Jobs for the Next Decade

We all know that the work world is being jarred by the acceleration of automation and artificial intelligence. Add in the variables that the current administration is deporting a large segment of our lower-end labor force for the kinds of work Americans will not take at any wage rate and denying visas to a vast coterie of in-demand high-skillset-educated technically-adept workers. Technology responds to that job vacuum, as it did with oil workers when the price of oil plunged, by designing new machines – imbued with artificial intelligence – such as new agricultural equipment to plant and harvest crops with perfect timing and waste avoidance (one example pictured above).

But certain heavy work, manual labor, does not go away, particularly in construction. Most of the agricultural world cannot yet afford those expensive replacement machines… but those prices will come down. Looking at the expectations of the near-term labor demands in representative Western markets (including the United States), mega-consulting firm McKinsey (their Global Institute) released a paper analyzing the job market demand factors for the 2030 work force.

Summarized in the May 25^th FastCompany.com, the McKinsey report observed: Here’s what demand will look like by 2030:

• Demand for technological skills, both basic digital and advanced tech, will rise by 55%
• Demand for social and emotional skills, such as leadership and managing others, will rise by 24%
• Demand for basic cognitive skills, which include basic data input and processing, will decline by 15%
• Demand for physical and manual skills, which include general equipment operation, will decline by 14%

Eric Hazan, a senior partner at McKinsey & Company in Paris and a coauthor of the report, warned that the skill shift could cause further exacerbate income inequality and a divide between companies that can and can’t attract top talent. ‘The watchword of the new era will be adaptability,’ he said in a statement. ‘Workers but also companies will need to be open and embrace new forms of working, new structures, and new approaches, in a world of work that will be changing rapidly.’

What is particularly interesting is the mismatch between what U.S. colleges and universities are able to produce even today in terms of the most-sought-after educational skills and the obvious demand for such skills. Not enough! Our population has been growing for the last two decades, not from normal reproductive replacement (the United States birth rate continues to contract further below the 2.1 births per couple population-stable replacement rate every year) but from immigration.

We are not only failing to educate young people in sufficient numbers to meet the above job demands, but while our price of post-secondary education continues to rise well-beyond the cost of living increases, the quality of that education – particularly in public universities where state funding continues to decline – is falling just as foreign support for such education is rising. What exacerbates the problem, impaling the numbers of teens who are actually ready for a vigorous college education, is the plunging quality of public education across the land, again a product of short-sighted state and federal funding cuts. The result: Income inequality rises as upward mobility vaporizes. And we are faced with Trump-imposed barriers to making up that shortfall from the overseas marketplace.

In the end, corporate America will be faced with moving its innovation venues to foreign lands, where the expert foreign immigrants are not treated with hostility and where visas are also accorded to their families. It’s already happening as the Trump administration operates under false notion of “America First.” So far, Canada has been the big winner as it has openly courted those gifted foreign students and experts who have completed their education – including their families – to settle and work in the Great North. American technologically-focused companies have cooperated by opening new research and development centers in Canada.

By the time the United States reverses these immigration policies, as it invariably must, the patterns of foreign experts choosing to join those who preceded them into a culturally welcoming venue (read: not the United States) may be so embedded that the United States will not be able to restore what once made “America Great.” We are, after all, a nation of immigrants. Oh, and those fears of foreign terrorists sneaking in? Well, aside from the fact that the vast bulk of terrorists mounting attacks in the United States are all-American, born and bred, you may notice the surprising paucity of foreign terrorist attacks in Canada.

I’m Peter Dekom, and the real world ignores meaningless slogan-driven political movements, choosing instead to pit their best and the brightest against the truly best and the brightest of every other nation against which they compete.