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Strategies & Market Trends : Booms, Busts, and Recoveries -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ramsey Su who wrote (46066)	2/11/2004 9:27:04 PM
From: TobagoJack	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 74559

I am very scared. assumption: - competitive devaluation will happen, per script; - prosperity cannot come out of a printing press; - new age depression on way (deflation of real economy, decline of asset value, inflation of essential services, implosion of wealth, drying up of funding pool). advise: - accumulation of physical/paper gold; - borrow appropriate amounts of paper money in correct currency units at smart rates; - sell most paper assets; - real estate? depends on where, for how much, yielding what %. J

To: Ramsey Su who wrote (46066)	2/11/2004 10:27:29 PM
From: elmatador	Respond to of 74559

big (job) growth areas will be low-skill -- and low-paying The Jobs of Tomorrow: A New Low? According to a new Bureau of Labor Statistics forecast, most of the big growth areas will be low-skill -- and low-paying ELMAT: Save on college tuition for the kids sicne they are not going to need it anyway. Americans don't just want jobs. They want interesting jobs that pay well. ELMAT: They are not alone on that. There a billion out here that want that too. Only that pay "well" is relative. But according to a forecast released Feb. 11 by the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), a large share of new jobs will be in occupations that don't require a lot of education and pay below average (click here to read the full report). The fastest growth of all will be for medical assistants, who require nothing more than "moderate on-the-job training." Advertisement The government does the study every two years. The new one covers 2002 to 2012. And of the top 10 occupations with the highest percentage expected growth in jobs, only four will require as much as a bachelor's degree. It's the same pattern when you look at the 10 occupations that will add the greatest number of jobs. This list includes some that aren't growing rapidly in percentage terms, such as cashier, waiter/waitress, janitor, and retail salesperson. GROWING GAP. Only two of the occupations on the top-10 list of total job growth require at least a bachelor's degree (namely, post-secondary teacher and "general and operations manager"). If you didn't get any education past high school and aren't planning to, the abundance of jobs that don't require a college education is good news. Better to have a job than not. But don't expect to be well-compensated for your labors. In the Information Economy, the gap is large and growing between the earnings of people who have college degrees and those of people who stopped at high school or before. American workers with less education are being battered by two powerful forces. Computerization and automation are wiping out jobs in both manufacturing and office work. Offshoring is sending other jobs abroad. At first glance, health-care jobs look like a happy exception. They're relatively insulated from those two global forces. A computer can't bathe a hospital patient in Milwaukee. Neither can an orderly in China or India. ELMAT: Patients worldwide are heading to hospitals in Asia for affordable, high-quality surgery. businessweek.com bumrungrad.com TECH'S ADVANTAGE. Still, just because health-care jobs are growing doesn't mean they're lucrative. Physicians, who do make good money, don't appear on the top-10 percentage-growth list. Instead, you find jobs like home health aides and physical-therapist aides, both of which require "short on-the-job training." The most education-intensive health-care job on the top-10 list is physician assistant, which requires a bachelor's degree. The other field that dominates the top-10 growth list is info tech. Here, the educational requirements tend to be higher, and the story is more positive. Many of these jobs actually benefit computerization and automation because they're involved with those trends. Three of the fastest-growing jobs on the BLS list are "network systems and data communications analyst" and two kinds of software engineer. All three require at least a bachelor's degree. The BLS doesn't seem appear to suggest that info-tech jobs will all leak offshore to India or elsewhere. Some will, of course. But American info techies can thrive if they're better trained, stay abreast of the latest developments in their fields -- and exploit knowledge of local customers and business processes that foreign competitors can't match. SHEEPSKIN'S VALUE. Educated workers are hardly exempt from the forces roiling the economy. In fact, the Economic Policy Institute calculates that workers with at least a bachelor's degree have seen a bigger increase in long-term unemployment since 2000 than workers with a high school degree or less. "Getting your ticket punched for four years isn't a guarantee of a good job," says Michael Horrigan, the BLS assistant commissioner who directed the latest projections. Conversely, he notes, some jobs that pay above average, such as radiation therapist and dental hygienist, require less than a bachelor's degree. Of course, the BLS may be understating the educational requirements of jobs -- and underestimating the value the jobs provide and the pay they can command. For instance, customer-service positions are considered dead-enders. But that could change if companies begin to realize that keeping good relationships with customers is vital. ELMAT: And those jobs are being outsourced to India Czech Republic and Brazil BACK TO SCHOOL. "The jobs that we see most in demand are the ones that touch the customer and the high-knowledge-component jobs," says Ravin Jesuthasan, who leads the rewards-and-performance management practice of Towers Perrin, a human-resources consultancy. Like those ones in hospitals in Asia to which people can come and buy thier services on the cheap Many occupations have become increasingly complex and valuable over time. Secretaries today do work that used to be thought of as managerial. And registered nurses perform many doctor-like functions. In fact, nursing associations say people who want to be registered nurses should have a bachelor's degree -- even though the BLS says the minimum qualification is an associate's. ELMAT: Universities want to keep people there! So it could turn out that the latest 10-year outlook is overly pessimistic about the quality of new jobs in the U.S. Let's hope so -- because nothing is more important than good jobs that pay well. Coy is BusinessWeek's economics editor in New York Edited by Beth Belton businessweek.com