While on their site (www.scorelogix.com) check out the national Job Security Index to see how your region may be doing in terms of job security (its free and doesn’t require signup).

There is a lot of useful information about jobs on bls.gov site.

–Ken–

Real work to manufacture and sell real products that provide customers with what they need and want still needs to get done. There is a lot of uncritical forecasting and wishful trending kind of statements. Readers need to filter out quite a bit.

What are the hiring practices of Google, HP, GE,
Microsoft, P&G? This is where people might get a reliable bit of information. They are aware of the external forces that are influencing and appropriately responding. Think– inflationary spiral, think higher taxes and more controls, think bigger industry trends…

1. Hiring younger workers. As an aside, I think that is more about not having to pay the dollars associated with someone with more experience, not necessarily because of the “shortage” of workers.

If there really was a shortage of workers, pay would be going up a lot faster than it has been. Instead of a shortage of workers, outsourcing provides a large pool of workers paid for at the lowest bid amount for the contract.

In addition, there is a large assumption that baby boomers will, in fact, retire. Given the amount of money needed for retirement now and pensions blowing up all over the place, that is a big assumption. I hope the “new 65 is 59″ is wrong (average retirement age today is 59 because of layoffs and health reasons) because there are a ton of baby boomers who cannot afford to retire.

2. Candidates driving the hiring process. Perhaps. But, at the end of the day, the hiring manager is the one that says yes or no. There is no control for the candidate, merely influence.

3. Stupid ads: praise the Lord and pass the resume.

4. Quality match: I certainly hope so. Most HR systems suck in terms of providing good matches. I’ve never been an accountant in my entire life, but I get accounting job requisitions all the time because once in my career I said “process up to financial interfaces” and that’s what triggered the financial positions. It’s bad.

5. The workplace being great: it all depends upon the culture. Given the outsourcing, corporate reorganizations, and focus on cost savings, this will be a tough one.

A good article. Thanks for writing it and your continued thought leadership on this whole topic, whether I agree with everything or not!

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Scott, thanks for the comment. To your first point - here is the article, from today’s Wall St Journal, that says starting salaries are going up fast because there’s such a high demand for young workers:

-Penelope

For the vast majority of folks, though, working at the vast majority of companies, the work environment likely will not change so much.

Companies likely will continue to value high performance from people who place their job as their #1 priority.

Sure hope I’m wrong, but I just don’t see changes at the macro level for the company or the employee.