog, and my two cats. I can listen to Internet radio as I work (something that many companies forbid because of the drain on bandwidth). I have total control over the lighting, the heating, and many other aspects of the workplace. I can make a lunch better suited to my idiosyncratic tastes than I could find in a corporate cafeteria and fresher than I could have by brown-bagging. (In fact, the temptation to snack is one of the drawbacks of working at home.) With no need to commute, I save time, run up less mileage on my car, and reduce my risk of accidents. I can participate in the truly important meetings by teleconference but avoid the trivial ones.

This last advantage also can be a disadvantage in some circumstances. Working at home means you lose facetime with your co-workers. The bonds of water-cooler gossip are harder to develop from home. When performance appraisal time rolls around, your boss may feel more positive about onsite workers whom he or she sees every day.

Even more serious is the possibility that the job you are doing at home could be done--for less pay--by somebody whose home is in Bangalore, Shanghai, or some other offshore location. The same factors that encourage your employer to have you work off-site apply to these workers as well. So if you are choosing a job on the basis of how readily the work can be done at home, perhaps you should also look for a position that requires occasional on-site work (such as a weekly meeting) or some attribute (such as a security clearance) that an offshore worker is unlikely to possess.

If you have a fairly extroverted personality, work at home can lack the energy input that you would get from personal contact with co-workers. In my case, this means that working at home has made me very responsive to journalists who call to interview me about career-related issues. I enjoy the contact, albeit remote, and I’m happy to talk for as long as they press me with questions.

Workers with small children who are considering at-home work need to be realistic about how well they will be able to divide their attention between their jobs and their children. They probably will need to arrange day-care services just as if they were working in a company office. A toddler can be much more demanding than my cat, who right now is curling up under the desk lamp.

Earning Less Because of Recession

2011-01-12T13:47:00.002-05:00

It should be no surprise that workers are earning less now because of the recession from which we’re still recovering. This is a tricky thing to quantify, for several reasons. For example, when you lay off a lot of low-skilled people, the average wage figure for those who are still employed actually goes up. However, if you look at the experiences of individuals over time, you’ll find lots of evidence that people are earning less, especially when they lose a job and take a new job.

This is the theme of a disturbing article in The Wall Street Journal: “Downturn's Ugly Trademark: Steep, Lasting Drop in Wages.” The article offers several accounts of workers who lost good-paying jobs and are now working in positions such as Starbucks barista and school janitor.

The most obvious reason for this drop in wages is simple supply and demand. When the labor market is overcrowded with job-seekers, people who are being hired have less leverage to ask for good wages. Or you might phrase it this way: The large number of job-seekers effectively bid down the price that it costs to hire them.

This is also the conclusion of a blogger on the PayScale.com site. Using a measure of earnings that the site developed, called the PayScale Index, he shows the inverse relationship between this index and unemployment. The PayScale Index began to decline in the first quarter of 2009, just when unemployment jumped from about 6.5 to about 9.2. Just as unemployment has shown only tiny declines since then, so has the PayScale Index remained quite flat.

The drop in wages is particularly severe for people who are laid off, and this is not just a temporary effect. The Columbia University labor economist Till von Wachter and two colleagues analyzed Social Security data to explore the effects of the recession of the early 1980s. The researchers found (PDF) that earnings of those who were laid off improved somewhat after the initial drop in pay, which averaged around 30 percent, but did not return to pre-recession levels. Earnings remained 21 to 27 percent lower 20 years later.

To explain this drop, Von Wachter looked beyond the simple matter of an oversupply of job candidates. He believed that the stale skills of workers were (and are) also to blame.

Many workers who have held a job for a long time do not keep their skills current with emerging trends in their job. These are the workers whom employers most readily target when there is a need for layoffs. In other cases, workers have skills that are fully adequate for the job they hold, but the need for that job is declining. This is the case for jobs that can be replaced by automation or foreign workers. Workers in these jobs will need to shift careers before they can find work.

I should caution that it’s not fair to blame the victim of layoffs and pay cuts in every case, especially in such hard times as these. Some workers have lost their job even though they have excellent skills for their position and are working in a field that is in demand. They may be the victim of a mismanaged company that could have survived in normal economic times. Or they may be unable to relocate to find work because they can’t find a buyer for their house. So they end up taking a job at a lower skill level, and with less pay, than they are qualified for.

On the other hand, these unfortunate workers are the exception. Everybody has heard of someone who survived a traffic accident because of a seatbelt that was not buckled. However, the odds of survival are much better for those who do buckle in. Play the odds. Your odds of weathering a recession with a good job and good pay are better if you keep your skills up to date and work in a career that has a future. For some tips on these matters, I recommend my new book, 2011 Career Plan.

Reading the Tea Leaves at the Department of Labor

2011-01-05T11:22:00.001-05:00

What are the emerging occupations that will offer job opportunities for young people and career changers? One way to get a clue is to look at how our government, especially the Department of Labor, classifies occupations.

You’ve probably been told since childhood that there are two kinds of elephants: African and Indian. Now it turns out, from genetic evidence, that there are actually two species of African elephants: the forest species and the savannah species. This discovery will mean changes in conservation practices.

Something similar happens among the labor economists in the U.S. government: Every so often, they change the way they classify occupations. Most of the time, they split up occupations, just as the biologists have split up elephant species. Two practical results are that we get (1) more career information and (2) indications of how our economy is changing.

Last year, the government changed the Standard Occupational Classification taxonomy, which is what organizes the occupational titles that appear in all reports generated by all branches of government (Labor Statistics, Census, Economic Analysis, and so forth). SOC 2000 was replaced with SOC 2010.

We’re able to see the specific impact on SOC 2010 on career information now that the National Center for O*NET Development, which prepares the nation’s chief occupational database, has announced its plans for how (in an interim release, next month) it will align the O*NET database with SOC 2010. Several occupational specializations have now become occupations in their own right. Some previously unrecognized occupations have been added. And these changes indicate the directions our economy is taking as the second decade of the 21st century begins.

Green energy is one field where the change is particularly visible. Solar Photovoltaic Installers and Wind Turbine Service Technicians used to be two specializations within Construction and Related Workers, All Other. Now they’re distinct occupations, for which BLS will need to collect workforce and wage statistics and make employment projections. I can’t wait to see these figures! For my books about green jobs, I had to rely on industry sources (historically susceptible to boosterism) for these figures.

The same result has happened in other fields as well. Health care, our fastest-growing industry, provides many examples. Genetic Counselors, which used to be a specialization within Healthcare Practitioners and Technical Workers, All Other, is now an occupation in its own right. Similarly, Nurse Anesthetists and Nurse Practitioners, which used to be confined within Health Diagnosing and Treating Practitioners, All Other, have been promoted to full occupational status. Nurse Midwives and Hearing Aid Specialists have broken free of Health Technologists and Technicians, All Other. (Two new specializations that O*NET is adding to this catch-all occupation are Ophthalmic Medical Technologists and Surgical Assistants.) Some completely new occupational titles in this field are Exercise Physiologists, Magnetic Resonance Imaging Technologists, Ophthalmic Medical Technicians, Phlebotomists, and Community Health Workers.

These changes reflect the effort to reduce health-care costs by shifting some tasks from doctors to highly-skilled nurses and technicians.

In high technology, you can find Web Developers no longer slotted within Computer Specialists, All Other. Computer Security Specialists used to be a specialization within Network and Computer Systems Administrators but now steps out on its own under a modified title, Information Security Analysts. Some entirely new titles are Computer Network Architects, Computer Network Support Specialists, and Radio, Cellular, and Tower Equipment Installers and Repairers.

In the business world, some new faces are Funeral Service Managers, Labor Relations Specialists, Fundraisers, and Credit Counselors.

The presence in SOC 2010 of new or newly-promoted occupational titles means the government is betting that these occupations are likely to expand. Most of them involve new or upgraded skills, which means limited competition for job openings. If you are thinking about your future career or advise people who are, you should pay attention to these occupations.

The Year's Career News in Review

2010-12-22T14:36:00.002-05:00

For my final blog of 2010, I decided it would be a useful exercise to look back at the 600+ tweets I’ve issued on Twitter in order to follow up on some, comment on the significance of others, and call your attention to some important ones you may have missed. (If you’re not already following me, my handle is LaurenceShatkin.)

In January, I mentioned that the Department of Labor was asking people to vote for their favorite career sites. The top vote-getters are now listed as Tools for America’s Job Seekers at the Career OneStop site. For example, the set of tools includes some social media sites and niche job boards that I’d never heard of before.

Several tweets dealt with the career prospects for lawyers. This career no longer guarantees high salaries and lots of job offers. One fascinating blog by a law professor shows how salaries for lawyers cluster around two levels, roughly $50,000 and $150,000. It’s almost like two separate careers, what statisticians call a bimodal distribution.

One theme that appeared in many tweets was the loss of public-sector jobs that has resulted from tight budgets at the municipal and state level. For example, Colorado Springs laid off firefighters, a vice team, burglary investigators, and beat cops, cut back on the hours of park maintenance workers, stopped repaving roads, and reduced bus service.

It’s worth taking another look at the predictions of the researchers at IBISWorld for the best-performing (i.e., those with most revenue growth) industry sectors of the coming decade. It’s interesting to note that most of them involve STEM careers and several of them will provide many green jobs.

Rank	Best Performing	Growth
1	Voice Over Internet Protocol Providers (VoIP)	149.6%
2	Retirement & Pension Plans	133.7%
3	Biotechnology	127.6%
4	eCommerce & Online Auctions	124.7%
5	Environmental Consulting	120.3%
6	Video Games	112.9%
7	Trusts & Estates	105.7%
8	Search Engines	100.9%
9	Recycling Facilities	80.9%
10	Land Development	72.7%

Another interesting prediction came from the software giant Cisco, who predicted that the smart grid will have a bigger market impact than the Internet. This sounds like hyperbole to me, but even a half of that impact would still mean tens of thousands of jobs.

Speaking of predictions, it’s worth taking another look at the list of pundits and supposed experts who were wrong about the housing bubble (by saying there was none).

Green jobs have been a continuing interest in mine. I think it’s worth repeating here that the O*NET developers have created an excellent directory of Web-based resources about green jobs. It’s a PDF with clickable links.

My favorite career-related video of the year: An animation that makes an economics lecture come alive. You'll find that economics can be a lot more fun than you thought possible. You'll also learn what really motivates workers. (It’s not pay.)

I hope the coming year is a good one for you and for your career.

New Insights into the Mommy Track, Part 2

2010-12-15T11:32:00.003-05:00

This is another blog about women's career issues, prompted in part by my recent research for Quick Nontraditional Careers Guide: Eight Steps for Defying Traditional Gender Roles, which will be published in June. Last week I wrote about a study that found high-skill women suffer a greater wage impact from the mommy track than do low-skill women. This week I’d like to discuss another study, this one showing that highly educated women face different levels of wage damage from the mommy track depending on their occupation.

Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz, economists at Harvard, in “The Career Cost of Family”(PDF), find that the earnings penalty of the mommy track is decreasing in many high-end careers. Specifically, many of these careers, especially in health care, have become more family-friendly than they were in the past, perhaps because of the increased presence of women in them. Corporate and financial occupations, on the other hand, are not progressing as rapidly.

Like last week’s study, this one is based on longitudinal research. In this case, the subjects were a very high-powered group: graduates of Harvard College between 1969 and 1992. The study found that although women are increasing their presence in high-level occupations, they are tending to choose professions and specializations within professions that offer the greatest flexibility of work hours.

The really interesting part of the report, called “Occupational Vignettes,” explains how and why women are moving into certain professions and specializations.

Among the fields of medicine, women account for 42 percent of workers under 45 years of age. In the specializations ob-gyn, pediatrics, dermatology, child psychology, and medical genetics, they account for more than half of all practitioners. “They exceed their average of 42 percent but are less than 50 percent in allergy and immunology, family practice, psychiatry, pathology, public health, general preventive medicine, internal medicine, and forensic pathology.” The general trend is that women are opting for specializations with fewer regularly occurring on-call, emergency, or night hours, and they’re avoiding those with the longest residency or fellowship requirements.

One of the most dramatic increases in female participation has been among veterinarians. In the 2007–2008 academic year, 77 percent of the DVM degrees went to women. Why? “Compelling evidence suggests that the increasing ability of many veterinarians to schedule their hours and reduce or eliminate on-call, night, and weekend hours has been a contributory factor.” Regional veterinary hospitals and emergency centers are serving this function, lifting the burden from veterinary practices. “About 40 percent of female veterinarians in private practice in 2007 (versus 27 percent of male veterinarians) stated that they put in no emergency hours.” It is also becoming more commonplace for veterinarians in a private practice to be employees rather than partners, an arrangement that encourages greater job flexibility.

Women with MBAs have a very different experience. The researchers find that these women “have the lowest labor force participation rates, the longest periods of job interruption when they have children, and forfeit the largest fraction of their income when they take time off.” Although they start out with pay equal to that of male MBAs, a decade later they are earning 55 percent of the men’s earnings. The researchers found three roughly equal factors that account for the bulk of the difference: different training prior to receipt of the MBA (e.g., fewer courses in finance), career interruptions (usually the mommy track), and shorter work hours (also usually the mommy track). Those MBA mothers with high-earning husbands are most likely to quit working or opt for self-employment; the others tend to cut back on work hours. The reduction in participation and work hours is actually greater three or four years after the first birth than in the first couple of years. “It is as if some MBA moms try to stay in the fast lane but ultimately find it is unworkable.”

In pharmacy, women account for almost 70 percent of new degree recipients. Like veterinarians, pharmacists have shifted from being stakeholders in a business (more than 35 percent were self-employed in 1970) to being employees (0.6 percent were self-employed in 2008). Optometry has made the same shift, and women are now 66 percent of new degree recipients.

The report ends with a chart (below) that shows the 87 highest-paid occupations from 2006–2008, with different shapes representing different industries. (The chart is based on data from the Current Population Survey.) Horizontally, the further to the right, the higher the earnings. Vertically, the further below the zero line (which is near the top), the greater the earnings gap between men and women. You’ll note that, as a group, the business occupations (red squares) have the biggest gap.

Note also that the technology occupations (green triangles) have the smallest gap. As an explanation, the authors of the report speculate, “One possibility is that the technology occupations are so recent that their work organizations are structured to deal better with a labor force that needs greater work flexibility.” Regardless of the reason, this small gap is one more reason why women should consider STEM careers. For more on this topic, see Quick STEM Careers Guide: Four Steps to a Great Job in Science, Technology, Engineering, or Math, due out next month.

New Insights into the Mommy Track, Part I

2010-12-08T09:30:00.000-05:00

Women’s career issues are a frequent topic of this blog, and I have been thinking about them again while putting the finishing touches on a manuscript, Quick Nontraditional Careers Guide: Eight Steps for Defying Traditional Gender Roles, due to be published in June. I also wrote about these issues in the volume about nontraditional careers that is part of Progressive Careers. This week I also learned about two new research studies that cast additional light on this subject, showing that the consequences of the mommy track vary greatly. More highly skilled women, particularly in certain fields, suffer a greater penalty for choosing to have children.

David Ellwood, Elizabeth Ty Wilde, and Lily Batchelder, in “The Mommy Track Divides: The Impact of Childbearing on Wages of Women of Differing Skill Levels” (PDF), wanted to know why childbearing by female college graduates has declined so much. Among those born in the early 1940s, nearly 50% of them had borne children by age 25, and only 18% were childless at age 40. Among the cohort born 20 years later, only 20% had borne children by age 25, and more than 25% remained childless at age 40. By comparison, in both generations, women who were not college graduates bore children earlier in life, with little generational difference in their timing.

The researchers hypothesized that the college grads were postponing childbearing to allow themselves time to establish a career and thus minimize the wage impact of the mommy track.

The researchers used data from a longitudinal study, dividing the women into low-skill and high-skill groups based on their performance on the Armed Forces Qualification Test. (They used that rather than college attendance, because early childbearing clearly can and does influence education.) They then compared the income trajectories of the two groups and found that the low-skill group had a trajectory that not only was flatter (as would be expected) than that of the high-skill group but also less affected by child-bearing. Having children later or not at all improved their earnings only modestly. For the high-skill women, however, the income rise was steeper but leveled off when they bore children, a mommy penalty that persisted even a decade after childbirth. But by postponing childbirth, the high-skill women had achieved a higher pre-child earning level and therefore leveled off at a higher plateau. In other words, for high-skill women it pays to establish a career before having children (if ever). This would explain the historical fertility and timing differences mentioned earlier.

Another interesting question is why women’s earnings suffer after child-bearing. Is it because they shift to part-time work or a less demanding occupation, leave their employer (thus losing human capital), or drop out of the workforce entirely (thus forgoing work experience)? The researchers found that all these behaviors have an impact, but there is additional impact that can’t be explained by these. Even women who stay full-time in the same occupation with the same employer suffer a 14% loss in earnings. Evidently, some other factor, such as discrimination or a perceived loss of career commitment, is depressing earnings.

It’s useful to note what the researchers found about high-skill men’s earnings. Like the high-skill women, those who postponed parenthood had higher earnings, but the arrival of parenthood had a much smaller impact than it had on the women. Most interesting was the finding that men who remained childless had the lowest earnings of all in the high-skill group. There’s a chicken-egg problem here: Does fatherhood make men strive more, or do low-earning men make less attractive partners for starting a family?

Apart from its findings about the wage penalty of the mommy track, this study produces two disturbingly different portraits of child-bearing behavior. One, among low-skill women, consists of child-bearing at a young age, much more often outside of marriage, with low earnings and little prospect of a large increase in earnings later on. The other behavior, among high-skill women, consists of child-bearing by a typically married couple in their peak earning years. You can imagine very different outcomes for the children in these two scenarios.

In next week’s blog I’ll write about a different study that looks at how, among highly educated women, different occupations cause the mommy track to have different impacts.

My Advice to PhDs in the Humanities

2010-11-24T14:22:00.001-05:00

Last week I was invited by the Career Services office at Rutgers University to be part of a panel speaking to humanities PhD candidates about careers outside of academia. I was at the receiving end of a similar panel discussion many years ago, when my PhD degree was new, so I was happy to pay back the debt I owed. I’ll give you the gist of what I said last week.

Your career will change many times during your working lifetime, and you will find ways to pursue interests you don’t expect to pursue. You also will find the need to develop new abilities and use abilities you don’t realize you have. But your immediate need is to find a job that matches the interests and abilities that you can identify now. You should start by clarifying these interests and abilities.

The panelists I listened to when I was a new PhD referred to a career-development book that helped me but that now is definitely showing its age. I’d rather you buy my books, but I’ll explain to you what specific career-development exercise in that book helped me. Take a sheet of paper and divide it into three columns. In the leftmost column, write the names of some jobs you have held or work-relevant accomplishments. In my case, I had done some college teaching and had written my dissertation. In the middle column, write the major tasks that you did in these jobs. Regarding the dissertation, I mentioned settling on a topic, identifying research resources, taking notes on research, organizing the notes, organizing what I wanted to write, and so forth. In the rightmost column, identify the skills you used to accomplish these tasks. Then notice which skills turn up most often and decide which you enjoyed using most. That should point toward your goals for your next job.

In my case, I realized for the first time that teaching did not satisfy me as much as researching and writing. That became my job target. At this time, my wife was working at Educational Testing Service and was passing on to me the job postings that she considered relevant to my background. I rejected two of these because they didn’t fit this new career goal, but the third was for a job researching and writing about careers for the SIGI computer-based career information system. I’ve been doing variations on this job ever since.

However, I’ve had to develop many new skills along the way. One of these is working with technology. In the early days of the SIGI system, we typed up information and handed the paper to the person who operated the ridiculously complex mainframe text-entry program. After a couple of years, I was given the responsibility of developing a database about college majors and learned a crude text-editing program. But the technical specifications for the database kept changing, and I needed an efficient way to be able to manipulate the text to match. My boss convinced me to take a computer-based course in BASIC to learn the skills to do this. Several years later I took three one-day courses, paid for by ETS, to learn Microsoft Access, a skill I still use almost every workday. I taught myself Excel from a manual.

I had struggled with math in high school and had avoided it in college, so I had assumed I’d never find a workplace use for my interest in technology. But now I was able to find an outlet for this interest and develop the appropriate skills. I’ve also needed to develop my writing skills in ways that I didn’t expect. Writing the narrative screens (as opposed to career information) to develop the SIGI PLUS system, I had to find ways to get my points across and extract input from users in an interactive format with highly limited space. Once ETS decided to get out of the career development business, I had to learn a different style to write books for JIST, my current employer. Actually, writing for JIST demands not one style but several. My recent book 2011 Career Plan called for a pushy style quite different from what I’d used previously, and I needed to use a simplified style for the Quick Green Jobs Guide and other booklets in that series.

As a JIST author, I also have needed to develop skills related to promoting my writing, such as the ability to make a good impression in a television interview.

Our economy does not have many obvious career paths for humanities PhDs, or in some cases the obvious careers don’t have a good outlook. When you look for work, it probably will help you to think not in terms of occupations but in terms of skills you want to use. I was not looking for “career information developer” as a job, and I would have missed the opportunity at ETS if I had confined my job-hunting to the obvious research-and-writing occupations such as journalist. You can increase your options if you avoid stereotyping yourself with a pat occupational label.

Because your career path is not obvious, your career is going to have many ups and downs. When you encounter adversity, don’t lose faith in your long-term prospects. When I was downsized from ETS, my 16-year-old daughter said to me, “Think of this as an adventure, Dad.” And it does help to put your career downturns into the larger context of the narrative arc of your life. Think of your immediate career difficulties as a plot complication and not as a tragic denouement.

The other really important lesson to take away is the importance of networking for finding jobs. Although I found my job at ETS through a job posting, this is no longer the most effective method. I found my job at JIST through networking with a JIST author whom I knew from a professional association. I started as a consultant, preparing the data-intense content for books, and I gradually increased the amount of prose I wrote and the number of hours I worked for JIST.

In my panel presentation at Rutgers, I discussed networking at greater length, but I’m not going to discuss that here because it would duplicate other blog entries.

My story was not greatly different from what the other panelists had to say. Although the specifics of their careers differed from mine, we all pursued new interests and developed new skills over the course of our careers, and we got hired for almost all of our jobs through networking. Humanities PhDs have tremendous potential for rewarding careers if they are willing to do the work (which never ends) of discovering and fulfilling their potential.

Classroom Subjects versus Workplace Skills

2010-11-17T14:29:00.001-05:00

Education is supposed to prepare us for our careers, but sometimes there appears to be a disconnect between the two. While in college, we are often forced to take certain required courses although we can’t see how they can ever help us in our careers.

Some of these courses may contribute to noncareer goals in life, such as being good citizens. History and political science courses obviously serve this purpose, and I wish that some of the people who are presently shouting about the Constitution had a better grounding in those subjects. Courses in the arts and literature may contribute to our leisure-time enjoyment of these fields.

But let’s set aside these “area requirements,” as they are often called, and focus on the required courses within college majors. Even some of these seem to contribute little to preparing for the putative career goals of your major.

This is true for math courses in particular. Sometimes it seems as if everyone studies more math in college than they ever will use in their careers. I was struck by this thought as I worked on Panicked Student's Guide to Choosing a College Major: How to Confidently Pick Your Ideal Path, which is due out in April of next year.

However, there are good reasons why so many math courses are required.

The curriculum developers who design the majors want you to be able to understand the people you’ll work with. In many jobs, you do not use a lot of math but work with people who do, so with a background in mathematical concepts you can understand how these other workers produce their results and can tell the difference between meaningful and misleading results. You can challenge the output of those workers and ask them intelligent questions. For example, market research managers need to understand the procedures of the statisticians who design market surveys. Physicians need to understand the procedures of the medical science researchers who make new discoveries about disease processes and pharmaceuticals. Many different kinds of workers need to understand how to interpret statistics about their field, and you can’t really understand the meaning of a statistic unless you know how it was derived, including the sampling method that was used. (I’ve blogged elsewhere about the importance of the sample in studies.)

Another consideration is the hard-to-predict outcomes of your career. While you’re still in college, you may not know that you’re going to specialize in research, which requires quite a lot of math in most industries. Or you may not realize that you’re going to change careers 10 years out and will be able to retrain much faster if you have a good command of math.

Math is not the only subject that college students need more than they may realize. Employers often find that new hires are woefully deficient in verbal skills. A 2007 report (PDF) by the National Endowment for the Arts surveyed several recent studies and found “simple, consistent, and alarming” indications that the reading and writing abilities of workers are not meeting the needs of employers. A 2004 survey by The College Board of 120 corporations in the Business Roundtable found that one-third of workers fall short of employer’s expectations for writing skills. The survey also found that writing is a regular part of the job for two-thirds of all employees. So if you think that your major requires you to take more English courses than are necessary, maybe you’re not aware of what level of writing skill your career goal actually will demand. And, as with math skills, the success of an unanticipated future change in your career may hinge on your verbal skills.

An Inside Look at Your Skills

2010-11-10T17:01:00.000-05:00

Imagine this scenario: You are being interviewed for a job, and after the usual questions about where you see yourself in five years and what your biggest weakness is, you are given a referral slip and told to report to a hospital for an MRI scan of your brain. The results of the scan will determine whether or not you get the job. What’s at issue is not your health; they’re not looking for a tumor or aneurism. Instead, they’re looking at the condition of your brain in order to decide whether you have the abilities and temperament to do the job.

This may seem bizarre, but it appears to be the logical consequence of some recent research. One study (PDF), by a team at the University of California, Irvine, found significant correlations between the shape of the gray matter in people’s brains and the scores those same people received on a battery of tests that are sometimes used in vocational guidance to measure work-related competencies. (The test battery was developed by the Johnson O’Connor Research Foundation.) Another team of researchers, at Erasmus University in the Netherlands, used brain scans to identify people’s tendencies toward career-damaging psychological states. One of these researchers predicted that brain scans will become routine in job interviews within five years.

I’m very skeptical about such claims. The research of both teams was able to predict only a small number of factors related to work. Human beings are more than the sum of our parts, especially in social situations such as work. It’s unlikely that in our lifetimes brain scans will be able to predict how a person will perform in the detailed aspects of an actual work environment.

On the other hand, it’s only fair to note that the traditional job interview also does not have a very good track record. What does the interviewer really learn by asking you what kind of car you consider yourself to be? (An article in Psychology Today demolishes this and other wacky interview questions.)

In fairness, I should add that bad interviewing is a two-way street. Most job-seekers probably concentrate excessively on responding to the interviewer’s questions and thus forget to ask important questions that would get at the suitability of the job. Why not ask where the interviewer sees the company in five years? CareerBuilder has several suggestions for questions such as this.

Who knows, maybe in Holland they really will be scanning job recruits’ brains five years from now. In Europe, handwriting analysis is already widely used in hiring decisions.

Too Many College Grads?

2010-11-03T15:07:00.003-04:00

This week’s blog is inspired by my friend Rich Feller, who wrote to ask for my reaction to an opinion piece that appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education. The article, called “Why Did 17 Million Students Go to College?” argues that too many people are getting bachelor’s degrees. It touches on some issues I discuss in my book about the pluses and minuses of various kinds of postsecondary education and training: Quick Education and Training Options Guide: Choose the Route That’s Right for You.

The heart of the article is a table (below) showing 20 occupations that normally require considerably less preparation than a college degree. For example, Parking Lot Attendants typically need only short-term on-the-job training to do the work. The table shows, for each occupation, the number and percentage of workers with a bachelor’s degree (or higher). (For convenience, I’ll refer to “a bachelor’s or higher” here as “a college degree.”)

The numbers are disturbing. For example, 14% of Parking Lot Attendants have a college degree. Among Bartenders, 16% do. The author of the article goes on to argue that our society is putting too many people through college, including many who should not be there.

I have many objections to the methodology and implications of the article. First, a certain number of artists and other aspirants to highly competitive fields will always be working in occupations for which they are overqualified. This is also true of recent immigrants, who lack English skills or recognized credentials, as one comment on the Web page noted.

Second, the table is based on figures from 2008, a period of great job loss. Many people, out of desperation, were taking jobs for which they were overqualified. I looked at older figures and found that the percentage of college grads in the same 20 occupations had increased by 3% from 2004 to 2008. I acknowledge that even the 2004 percentages were much too high. But this entire past decade has been an era of tepid job growth. In an economy with normal job growth, we won’t see this level of overqualification. And how are we going to get to a better economy without a good supply of highly skilled workers?

The figures in the article don’t necessarily demonstrate that a college degree is not worthwhile. At best, you may judge from the evidence that some college degrees are not worthwhile. Everyone has heard stories about liberal arts graduates who have trouble getting hired in a college-level job. It’s likely that many of these overqualified workers chose an academic specialization that holds little appeal for hiring managers. But, as someone who holds only liberal arts degrees, I maintain that many of the overqualified workers with the “wrong” degree simply aren’t savvy about how to position themselves for employment in fields for which they supposedly are not equipped. I’d argue that what we need is not fewer college grads, or even fewer college grads in the liberal arts, but rather more help with career development and job-hunting.

I can counter the figures in this article with a different set of figures, from a chart (below) maintained by the Department of Labor at a site called “Education Pays.” The chart shows that people with a bachelor’s degree had an unemployment rate of 5.2% in 2009, at a time when the overall rate was 7.9%. Certainly, some of these employed college grads were in overqualified situations, but overall their average weekly earnings were $1,025, compared to $626 for those with only high school. I have followed this chart for many years, and the advantages of the bachelor’s degree are actually growing. So college does seem to be preparing people for good jobs.

Now, let’s switch the perspective. Instead of looking at policy decisions about what’s good for society as a whole, let’s look at career decisions that individuals must make. This is the perspective from which I write my books.

Seen from this point of view, getting a college degree is often an excellent choice. (It’s certainly not the only excellent choice, as I make clear in the Quick Education and Training Options Guide.) One of the people who commented on the article said it very well:

“I work in human resources now for a public university, and I can tell you that college degrees are basically an arms race. No, you may not need a degree to perform the task at hand, but you’re competing against people who have degrees. If you don’t have one too, you’ll be at a disadvantage. Ditto raises and promotions, in which education level is a significant factor. This is true across multiple industries, not just higher ed employment.”

Innovation and Job Opportunity in Manufacturing

2010-10-27T12:56:00.001-04:00

One of the central points in my new book, 2011 Career Plan: The Best Moves Now for a Solid Future, is that it’s important to upgrade your skills if you want to compete in the economy of 2011. The book has many specific suggestions for how to do this. But maybe you’re wondering why a high level of skill is so important.

It’s because of the current nature of our economy. The days are long past when an American kid fresh off the farm would be put in front of a machine that stamps out auto parts (or something comparable), could learn how to use that machine in a few minutes or hours, and would take home a comfortable paycheck at the end of the week. Those hayseeds-turned-factory-workers are now working in China and other low-wage countries.

But does that mean manufacturing in America is dead? Not at all. Manufacturing was actually one of the first industries to bounce back from the depths of the recession. It has seen its growth slowing in recent months, but no more so than almost all other industries. This week, Ford Motor Company reported that it just had its most profitable quarter ever, netting $1.69 billion and paying down it debt faster than planned.

Innovation is what has kept American manufacturing successful and will allow manufacturing to continue to provide jobs. It’s particularly striking to see how manufacturing compares to other industries in a study (PDF) by the National Science Foundation that looks at innovative products and processes. NSF surveyed 1.5 million for-profit companies and asked them about their practices for the years 2006–08.

The study found that “22% of the manufacturing companies introduced product innovations (one or more new or significantly improved good or service) and about 22% introduced process innovations (one or more new or significantly improved method for manufacturing or production; logistics, delivery, or distribution; support activities).” Compare this to the mere 8% that is reported for both kinds of innovation in the nomanufacturing industries.

I’m particularly interested to note that the 22% figure applies to both kinds of innovation. It indicates that the high level of innovation is motivated by more than just the need to compete with low-wage overseas workers. If wage competition were the only issue, American manufacturers would simply be upgrading their processes--for example, using more robots or economies of scale. But American manufacturers are being equally innovative in the products they offer. New products open new markets and draw new purchases from existing markets.

What does this mean for job opportunities? If all the innovation were happening only in manufacturing processes, most of the resulting jobs would be for engineers and engineering technicians. But new product development (NPD) is a multidisciplinary field that also involves marketing managers, technical writers, artists, commercial designers, logistics specialists, cost estimators, and perhaps even anthropologists. (Not long ago I did a presentation for an NPD team, and the most effective presenter that day was an anthropologist.) NPD work is highly collaborative, so it requires excellent people skills and communication skills. It also requires a high level of creativity.

So America’s most innovative industry sector is going to need a wide variety of highly skilled workers. This drives home the most important point in 2011 Career Plan, that today’s economy requires you to hone your skills.

Green Jobs Satisfy in Many Ways

2010-10-20T10:58:00.002-04:00

This week has produced some interesting news about green jobs. This subject is dear to my heart because I’ve been writing about it, most recently in Quick Green Jobs Guide: Six Steps to a Green Career. I’ll also be speaking about it on November 1 at the STEMtech conference hosted by the League for Innovation in the Community College.

One of the most intriguing things I’ve read about green jobs this week was in a USA Today article that I learned about from a JIST colleague, Athena Wampler. The article, “Are workers in green jobs happier? Study offers clues,” reports on research by two academics at University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business. The research project, called “Business for the Greater Good,” is being done in cooperation with the Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy, which is working with dairy farmers to reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases from their farms.

One of the researchers, Ante Glavas, commented that “We’re finding that people who work for green companies have a pride-in-ownership mentality and are happier and more productive.” In fact, he said, workers who feel they are contributing to the greater good can be as much as 40% more productive.

This study provides an interesting new way to look at the economic benefits of green business practices. Most other studies focus on results such as the cost savings from recycling, conservation, and use of alternative energy. Or they may estimate the economic impacts of global warming. The Notre Dame researchers focus instead on the productivity of workers. Their study is a reminder that one of the principles of career development--helping people find meaning in their work--makes good business sense.

Another lesson to take away from this study is that the shift to a green economy is happening for a wide range of reasons, not simply because it’s better for our planet. This lesson was reinforced by a news story in The New York Times, “In Kansas, Climate Skeptics Embrace Cleaner Energy.” It reports on how six towns in Kansas competed to achieve the greatest reductions in energy use. A small nonprofit group, the Climate and Energy Project, understood that many Kansans are skeptical about global climate change and resent large-scale government intervention. So the group appealed instead to the values of “thrift, patriotism, spiritual conviction, and economic prosperity.” They emphasized the importance of reducing dependence on foreign oil, the opportunities offered by green jobs, and the concept of stewardship of God’s creation. As a result of the program, “energy use in the towns declined as much as 5 percent relative to other areas--a giant step in the world of energy conservation, where a program that yields a 1.5 percent decline is considered successful.”

Another new development was the release of a bibliography listing dozens of reports about green industries and green jobs. Compiled by the O*NET Development Center, this list of references (a PDF) includes URLs for almost all of these reports.

For more about green jobs, look to the latest edition of the Occupational Outlook Quarterly for an article about wind service technicians. Or look at what the Solar Foundation reports from its 2010 National Solar Jobs Census: a workforce of 93,000, with a projected increase of 26%, representing 24,000 net new jobs by August 2011.

Green jobs are the wave of the future because they can be very satisfying. They offer people a sense of purpose in their work as well as growing job opportunities.

Career Tips to Increase Your Visibility

2010-10-13T09:16:00.002-04:00

In one of my recent books, 2011 Career Plan: The Best Moves Now for a Solid Future, I make the point that one way to improve your job security is to make yourself more visible. My blog this week enlarges on this topic.

The basic point is that your employer will value only the employees they are aware of; likewise, prospective employers will be much more likely to hire job applicants who are familiar to them. You may be doing superlative work and you may have a dynamite performance appraisal or resume for showing off your accomplishments, but employers don’t like to have to read these documents. You need to find other ways to make your employer (or prospective employer) aware, on an ongoing basis, of your outstanding skills and achievements.

In the book, I suggest that the reader “start an in-house Web page, newsletter, or bulletin board showcasing the project you’re working on and soliciting suggestions from people outside the project. This will encourage them to buy into the project and make your efforts look not purely self-promotional.”

Blogging is another platform, and you can use it to build a national reputation. Focus your blog on some niche in your industry that you are well-informed about. If you can’t think of some such topic or you don’t have time to maintain a blog, consider being a frequent commenter on an existing blog. Anyone who follows a blog over time starts to recognize and appreciate the particular expertise of the people who are frequent commenters. That could be you.

Much of the impact of blogs is achieved passively; that is, blog readers come to your blog, and that’s how they become aware of you. However, you can use your blog for making active connections: Include interviews. Record a telephone interview of someone who is of interest to your readership (making it clear to the subject that you are recording the conversation), transcribe the interview, and post it on your blog. With a somewhat higher level of tech savvy, you may be able to post the interview as a podcast. Each time you do an interview and make it available, you will be connecting not only with your readers but also with the person being interviewed. This increases your visibility two ways.

Twitter is often referred to as “micro-blogging.” You can use it like a blog to make yourself a highly visible hub of information, and Twitter has the advantage of being very brief, so it can reach readers who are carrying smart phones or who simply don’t like to read long articles.

Still another way to make yourself a wellspring of information--and therefore more visible in your industry--is to publish a business directory. (I learned this idea from my cousin, Arlene Hershman, former editor of Dun's Business Month.) Assemble and publish a directory of facts about businesses and/or people in your industry. Obviously, it helps to focus on some specialized industry niche or to include some facts that are not available elsewhere (or not available in a single place). Doing the research for this directory provides an excellent pretext for you to contact everyone who matters in your industry (visibility-enhancer #1).

Being the conduit of this information is visibility-enhancer #2. Although you can get exposure by posting the directory on the Web, you may consider using teasing as a strategy: Post only a sample of your contents and make would-be readers pay a nominal subscription fee or at least register with you to get the full directory. By requiring your information-consumers to do this, you make them (a) pay additional attention to who you are, (b) place a higher value on your content, and (c) identify themselves to you, so you have a valuable list of subscribers. You need to assure your subscribers that you will not sell this list, but you may want to use the list yourself. It can expand the base of people or companies you can call for research purposes. Better yet, it can expand your network of contacts who will be helpful for future (or present) job-hunting.

Be All That You Can Be--In a Green Job

2010-10-06T13:42:00.002-04:00

I’m paying extra attention to news about alternative energy now that my new book, Quick Green Jobs Guide: Six Steps to a Green Career, has come out. You may have heard the news this week that solar panels will be installed on the roof of the White House. These units will supply both electric power and hot water. But you may have missed a more important item of green news: The military has started to invest heavily in alternative energy. This trend will have great impact on the growth of green jobs.

The armed forces are not promoting alternative energy as a symbolic gesture or as a matter of ideology. They’re not even doing this to prevent global warming. The policy makes good sense for purely military reasons.

One reason Alexander the Great was able to conquer Afghanistan was that his transport vehicles (horses) could live off the land. Nor did Alexander need energy for any purposes other than the campfires that could be supplied by local firewood. Modern military history, by contrast, has seen many armies made terribly vulnerable by long supply lines. Our military needs fuel not only to power vehicles but also to keep generators pumping out a steady supply of electricity. The Army buys gasoline for a little over $1 per gallon, but the cost of trucking that gallon to distant bases in Afghanistan can reach $400. Tanker trucks chugging through mountain roads are prime targets for Afghan insurgents. (Also for angry Pakistanis.) In fact, one Army study found that an average of one soldier or civilian is killed for every 24 fuel convoys that set out in Iraq or Afghanistan.

That’s why energy created at the point of use can be so valuable to a military campaign. Company I, Third Battalion, Fifth Marines will be using the following equipment, according to the story in The New York Times: “portable solar panels that fold up into boxes; energy-conserving lights; solar tent shields that provide shade and electricity; solar chargers for computers and communications equipment.” This will be the first time that alternative-energy equipment will be taken into a battle zone.

The Times reports that Navy Secretary Ray Mabus wants 50 percent of the power for the Navy and Marines to come from renewable energy sources by 2020. That figure includes energy for bases as well as fuel for cars and ships. The Navy has already commissioned an amphibious assault ship that’s hybrid-powered. The Air Force is testing mixtures of biofuels with jet fuel and will have all its planes certified to use biofuels by 2011. The one alternative-energy source notably absent from the military’s plans is wind turbines, which are extremely bulky and work best on the hilltop locations that are hardest to defend.

Secretary Mabus notes that as the military’s use of green energy sources ramps up, the price will come down and infrastructure will be put in place. That will make these technologies more affordable and practical for the civilian economy. That, in turn, means more jobs for green-energy workers.

But the article fails to note one very important consequence of this military policy: The military will be training large numbers of green-energy workers. Civilians often forget that the military is a major educational institution, one that actually pays its students. As the armed forces adopt alternative energy technologies, they will become important sources of worker training for these technologies. As military personnel cycle out of their stints in uniform, they will enter the civilian workforce with the skills required to install solar panels, process biofuels, service hybrid power plants, and perform many other green job functions.

I expect that a future edition of 150 Best Jobs Through Military Training will include Solar Photovoltaic Installers, Biofuels Processing Technicians, Geothermal Technicians, and other green-energy occupations.

Three Kinds of Green Jobs

2010-09-29T11:30:00.000-04:00

You've probably been hearing people tossing around the term "green jobs." This can be a slippery term, so in my forthcoming book Quick Green Jobs Guide: Six Steps to a Green Career I make a point of explaining what a green job is. It's important to understand that the term applies to a lot more jobs than just installing solar panels.

Every big shift in the economy creates many new job opportunities. Think about what happened when computers arrived. They created many new occupations, such as computer programmers and computer systems analysts. But more important was the way technology changed existing occupations. By 2001, 56 percent of all workers were using computers, but only a small fraction of these workers had the word “computer” in their job title.

Something very similar is expected to happen to careers as we shift to a green economy. The U.S. Department of Labor identifies three kinds of occupations that will contribute to the green economy:

Green Increased-Demand Occupations: These existing jobs will take on many new workers as green practices and technologies expand. The work itself and the skill requirements will not change much. Examples: Boilermakers, Chemists, Electricians, Forest and Conservation Workers, Locomotive Engineers, Power Distributors and Dispatchers, Rough Carpenters, Structural Metal Fabricators and Fitters, Zoologists and Wildlife Biologists.

Green Enhanced-Skills Occupations: These existing jobs will experience changes in work tasks and skill requirements as we shift to a green economy. They may or may not see increases in employment. Examples: Aerospace Engineers, Construction Managers, Financial Analysts, Geological Sample Test Technicians, Landscape Architects, Machinists, Marketing Managers, Plumbers, Storage and Distribution Managers, Urban and Regional Planners.

Green New and Emerging Occupations: These jobs are being created to do new kinds of work or meet new skill requirements. Examples: Biofuels Processing Technicians, Biomass Production Managers, Chief Sustainability Officers, Energy Auditors, Fuel Cell Engineers, Logistics Managers, Methane/Landfill Gas Generation System Technicians, Precision Agriculture Technicians, Solar Photovoltaic Installers, Weatherization Installers and Technicians.

These definitions point to an important truth: Most green work opportunities will be in existing occupations. That’s why it's important to become informed about green jobs even though the green economy has not fully emerged yet.

To see the information the Department of Labor has about green jobs, go to the O*NET site at http://www.onetcenter.org/green.html.

The Recession Has Ended?

2010-09-22T09:49:00.001-04:00

By now you’ve probably heard the news that the Great Recession officially ended in June 2009. That’s the verdict of the economists on the Business Cycle Dating Committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research. This means we have already been in a recovery for 15 months. Why doesn’t it feel like that? And what does this mean for your job prospects?

Many of the indicators of recovery that the economists examined show that this recovery is weak. For example, the gross domestic product in the second quarter of this year advanced only 1.6 percent, a slowdown from the 3.7 percent of the first quarter. In July, existing home sales were at their lowest level in a decade.

But not all indicators show weaknesses. To me, the most startling figure is that corporate profits last quarter ($1639.3 billion) were only 1 percent lower than they were at their pre-recession peak ($1655.1 billion). They have risen steadily for the past six quarters. In other words, companies are sitting on a mountain of cash.

That’s why it’s all the more startling that job creation has been so dismal. In fact, we have actually lost more jobs than we have gained since the recovery began.

You may be wondering how corporations can be making such big profits while economic growth is tepid and so many people aren’t working. The reason is productivity gains. American workers who are still employed keep on producing more output relative to what they’re paid. It’s important to understand why this is happening. Some of it is because the workers are putting in longer hours. Some of it is because businesses have invested in machinery and computers that increase workers’ output. And much of it is because we have a leaner, meaner workforce. So many low-skill workers have been laid off. The work that they used to do has either been shipped overseas or is being done by machinery and computers operated by high-skill workers.

Here’s an indication of how lean and mean our workforce has become: Workers over 25 who have a bachelor’s degree or higher had an unemployment rate of 4.6 percent in August, while those with only a high school diploma had a rate of 10.3 percent. Compare that gap of 5.7 percent to the gap of only 2.6 percent when the recession began. Figures for the duration of unemployment tell a similar story. In August, the median duration of unemployment for the college grads was 18.4 weeks, compared to 27.5 weeks for the high school grads. Three years ago, there was only about one unemployed day of difference between the two groups.

There’s little reason to think that this lean, mean workforce will be able to get fat and lazy anytime soon. A report this week from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco says that "capital utilization" (i.e., investment in machinery and computers) has been one of the main drivers of recent productivity growth but notes that the level of investment has been below historical averages. The report concludes that businesses will be able to squeeze still more productivity out of the employed workforce through increased capital utilization rather than through increased hiring.

What is the implication for your job prospects? To be part of the leaner workforce, you need to be meaner. By “meaner,” I don’t mean more ruthless (although you do need to be aggressive in your job-hunting), but rather that you need to be one of the high-skill workers. You need to aim for the highest-skill work that you’re capable of and--better yet--you should plan to upgrade your skills. If you’re still in school, plan to get a higher-level degree than you might have had in mind originally. If you’re out of school, think about formal or informal training to upgrade your skills. And be sure to do more than thinking and planning. Commit to some specific action.

This is the central theme of my latest book, 2011 Career Plan: The Best Moves Now for a Solid Future, and it’s why I take a rather pushy tone in that book. It’s also why so many of my recent blogs have been about the theme of improving your skills. Your job survival in this economy depends on taking action to be one of the highly skilled workers.

Improving Your Skills, Part 4: The Bachelor's Degree

2010-09-15T16:43:00.004-04:00

In my book Quick Education and Training Options Guide: Choose the Career Entry Route That’s Right for You, coming out in October, I discuss various ways people can improve their skills through education and training. I cover many kinds of formal and informal training, including apprenticeship, military training, and self-instruction, among others.

Although I do not, by any means, single out the bachelor's degree as the best kind of preparation, I make a good case for it. I point out that a bachelor’s degree can provide you with many advantages in the job market. In fact, some jobs require it. For example, to become licensed as a professional engineer or a public school teacher, you generally need to have a bachelor’s degree from an approved program. In many other occupations, there is no legal requirement, but employers will not consider job candidates who do not have at least a bachelor’s degree, sometimes in a specific major. Accountants, foresters, and financial analysts are examples of careers where a specialized bachelor’s is expected. In still other careers, a bachelor’s is not required but preferred.

Then I give specific reasons why a bachelor’s degree is such a valuable credential:

It gives you broad and deep knowledge of the field. A bachelor’s degree program has requirements that ensure that you will learn more than you could in a two-year program or from on-the-job experiences. It helps you understand theoretical issues that are the basis of problem-solving techniques and creative thinking.

It gives you a foundation for further learning. Our economy is changing so rapidly that workers need to continue learning throughout their careers. Even if they do not pursue higher-level degrees that require the bachelor’s as a foundation, they will need to take courses or pursue informal learning to remain productive as their jobs evolve. But continuous learning requires skills that go beyond the immediate demands of the job—skills in critical thinking, writing, math, and research methods. That’s another reason why employers prefer bachelor’s degree holders over people who have taken courses related only to the entry-level job.

It represents a commitment of time and energy. Four years is a long time to devote to any effort, and employers appreciate people who have made that commitment and have seen it through to completion.

It gives you knowledge beyond your major. Students often wonder why bachelor’s degree programs include requirements for courses in departments outside their major--such as literature, philosophy, history, public speaking, political science, the arts, or science. A bachelor’s degree is meant to produce a well-rounded citizen, not a robotic worker. Employers believe that bachelor’s degree holders have a broad understanding of the society in which business is conducted. People with the degree have explored enough different subjects to be fully committed to their career specialization yet have the flexibility to adapt as their career undergoes change. For example, if your job should open to an international market--as happens so often these days--knowledge of geography, history, comparative religion, and foreign language can be very useful.

On average, it leads to better-paying and more secure jobs. Bachelor's degree holders averaged $53,300 per year in earnings in 2009, an advantage of $26,692 over high school dropouts. Their unemployment rate was 5.2% in 2009, compared to 14.6% for high school dropouts. These advantages are actually growing over time.

It enriches your life beyond your job. The same breadth of learning that will make you a better learner and a more flexible employee also will help you to appreciate all aspects of life. It will give you a context in which to get more out of experiences such as a nature walk, a conversation with a person much older than you, a movie, a visit to a foreign country, a political speech, or a news article about an emerging technology.

Improving Your Skills, Part 3

2010-09-08T10:23:00.000-04:00

In two previous blog postings, I wrote about getting ahead in your career through informal learning. This kind of learning is a frequent method for advancing a career, and so I cover it in some detail in my new book, 2011 Career Plan. But, in the same book, I also discuss formal coursework. This does not always have to mean earning a college or graduate degree. It can consist of a single course.

About 15 years ago, I was fortunate to get my employer to pay for me to be trained in Microsoft Access. I had three days of training in the basics and, later, two days covering intermediate topics. What I learned in these two courses I now use on the job virtually every day.

Here are some of the features of a formal class or program that differentiate it from informal learning:

The learning goals are clearly spelled out.
The instructor (whether it’s a human, a computer program, or a booklet) has a reputation for knowing the subject and being able to teach it.
There’s some way to measure how much you learn.
When you’re finished, you get some kind of recognition for what you’ve learned—for example, a piece of paper or a mention on your performance appraisal.

The last bulleted item is what makes this form of learning especially valuable to you.

However, some courses are a better choice for your career than others. Following is a checklist that I developed for the 2011 Career Plan to help you assemble the facts about a course or workshop and decide whether or not it’s a good choice.

Facts to Know Before Signing Up for a Course or Workshop

__ The expected learning outcomes of the course are clear to me.

__ The learning outcomes match the skill needs of a current or potential employer.
__ The learning outcomes contribute to a skill I want to develop.
__ The learning outcomes do not repeat what I already know.
__ The course has no prerequisites I can’t meet.
__ I have evidence that the course provider can teach me successfully. (Examples: reputation of provider; testimonial of a course completer; demonstrated skill of a course completer; recommendation by my employer.)
__ I will learn more or better than I could by teaching myself instead.
__ I will be able to show evidence of how the course has improved my skills. (Examples: certificate of completion; documentation of a completed project.)
__ The course is offered at a time convenient for me.
__ The course is offered at a place convenient for me.
__ I can afford the cost of the course (perhaps by getting my employer to pay).

Note that you don’t have to check off every statement, but the more you agree with, the better. If several of the statements are not checked, maybe this course is not a good move for your career.

The Importance of Outlook Information

2010-09-01T10:37:00.000-04:00

In my new book 2011 Career Plan, which comes out this month, I focus on industries and occupations that are projected to have high growth. This week, I fielded an inquiry from a journalist who wanted to know whether growth projections are actually useful in career advice. Read on to see what I told him.

First of all, to understand the outlook for an occupation you’re considering, you have to be careful not to go solely by the figure for growth. You also need to pay attention to the projected number of job openings. Growth and openings are not the same thing. Consider the occupation Hydrologists, which is projected to grow at the outstanding rate of 31.6 percent. There should be lots of opportunities in such a fast-growing job, right? Not exactly. This is a tiny occupation, with only about 8,000 people currently employed, so although it is growing rapidly, it will not create many new jobs (about 1,000 per year). Now consider Secondary School Teachers, Except Special and Vocational Education. This occupation is growing at the sluggish rate of 5.6 percent. Nevertheless, this is a huge occupation that employs more than one million workers, so although its growth rate is unimpressive, it is expected to take on more than 93,000 new workers each year as existing workers retire, die, or move on to other jobs.

In fact, some very large occupations have so much job turnover that they provide tens of thousands of job openings even though they’re shrinking in size. Size of the workforce is not the only cause. Occupations that are easy to get into and/or low-paying are also easy to walk away from, so Home Health Aides, for example, has huge turnover. Contemplating such career options, you have to ask yourself whether you’re looking for a long-term career or a job where most people sojourn only briefly.

Next, consider the possibility of local variation. A national boom in an occupation may bypass your region. You really need to check with local employers to get a sense of the local outlook, unless you’re planning to cast a nationwide net in your job search. Something similar applies to variation by occupational .specialization. Here again, it helps to talk to employers in the specialization that interests you.

Then there’s the question of personal satisfactions. It’s true that you won’t get any satisfactions (earnings, working in your interest field, leadership, helping others, prestige--you name it) from work if you don’t have work. This is one reason why job opportunity is so important. However, if your personality is comfortable with taking risks, you may strive for an occupation with a somewhat poorer-than-average outlook because of the potential for a high payoff in satisfactions.

When I write my books, I don’t encourage people to defy the odds, because the books are aimed to do the most good for the greatest number of readers. However, there are always people who are the exceptions to the rule, who beat all the competition and get the job even though only a handful of openings are available. (Maybe you saw the movie “The Pursuit of Happyness.”) These people either are risk-takers or they have extraordinary abilities or credentials. They are uncommon enough that I don’t usually address them in my books. If they do read one of my books, they probably have enough well-earned self-confidence to be able to ignore my warnings about limited job opportunities.

Another minority of readers whom I choose to neglect are those interested in doing work that almost nobody else wants to do. They may be willing to pursue a highly specialized occupation, such as repairing antique clocks and watches, or an occupation with work conditions that almost everyone else finds repulsive, such as cleaning up houses where obsessive cat collectors have lived and died. The job outlook for such occupations is actually good because there is almost zero competition for job openings, but the number of job openings is so minuscule that the occupations are not worth including in a book of general interest. Like the übermenschen I discussed in the previous paragraph, these uncommon people probably will find their way to their obscure career goal without needing my help.

So, in conclusion, outlook figures are very useful, but be aware of figures for both growth and openings, verify them as they apply to your region and specialization, decide how much risk you’re willing to undertake, and weigh how much you’re willing to do the unconventional.

Measuring the Importance of Postsecondary Education

2010-08-25T09:49:00.002-04:00

One of the purposes of my forthcoming book, 2011 Career Plan: The Best Moves Now for a Solid Future, is to exhort the reader to get additional education or training as preparation for a career move. I describe several routes to career entry, such as on-the-job training, postsecondary technical school, and college degrees. Although I mention the advantages and disadvantages of each skill-building route, I don’t point to any single route as best for all people. That would certainly be bad guidance. But the point is that some education or training beyond the high school diploma is vital. (I make the same point in another book, Quick Education and Training Options Guide, which is due out in October.)

This argument gains a lot of reinforcement from a fascinating research study from Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce: Help Wanted: Projections of Jobs and Education Requirements Through 2018. (You can get the PDF of the full report or the executive summary at http://cew.georgetown.edu/jobs2018/.)

The report, by Anthony P. Carnevale (full disclosure: he was a colleague of mine at Educational Testing Service), Nicole Smith, and Jeff Strohl, forecasts the demand for workers with various levels of education. The researchers show that the jobs (that is, paid positions, not occupations) normally requiring an associate degree or higher increase from 28% of the total mix in 1973 to 56% in 1992, 59% in 2007, and a projected 62% in 2018. Over the same interval, the fraction of jobs for people with only a high school diploma falls from 40% to 28%, and for high school dropouts from 32% to 10%.

They also show that postsecondary education is increasingly important for entering or staying in the middle class, which they define as the middle four deciles of household earnings. In 1970, 46% of high school dropouts and 60% of high school graduates were in the middle class. By 2007, these proportions had dropped to 33% and 45%. There was also some erosion among college grads, as people with the bachelor’s went from being 47% in the middle class to 38%. But the bachelor’s-holders were moving upward, not downward. The percentage of bachelor's-holders in the upper three deciles of household earnings increased from 37% to 48%. Similar changes can be seen in those with a graduate degree.

Looking at wage trends, they found that from 1983 to 2008, among prime-age workers between the ages of 25 and 54, earnings increased by 13% for high school grads compared to 15% for those with an associate degree, 34% with a bachelor’s, and 55% with a graduate degree. Over a lifetime, they estimated earnings (in current dollars) of $1,767,025 for high school grads, but almost double that ($3,380,060) for those with a bachelor’s.

The researchers point to the changing nature of our economy, only accelerated by the Great Recession, as the force that is increasing the demand for--and remuneration of--workers with postsecondary education.

They also make a related point: that our current postsecondary educational system will not produce enough workers to meet this demand. This idea goes beyond the purview of 2011 Career Plan and therefore doesn’t get a full discussion in this blog. Nevertheless, it’s a very important point, and I may return to it in a future blog.

One of the Hottest Career Fields for 2011

2010-08-18T09:49:00.004-04:00

In my forthcoming book 2011 Career Plan: The Best Moves Now for a Solid Future, I devote one chapter to the hottest fields of 2011.

If you’re planning for a career move, it makes sense to focus on a field with a lot of potential. As the economy heats up, it doesn’t work like an oven that browns all the biscuits at the same rate. Some industries are much hotter than others. So it makes sense for you to focus your 2011 career plan on a field that is expected to offer lots of job opportunities.

In the book, I provide information about 11 hot career fields. Following is some information about the hottest field of all, management, scientific, and technical consulting services. (The following discussion draws heavily on the U.S. Department of Labor’s Career Guide to Industries.)

Firms that offer management, scientific, and technical consulting services influence how businesses, governments, and institutions make decisions. Often working behind the scenes, these firms offer technical expertise, information, contacts, and tools that clients cannot provide themselves. They then work with their clients to provide a service or solve a problem.

Usually, one of the resources that consulting firms provide to clients is expertise—in the form of knowledge, experience, special skills, or creativity; another resource is time or personnel that the client cannot spare. Clients include large and small companies in the private sector; federal, state, and local government agencies; institutions, such as hospitals, universities, unions, and nonprofit organizations; and foreign governments or businesses.

The management, scientific, and technical consulting services industry is diverse. Almost anyone with expertise in a given area can enter consulting, which means that it can be a good field to move into after you have acquired a lot of skills and knowledge in some other industry.

Management consulting firms advise on almost every aspect of corporate operations: marketing; finance; corporate strategy and organization; manufacturing processes; information systems and data processing; electronic commerce (e-commerce) or business; human resources, including benefits and compensation; and many others. Scientific and technical consulting firms provide technical advice relating to almost all nonmanagement organizational activities, including compliance with environmental and workplace safety and health regulations; the application of technology; and the application of sciences such as biology, chemistry, and physics.

Consultants work slightly longer hours than most other workers, and occasionally they work evenings or weekends under stress to meet hurried deadlines. Consultants whose services are billed hourly often are under pressure to manage their time very carefully.

Workers enter this industry via a wide variety of routes. Although employers generally prefer a bachelor’s or higher degree, most jobs also require extensive on-the-job training or related experience. Advancement opportunities are best for workers with the highest levels of education.

Some consultants start their own firm as a self-employed, one-person operation, eventually taking on a small support staff.

Employment in this field is projected to grow by 82.7 percent from 2008 to 2018. All of the following occupations are projected to grow within this industry by at least 100 percent. Note that the following facts about these occupations apply only to workers within this industry.

	Occupational Growth Within Industry	Workforce Size Within Industry	Average Earnings Within Industry
1.	Network Systems and Data Communications Analysts	148.2%	6,560	$74,410
2.	Industrial Engineers	111.8%	5,070	$82,440
3.	Financial Analysts	104.1%	9,120	$74,380
4.	Customer Service Representatives	104.0%	27,980	$31,520
5.	Logisticians	104.0%	5,040	$61,940
6.	Public Relations Specialists	104.0%	8,350	$57,530
7.	Training and Development Specialists	103.9%	6,640	$60,420
8.	Computer Software Engineers, Applications	102.4%	11,660	$89,190
9.	Computer Software Engineers, Systems Software	102.4%	11,420	$94,170
10.	Compensation, Benefits, and Job Analysis Specialists	102.1%	5,200	$60,340

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics. Earnings are national estimates for May 2009.

Improving Your Skills, Part 2

2010-08-11T09:10:00.000-04:00

In the previous blog, I wrote about getting ahead in your career through informal learning, either by asking co-workers for help or by creating a program of self-instruction, ideally with a study partner. (These are some ideas I include in my forthcoming book, 2011 Career Plan: The Best Moves for a Solid Future.)

Independent study is particularly useful if the skill you want to master is on the cutting edge of technology and classes are not yet available. People who work with computers do this constantly; in fact, their jobs are in danger if they don’t. Years ago, I taught myself how to use Dan Bricklin’s Demo Program, which was the best program for creating demos during the DOS era, before Windows and Visual Basic. I learned by ordering the software (and getting my employer to pay), studying the manual, and experimenting with a project.

This last element of the learning process--applying it to an actual project--is vital. You won’t retain mastery of the skill unless you have occasions to use the skill. This is part of the reason I can barely make out the Arabic alphabet these days, although I studied the language for awhile. As my visits to Saudi Arabia grew further apart, my occasions to use Arabic diminished. Nowadays the only practice I get is with the occasional taxi driver.

By contrast, my skill with the Demo program kept getting better and better for a few years, because I had repeated projects to use it on. When I first learned Demo, I used it in an actual development project I was involved with at work. Because the project would benefit from my use of a demo, my boss was willing to let me learn the skill during the workday. I improved my skills in subsequent projects. Later, I learned Visual Basic the same way and continue to use it now.

Using the skill in a project overcomes one of the downsides of informal learning: that it does not give you a tangible credential in the same way that a formal course does. Once you've used the newly learned skill in a project, you can get recognition for the skill on your performance appraisal.

To encourage skill growth through informal learning and on-the-job experience, in 2011 Career Plan I include a sample e-mail message that a worker can send to his or her boss asking for such an assignment:

E-mail That Requests Skill-Testing Assignment

I have been working on improving my ____________________ skills and would really appreciate some feedback from you regarding these skills. I believe a good way for me to get this feedback is to tackle a work task that requires these skills at a level beyond what you’ve seen me do in the past. If I handle the task correctly and demonstrate the skill, please let me know I’ve done so. If I make any mistakes, I want to know about them, too. Please let me know not just what I’ve done wrong, but how I can do the task better. I promise I won’t be defensive about your comments.

I’m not asking for extra pay for doing this, and doing it would not imply I’ve been promoted. I also assure you that I won’t let this extra task interfere with my usual work assignments. If necessary, I’ll work on this task outside of my regular work hours.

Please give some thought to what task would be appropriate—a challenge, but not so difficult that I’m guaranteed to fail. If you’re not sure, I can suggest some possible tasks that you can choose from. I’ll be happy to answer any other questions you have about this experiment.

Improving Your Skills, Part 1

2010-08-04T12:23:00.001-04:00

This blog is a departure from my usual focus on career information. It’s about career advancement. Many people who want to get ahead in their careers think their only option is to get an additional college degree, certification, or other formal credential. In my book 2011 Career Plan: The Best Moves Now for a Solid Future, due out in September, I explain some other strategies for getting ahead.

You advance in your career by improving your skills. Degree programs and other formal courses are not the only way to do this.

Let’s face it, nobody knows exactly what to do on the very first day at the worksite. Every new worker needs at least a little informal on-the-job training from experienced workers. Why should this end once you’ve learned the job? When you see co-workers using a skill that you don’t have, ask them to show you how. Most co-workers will be happy to teach you, if it doesn’t take up too much of their time.

Another way to learn informally is through independent study. In fact, this may be your only option if the skill is so arcane that local classes are not available. A few years back, I was involved in a project for a university in Saudi Arabia and realized it would be useful for me to learn some Arabic. This was before 9/11, and it would have been difficult for me to find an academic course in the language, so I undertook a self-instruction program using a textbook and homemade flash cards.

I managed to teach myself a smattering of Arabic, but the program eventually ran aground because I lacked a study partner. Study partners help reinforce each other’s learning and keep the learning program on track. Without a study partner, you’re more likely to give up quickly.

In 2011 Career Plan I include a checklist of characteristics that are good to have in a study partner:

Characteristics of a Good Study Partner

__ This person is interested in learning the same skill that I want to learn.

__ For the skill that I want to learn, this person is now at roughly the same level.

__ For the skill that I want to learn, this person has roughly the same aptitude for learning.

__ This person is as committed as I am to keeping the study program going and staying on task.

__ This person and I can agree on what book (or other learning resource) to use in our program of study.

__ This person and I can get along reasonably well.

__ This person’s schedule and mine allow time to meet regularly for study sessions.

__ This person is able to find time to do the homework required between meetings.

When you’re filling out this checklist, it helps if you know which statements you feel positive about. However, you may be unsure about some statements. For example, you may not know how committed the study partner is until you have started studying together. If you feel neutral about some statements, you may choose to give the person the benefit of the doubt, start studying with this person, and eventually decide whether the arrangement is working out.

On the other hand, if you already feel negative about several statements, maybe you should consider finding someone else as a study partner

What Are the Best Occupations for Women?

2010-07-27T10:04:00.004-04:00

The topic of career advice for women never seems to get stale. I’ve been invited to discuss this topic on a radio broadcast, “Girlfriend We Gotta Talk.” The interview will be broadcast Sunday, August 22nd, after which you can download the recording at the show’s Facebook page.

I’m often asked, “What are the best occupations for women?” This seems like a straightforward question, but most people don’t realize how loaded it is. To accept this as a legitimate question, you have to accept the premise that all women are alike, that what’s good for one woman is good for all women. Nobody working in career development would suggest that one career is good for everybody. Neither is any good for all women.

I am reluctant to rephrase the initial (loaded) question this way: “What occupations are easiest for women to enter?” That’s because ease of entry means more than the simple availability of job openings, the balance between demand for and supply of workers. Ease of entry also is affected by the proportion of women already in the workforce of the occupation. In other words, occupations that are easiest for women to enter tend to be occupations where there are already a large number of women. Recommending these occupations is tantamount to advocating continuation of the status quo.

We have to be careful to realize that “best occupations for women” is not the same as “best occupations with women.”

However, there is one legitimate (although highly limited) way to rephrase the question. We can ask this: “What occupations are best suited to the preferences of women on average?” The last two words of this question make clear that the answer will not apply to all women. The answer depends on what women, on average, prefer in their work.

I was part of the team at Educational Testing Service that researched the work-related values of men and women. We found that on average there are differences between the values priorities of men and women. Women on average tend to value “helping others,” and men on average tend to prefer work values associated with achievement, such as “high income,” “prestige,” and “independence.”

The implication of this difference is that women, on average, can get satisfaction from occupations that offer many opportunities for helping others. But it doesn’t follow that the more “helping others” an occupation offers, the more the average woman (if we pretend that there is such a person) will be satisfied by it. That’s because any work involves a mix of satisfactions (and dissatisfactions). An occupation like Home Health Aides offers a great amount of “helping others,” but the low pay may make it unattractive to many women. On the other hand, an occupation like Veterinarians offers both “helping others” and high pay. I should mention that more than half of Veterinarians are now women.

The ETS study probably overlooked some other preferences that characterize women on average. For example, one study by the Pew Research Center found that working mothers with minor children tend to prefer part-time work more than do fathers. Women who share this preference may be attracted to occupations that offer more opportunities for part-time work.

Of course, you have to set averages aside when you give advice to one person. The same ETS study that found the average value priorities of women also found that there is a significant minority of women whose value profile looks very much like the average value profile for men. (The reverse is also true.) Women with an atypical values profile may not be satisfied by Home Health Aides, Veterinarians, or any other occupation largely focused on “helping others.”

So even the question “What occupations are best suited to the preferences of women on average?” has very limited usefulness.

As a society, in fact, we have to be careful not to focus too much on averages. Although the majority rules in our republic, we also have a Bill of Rights that safeguards minority rights to speech, religion, and so forth. The same should apply to job opportunity. If we focus too much on what women want on average in their careers, we too easily allow the perpetuation of traditional practices that thwart the career preferences of individual women.

Career Success for Introverts

2010-07-22T09:52:00.003-04:00

This week I came upon a pair of Web-based articles on the impact of introversion and extroversion on a person’s career prospects. I have researched and written on this subject (in 200 Best Jobs for Introverts), and so I was disappointed to find that the writer of these articles presents a distorted picture of what an introverted personality is like. She also fails to find any advantages in introversion.

Here are a few choice quotations that show how this writer characterizes introverts:

“Your inability to exude confidence in social situations is a definite weakness. You therefore have to either learn to overcome this anxiety or find a career where you don’t really have to deal with people.”

“If you become flustered and start panicking when you’re surrounded by large numbers of people you will most probably want to avoid developing a career which involves a great deal of contact with the public.”

“If communicating is a real problem it may be worth drawing attention to the fact that you’re shy, rather than pretending to be someone you’re not and being perceived as ‘weird’.”

Contrasting extroverts to introverts, she says this:

“When you’re an extrovert, you tend to have much more confidence than someone who is an introvert, which can really help you pursue the career you want. Instead of being plagued by self-doubt you have a consistent belief in yourself so that you set goals and work towards achieving them, rather than letting yourself get sidetracked by the potential for failure. You may listen to other people’s views and opinions, but you don’t take any criticism to heart, as you are confident to ignore anything you don’t want to hear.”

The essential problem here is that she confuses introversion with social phobia. Introverts are not shy. They do not lack confidence, get flustered, suffer from self-doubt, or panic in social situations. These are all symptoms of social phobia.

Introverts are people who derive energy from solitude and feel a loss of energy in social situations. That’s not the same as being anxious or awkward in social situations. In fact, many introverts are very skilled at social interactions. They simply prefer to work alone.

Based on a fallacious definition of introversion, this writer makes it appear that introverts are ill-equipped for finding and succeeding at jobs. It’s true that the 21st century workplace, more than ever before, emphasizes working in teams, which is not the arrangement introverts prefer. It’s also true that much of the growth of the workforce will be in service occupations, such as health care, that often involve a lot of working with people. Finally, modern technology throws a lot of distractions at workers (e-mail, IM, cell phones) that introverts would prefer to avoid.

Nevertheless, introverts have many strengths that they bring to the job hunt and the workplace. Introverts who know how to use their strengths will have many opportunities.

Introverts make up about 25 percent of the population. (Estimates vary, but I reject the much higher figure from MBTI, which counts everyone on the "I" side of the midpoint as an introvert. In reality, the amount of measurement error in the assessment means that many people near the midpoint could just as easily be on the other side.) Although introverts are definitely a minority, they make up a majority of the gifted population. Many highly successful people are thought to be introverts--even some presidents of the United States.

When introverts are able to focus on the task at hand without interruptions, they often are able to provide very thoughtful solutions to problems. Their patience and persistence enable them to solve problems that take a long time to complete and that require mastery of both the big picture and the details. By avoiding a herd mentality, introverts can produce highly original ideas. The volume of their work output also may be very high, because they don’t have to adjust their work pace to fit other people’s schedules or preferences. Introverts tend to be good writers, because they prefer to give a thoughtful response rather than work out their ideas in conversation. Research shows that multitasking tends to lower productivity, so the introverted workers’ tendency to turn off their cell phones and ignore e-mail arrivals probably makes them more efficient.

When it comes time to find a job, introverts may seem at a disadvantage because networking involves so much social contact. However, introverts can network successfully by concentrating on the strengths that they bring to the task: their understanding of themselves, their ability to articulate their skills, and their ability to cultivate relationships over time.

Introverts may be highly effective at crafting the perfect resume and cover letter, but they run the risk of being misunderstood in job interviews, especially if the person interviewing them is an extrovert. The interviewer may perceive them as “guarded,” “reserved,” “standoffish,” “private,” or “too serious.”

Again, introverts can compensate by using their strengths, especially their ability to prepare for the interview. Applying their research skills, they can find out useful information about the employer--and, possibly, the interviewer. They can use a portfolio to provide examples of their best work. Using a thorough knowledge of the business, pointed questions, and specific examples of their work, they can dispel the notion that they are “aloof.”

New Data on Women's Earnings

2010-07-14T14:16:00.011-04:00

The Bureau of Labor Statistics recently released a report on the 2009 earnings of women (PDF). This annual report always makes for fascinating reading, and this year's edition is no exception. Surprise, surprise! On average, women are still earning less than men. However, I was able to find some interesting tidbits about the variations within that overall average.

Start with this chart, based on figures from the report, that indicates the earnings of women at various levels of education, measured (on the vertical scale) as a percentage of the earnings of men at the same level of education.

Given these categories for level of education, the more education a woman gets, the greater the disparity in her earnings. It looks as if it's pointless for women to get more education, doesn't it?

Yet, paradoxically, it turns out that (again, on average) women actually gain a greater advantage than men for each additional level of education they attain. The following chart, also based on figures from the report, shows the advantage of various levels of educational attainment for men and women over workers of the same sex who did not complete high school.

The difference for women is not great, but it's consistent, and it's greater (1.3%, 2.1%, and 11.5%) with each additional step up the ladder.

Now, here's another chart based on data from the report. This one looks at the wage differences for different age brackets. Like the first chart, it shows women's earnings as a percentage of men's earnings (in the same age bracket):

You'll note that younger and older women earn a better-than-average percentage of the male wage, whereas middle-aged women earn less. I'm only guessing, but I think that younger women earn more because they have higher expectations of fair treatment and because the earnings-limiting lifestyle choices that many women make have not yet taken a toll on their wages. I also speculate that older women have acquired enough work experience to make up for some of the ground that they lost earlier, and this explains their higher earnings.

Now, here's one more chart derived from the report, yet again showing women's earnings as a percent of men's. In this case, the average is broken down into various levels of hours worked per week:

This chart reveals that women who work part-time earn higher wages than men working the same number of part-time hours (except for those women who work fewer than 5 hours). This difference partly reflects the kinds of jobs that women and men are working in. For example, some women who work part-time as nurses on night duty earn very impressive per-hour wages. It may also reflect the attitudes of employers toward workers. That is, working part-time may seem a more conventional behavior for women workers, whereas male workers who choose this arrangement may be perceived, rightly or wrongly, as less committed to their careers.

I doubt these disparities will ever vanish, but we do seem to be making progress. A female friend of mine who got her bachelor's in chemical engineering from The Johns Hopkins University about 15 years ago told me that there are now more women in the JHU School of Engineering with the same given name as her as the total number of women enrolled when she was an undergraduate.

Finally, here are some occupations in which the percentage of female workers has increased by more than 10 percent between 2007 and 2009. I limited my analysis to occupations with a total workforce of more than 100,000 in order to exclude small-sample occupations, for which the male-female percentages are likely to be unreliable:

Occupation Name	Increase
Medical Transcriptionists	23.7%
Library Technicians	23.2%
Instructional Coordinators	21.3%
Demonstrators and Product Promoters	13.3%
Administrative Services Managers	12.1%
Telemarketers	11.6%
Medical Scientists, Except Epidemiologists	10.6%
Paper Goods Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders	10.2%

This blog entry is dedicated to the memory of Sarah Doshna.

New Release of Career Information

2010-07-07T15:46:00.004-04:00

This week’s blog entry is aimed mostly at career-information geeks who, like me, are thrilled by each new release of the O*NET database. Release 15 came out while I was away from home, at the National Career Development Association conference, so I didn’t get a chance to play around with it until today.

No new occupations were added this year. However, I am very pleased to note that data regarding skills, work styles, and other domains now may be found for 45 occupations that previously had only definitions and lists of work tasks. A list of these occupations appears below. Of these, all except the last two were added to the O*NET database only last year.

I am not surprised that many of these expanded-data occupations are in health care; this is America’s largest and fastest-growing industry. You may have already had a personal encounter with a worker in one of these occupations, such as Nuclear Medicine Physicians, Nurse Practitioners, or Endoscopy Technicians.

But I am especially happy that many of the expanded-data occupations are STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) occupations. Our economy needs an infusion of workers into STEM careers, so it’s important for these occupations to have a higher profile than in the past, giving career decision makers more opportunities to consider them.

Only a few titles on the list below (notably Energy Auditors and Energy Engineers) are clearly identifiable as green occupations. Nevertheless, I can’t say I’m disappointed that this release does not expand the data for many more green occupations. The field is so recently emerged that I simply would not be realistic if I expected the full range of data for these occupations already.

11-9111.01 Clinical Nurse Specialists
11-9199.01 Regulatory Affairs Managers
11-9199.04 Supply Chain Managers
13-1041.07 Regulatory Affairs Specialists
13-1199.01 Energy Auditors
13-2099.04 Fraud Examiners, Investigators and Analysts
15-1051.01 Informatics Nurse Specialists
15-1099.06 Geospatial Information Scientists and Technologists
15-2041.01 Biostatisticians
15-2041.02 Clinical Data Managers
17-1022.01 Geodetic Surveyors
17-2199.02 Validation Engineers
17-2199.03 Energy Engineers
17-2199.04 Manufacturing Engineers
17-2199.07 Photonics Engineers
17-2199.08 Robotics Engineers
17-3029.04 Electronics Engineering Technologists
17-3029.06 Manufacturing Engineering Technologists
17-3029.09 Manufacturing Production Technicians
19-1029.02 Molecular and Cellular Biologists
19-1029.03 Geneticists
19-2099.01 Remote Sensing Scientists and Technologists
19-3039.01 Neuropsychologists and Clinical Neuropsychologists
19-4099.02 Precision Agriculture Technicians
29-1069.03 Hospitalists
29-1069.05 Nuclear Medicine Physicians
29-1069.09 Preventive Medicine Physicians
29-1111.01 Acute Care Nurses
29-1111.02 Advanced Practice Psychiatric Nurses
29-1111.03 Critical Care Nurses
29-1122.01 Low Vision Therapists, Orientation and Mobility Specialists, and Vision Rehabilitation Therapists
29-1199.02 Nurse Anesthetists
29-1199.03 Nurse Practitioners
29-1199.04 Naturopathic Physicians
29-1199.05 Orthoptists
29-2011.01 Cytogenetic Technologists
29-2011.02 Cytotechnologists
29-2011.03 Histotechnologists and Histologic Technicians
29-2099.01 Electroneurodiagnostic Technologists
29-2099.03 Ophthalmic Medical Technologists and Technicians
29-2099.04 Nurse Midwives
29-9099.02 Genetic Counselors
31-9093.01 Endoscopy Technicians
33-9099.01 Transportation Security Officers
15-1099.03 Network Designers

Writers Need to Do More Than Just Write

2010-06-29T13:50:00.006-04:00

I have written about many occupations in this blog, but never before about my own: writer. I recently was reading the memoir of Paul Auster, Hand to Mouth: A Chronicle of Early Failure, in which he describes his struggle to start his writing career. He writes, “Becoming a writer is not a ‘career decision’ like becoming a doctor or a policeman. You don't choose it so much as get chosen, and once you accept the fact that you're not fit for anything else, you have to be prepared to walk a long, hard road for the rest of your days.”

What Auster (one of my favorite authors) says about writers applies equally well to any career in the arts. In some of the informal assessments I've worked on, I've made special exceptions for people who are determined to work in the arts, saying, in effect, “Understanding the risks, you may choose to ignore what this assessment is telling you.”

Although Auster seems to be talking mainly about fiction writers, his sentiments also apply to many, perhaps most, nonfiction writers. I know that in my case I have tried other careers but seem to be fated to work in this one. I first thought of writing as a career in the fourth grade, when the children’s writer Beman Lord came to my class and talked about his novel The Trouble With Francis. But I aspired to several other career goals in subsequent years before ending up doing what I do now.

Because I write and because I work for a publisher, people sometimes tell me they have an idea for a book (or are actually writing one) and ask for my advice about how to get published. One important piece of advice I impart is that writing the book is only half, or maybe less than half, of the author’s work. The other crucial task is promoting the book.

You might not realize the importance of promotion for writers if you were to go by the O*NET database’s listing of work tasks for the occupation Poets, Lyricists and Creative Writers. Only one of the 11 core tasks listed for this occupation refers to promotion: “Attend book launches and publicity events, or conduct public readings.”

For a more realistic understanding of the importance of promotion, I suggest you look at the guidelines that any book publisher offers for book proposals. They all ask prominently “What are you prepared to do to promote the book?”

This is also the reason why publishers are so fond of acquiring authors who are retired presidents, former first ladies, superannuated actors, or over-the-hill athletes. These authors have great name recognition but also a lot of time on their hands, so they are not just desirable but also available guests for talk shows and other media events. If you lack stellar name recognition, you may have a very good professional network that will help you get your name and work out there.

If you’re still not convinced of the importance of self-promotion, I suggest you read the experiences of Jonathan Papernick, a writer who thought that his success was assured after his first collection of short stories was greeted by glowing reviews. He writes, “Nobody ever told me that the real work begins once a book is finished and that you need to spend a good six months to a year getting out there and promoting your own work, otherwise it risks dying on the vine.”