Career Laboratory by Laurence Shatkin

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Lawyers and Their Discontents

In my previous blog, I wrote about job dissatisfaction: about a survey that found it on the rise, and my own speculations about possible causes of job dissatisfaction. By coincidence, a few days later I attended a presentation on a related topic at the Careers Conference. My friend and fellow JIST author Dr. John Liptak, of Radford College, spoke about “A Framework for Integrating Spirituality in Career Counseling and Coaching.” He noted how many people are dissatisfied with their jobs and he stressed the need to help people identify the activities that give them the greatest fulfillment.

Neither the survey I cited nor John Liptak’s presentation focused on the particular occupations that have the most dissatisfied workers, but one occupation has been getting attention lately for its frustrated workers: lawyers. Of course, it is entirely possible that lawyers are no more dissatisfied than plumbers, order clerks, or truck drivers and that they are simply better at getting the attention of journalists.

Lawyers’ dissatisfactions seem especially poignant because they have invested so much money and effort to gain their law degree. They expect a wonderful payoff. Lately, however, as noted in The New York Times, the law degree is no longer a golden ticket to high income and job security. Employers laid off more than 4,600 lawyers last year, bonuses are not as robust as they once were, and pay raises are now based on performance rather than occurring automatically. The bar association of New York reports that half of the lawyers seeking counseling from the association’s outreach program cite mental health as their primary concern.

Another recent article, this one in The Wall Street Journal, mentioned that a 2009 study by AmericanLawyer.com found the morale of associate lawyers at its lowest level in five years. The article featured advice for lawyers thinking of walking away from their hard-to-enter profession.

The main causes of dissatisfaction mentioned in the articles were the fear--or the reality--of job loss, plus the stress of working long hours.

Of course, not all lawyers work under such conditions. A young friend of mine works as a lawyer at the Social Security Administration. The pay isn’t as good as it is at law firms (for those who are still employed), but the security is much higher, and she works a 40-hour week.

In my previous blog, I argued that job satisfaction has been oversold; people have been trained to expect more fulfillment than any job can actually offer. I think that lawyers suffer from a particularly bad case of this hype. Let’s face it, this is one of the few careers that has reliably served as the basis for television series as long as the medium has existed. Physicians and crime-related careers, such as police officers or private detectives, are the only other staple TV-show careers. (I recall a series about a social worker, starring George C. Scott, that aired in the early 1960s and lasted only one season.)

Even before lawyers lost their job security, their career suffered from hype. It was no surprise to me that Marty Nemko, in a December 2008 article in U.S. News and World Report, listed lawyers among 13 “Overrated Careers.” (Interestingly, police officers were also listed there.)

I have one piece of less-than-scientific evidence to offer as confirmation of the continuing interest in lawyers--interest that the career may never be able to fulfill for many who aspire to it. I have a “channel” on YouTube called CareerVideoGuy. Three years ago, as an experiment, I uploaded three career videos that were developed for and distributed by the U.S. Department of Labor. One was about farmers and ranchers and has been viewed 70 times over these three years. Another is about zoologists and wildlife biologists and has been viewed 818 times. The third, called “Attorneys (Lawyers),” has been viewed 2,457 times.

Certainly, you can find many lawyers who love their work. But I would advise a person considering this career not to assume that the long years of schooling and the hefty tuition payments will automatically be recouped in the form of high income and satisfying work. Make sure you know what you’re getting into and that it truly will suit you. Of course, that’s what I say to anyone about any career plan, but the stakes are particularly high for those contemplating a law career.

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Job Dissatisfaction

Last week, the Conference Board released a report on the job satisfaction of American workers, based on a survey of 5,000 households. They found that only 45 percent of respondents were satisfied with their jobs.

You might expect that the current recession would drive up the number of dissatisfied workers. Many workers probably are staying in jobs they don’t like because they have few alternatives; they can’t find new jobs in a highly competitive job market, and the oldest of them may hesitate to retire because their investments have lost value.

However, worker dissatisfaction has been rising for over two decades. (The Conference Board started this study in 1987.) Why are workers so unhappy? I don’t have an authoritative answer, but I can hazard some guesses.

I believe that people’s expectations have been rising for even longer than this study has been around. Career guidance following the Second World War was dominated by the wartime practices of steering people toward work that best served a mobilized nation. It was also influenced by memories of the Great Depression, when people had few career options: “Don’t complain about your job; consider yourself lucky to have job.” Both of these forces discouraged people from thinking in terms of workplace satisfactions and instead focused on encouraging people to do work that was (a) available and (b) consistent with their abilities. In career choice, young people’s aptitudes were a key factor, because aptitudes could be matched to the demands of careers that needed workers. The country needs engineers? Find young people with math aptitude.

Then the baby boomer generation, of which I am a proud member, filled the career-preparation pipeline. We expected prosperity to grow endlessly and provide abundant opportunities. We also were encouraged to think of our careers as means for personal fulfillment. Now interests gained importance. The future engineers who were to match the Soviets’ space-race achievements needed to be interested in engineering or they would never endure the many years of rigorous schooling that the career requires. Thus personal fulfillment became part of the decision.

The concept of work-related values, which was even more synonymous with satisfaction than interests, gained prominence in the 1960s (although it never eclipsed interests). Does the occupation afford me opportunities for independence? Leadership? Variety? President Kennedy may have told us to ask what we can do for our country, but he came of age during Depression and war. If we sought to make a contribution to society, it was because that was a value that gave us personal fulfillment; we chose to pursue it.

During the 1970s, many professional-level jobs were becoming open to women for the first time. Women (and some men) who rightly pressed for equality in the workplace encouraged more women to defy career-gender stereotypes, arguing that jobs could be as fulfilling as, or more so than, traditional homemaking roles. This climate raised the job-fulfillment expectations of both sexes.

I do not perceive any recent trends in career development that are trying to discourage these expectations of workplace fulfillment. For example, the trendy constructivist idea--that your career can be perceived as a story--assumes that your plot line, like that of a character in any well-written story, should unfold in keeping with your personality. Ideally, this theory implies, you should achieve your destiny.

For an inside look at how job satisfaction is being promised to career decision makers, I suggest you read Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream, in which she contrasts the encouraging words of job coaches (“Find your passion!”) with the realities of job-changing for middle-age workers.

And, in truth, the realities of the workplace can often be discouraging, especially the failure of incomes to keep up with inflation and the erosion of take-home pay by rapidly increasing health-care costs. The Conference Board’s survey notes both of these complaints.

A third discouraging factor the Conference Board mentions was a lack of interesting work. Here, some of the blame may lie with the workers. Presumably, most respondents at one time or another did exercises that clarified their work-related interests. If they now find their work uninteresting, they may have allowed other satisfactions--most likely the desire for higher income, or perhaps security--to overrule their interests when they chose a career or as they climbed a career ladder.

Another possibility is that the putative interest field of the job has turned out not to match the actual work activities, at least in the perceptions of the worker. A frequent complaint I hear is, “I love my job; I just wish they’d let me do it.” Sometimes paperwork, travel, meetings, supervisory tasks, and other aspects of a job that seemed marginal from the outside become major irritants over a long career, offsetting the remaining satisfactions.

Still another explanation is that the job has failed to deliver many satisfactions other than interests, but the worker does not have the vocabulary to express exactly what is dissatisfying and therefore latches onto interests, the concept that has been promoted most heavily. For example, the worker may not have realized beforehand that the job lacks the amount of variety (or independence or leadership) that the worker wants. The worker may not have an explicit understanding of how much he or she cherishes these values, so the worker says that the job is not interesting.

Whatever the reason for the dissatisfaction, workers often fail to do much about it other than complain. It’s a natural human tendency to fear the unknown, which causes many workers to continue in a job long after it has lost many of its appealing features.

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Moving Toward a Green Economy

On January 5, NPR’s “Morning Edition” did a feature about a once-defunct Polaroid film factory in New Bedford, Massachusetts, that has reopened to manufacture solar panels. (I thank my friend Jeff Doshna for calling this story to my attention via Facebook.)

These panels are of a new type that you may not be familiar with. They are lightweight and flexible, so they can be attached to objects such as a briefcase to provide power that charges up a mobile phone inside. They can be fabricated in transparent form so they can be built into windowpanes.

The manufacturing company, Konarka, turn out sheets of this photovoltaic film by using the same machines that used to churn out big sheets of Polaroid film. About 20 of the workers who lost their jobs when Polaroid shut down this factory are now back at work in it.

The NPR story shifts from this particular factory to the larger issue of green jobs, mentioning that President Obama has set the goal of creating 5 million new green jobs over this decade. I was interested to read this discussion because I have written quite a lot about green jobs recently--for example, in 200 Best Jobs for Renewing America.

The NPR story gives considerable coverage to the opinions of Michael Levi, a senior fellow with the Council on Foreign Relations who is skeptical about the role that green jobs can play. I want to use today’s blog to rebut some of Mr. Levi’s points.

Mr. Levi observes that even if 5 million green jobs are created, “that can only be a very limited piece of the puzzle in a country of several hundred million people.” I’d like to start by setting aside the children and retirees in the U.S. population and focusing on the actual wage-and-salary workforce, which numbered around 151 million in 2008 and is projected to grow to 166 million in 2018. The 5 million green jobs would represent close to 3 percent of the latter figure. That's a decent-sized industry, a bit smaller than all hospitals and a bit larger than all full-service restaurants. Another figure to consider is the 15 million who were unemployed in November 2009. If only half of the 5 million green jobs soaked up these unemployed people, the reduction in unemployment would be considerable.

Levi also notes when the government takes measures to create jobs in one part of the economy, this can result in job losses elsewhere. For example, when more electricity is generated from sun and wind, less will be generated from coal, meaning coal miners will be losing their jobs.

The main weakness of this argument is that labor economics has never been a zero-sum game. Job creation has multiplier effects that are difficult to predict and that can be very dramatic when new industries emerge. The outstanding example is the Internet, which started as a Department of Defense project and now has created thousands of jobs. Yes, the Internet has also eliminated some jobs at newspapers and record shops, but the balance tilts very heavily toward the number of jobs created. And the multiplier effect of job creation means that people in these new jobs can create, through their spending, jobs in many other industries. A communications technology such as the Internet also can create or preserve jobs in locations that used to be out of the economic mainstream.

Levi also points to the mushiness involved in defining green jobs. If an electrician who is already employed starts installing solar panels, does that count as a new green job? I don’t deny the mushiness of the definition, but the tally of green jobs--five million, three million, or seven million--doesn't really matter. In our present economy, job creation of any kind is what matters. The electricians who will vacate their existing jobs for solar installation work may not count toward the five million, but they will leave vacancies in other industries (such as construction) that new hires can fill. Government encouragement of green energy will create many job openings that are not considered green, but who has a problem with that?

And I haven’t even mentioned the benefits of a greener economy for our environment, for our balance of trade, and for safer workplaces. Yes, you can fall off a rooftop while installing a solar panel, but coal mining is a much riskier job.

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The Biggest Career-Related News Items of 2009

As 2009 draws to a close, I’m joining all the other critics, columnists, pundits, and bloviators in taking a backwards look at the year and commenting on the most momentous events, at least from my perspective as a writer in the field of career information.

By far the biggest news of the year was the calamitous loss of jobs. Statisticians chalked up 2008 as the worst year for job loss since the Depression, but the carnage continued throughout 2009. Although the unemployment rate went down slightly between October and November (when it was “only” 10.0 percent), an average of 135,000 payroll jobs were lost in each of the previous three months. Some industries and demographic groups were hit particularly hard. For example, newspapers lost over 15,000 employees well before the year was over. African American males suffered disproportionate job losses, partly because of layoffs in the manufacturing industries.

The next-biggest story, closely related to the first, was the Obama stimulus plan. In many ways, this legislation set the pattern that Obama’s health-care reform legislation now seems to be following: The legislation was sorely needed, it was severely compromised to the borderline of inadequacy by an effort to garner votes from Republicans and blue-dog Democrats, and it passed with almost no Republican votes. (Since the passage of the stimulus plan, several politicians who vocally opposed it have been welcoming stimulus money to their districts. It remains to be seen whether politicians who oppose health-care reform will take a similar rosy view when it appears in their rear-view mirrors.)

The stimulus bill was more than a job-creating program (in fact, it might have been better at bringing down unemployment if that had, in fact, been its primary focus); it provided a preview of the economic growth priorities of the Obama budget, which was another big career-related news story of 2009. Both the stimulus bill and the budget reflected dramatically increased commitments to green technologies, repair and upgrading of the infrastructure (including a smart power grid), and advanced manufacturing. They’re evidence that the administration recognizes (correctly, I believe) that these sectors of the economy are going to be critical for American competitiveness in the 21st century.

The last news item I’m going to highlight is the rise of Twitter, which became almost inescapable in 2009. Twitter is affecting careers in three main ways. First, it has become an important tool for finding job openings. The Web is already dotted with articles about how to do this, and you will be able to read about this in detail when Susan Britton Whitcomb’s The Twitter Job Search Guide is published in March. Second, those of us whose jobs depend on publicity and establishing a brand (and nowadays that means more and more people) are using tweets to reach the public directly. The advantages for an author like me are obvious, but last week, for example, I was recommending to my nephew that he start a Twitter feed. He’s general manager of a major metropolitan sports franchise, and it would be useful for him to be able to disseminate information without having to wait for journalists or depend on them for accuracy and appropriate spin. Finally, if we subscribe to appropriate Twitter feeds, we can all be better informed about job-related news and thus do our jobs better.

I’m not going to try to make predictions for 2010. I get in enough trouble just trying to analyze what’s already happening! But I hope it’s a good year for you and for those dear to you.

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The Indispensible Reference

Tomorrow, the 2010-11 edition of the Occupational Outlook Handbook will be posted on the Web. It used to be the best-selling publication of the U.S. government. Now that JIST publishes it (based on the Web text, with some additional material), it’s JIST’s best-selling publication. Here are some important reasons why it has been so popular, why I am deeply grateful to the Bureau of Labor Statistics for providing this indispensible reference work, and why you should turn to it when you have questions about occupations.

(Many of the following statements are predicated on the expectation that the 2010-11 edition will follow the same format as the 2008-09 edition.)

The OOH is one of the few well-researched sources we have for occupational information that is written in prose, rather than presented as tables of numerical ratings. The writing style is usually just right for a very broad readership that includes students in high school as well as adult workers. The descriptions of work tasks include explanations of technical terms and industry jargon. They go beyond mere task statements to explain why the worker does these things. They sometimes give real-life examples of typical problems that workers face on the job.

The section on “Nature of the Work” also teases out the various specializations within the larger occupation covered by the article. Now that I’m on that subject, I should mention one possible quibble about the OOH: the level of aggregation that is used to group occupations as subjects of separate articles. The OOH taxonomy is not as fine-grained as the Standard Occupational Classification, not to mention the O*NET-SOC classification, which is even finer-grained. For example, SOC itemizes 18 kinds of engineers, and O*NET-SOC presently itemizes 40, whereas the OOH furnishes just one article called “Engineers.”

However, I understand that if the OOH had separate articles on each engineering specialization, much of the information in the articles would be redundant. In addition, most people preparing for a career in engineering have the abilities and interests to be able to aspire to several different engineering specializations as career goals, so they are likely to appreciate being about to compare and contrast the specializations, as they are able to do when one article covers all. In summary, then, I’m mostly happy with the level of occupational aggregation that the OOH uses.

It’s true that the OOH does not give coverage to certain occupations, apart from a brief definition, statistics for current employment and projected growth, and a statement of the “most significant source of postsecondary education or training.” Some of these, such as Hunters and Trappers, I don’t miss seeing described in detail. Others, such as Credit Analysts (which employed 73,180 workers in 2008), I’d like to see covered, at least as a specialization within a large umbrella occupation. I was particularly puzzled by the demotion of Clergy (starting with the 2008-09 edition) to the ranks of occupations not described in detail. It had a workforce of 670,100 in 2008.

The section on “Training, Other Qualifications, and Advancement” has always been a strong feature of the OOH. Most other sources (including the OOH write-ups of occupations not covered in detail) go no further than assigning a single level of education or training as the appropriate level for each occupation. In this section, however, the prose paragraphs have sufficient room to be able to discuss as many optional preparation pathways as are commonly available. If work experience is desirable, this section explains what kinds of experience are most useful to have, not to mention the information about certification, licensure, and useful personal traits.

The section on “Employment” also has information about types of employers--not just workforce numbers--that is pretty much unobtainable elsewhere. Sometimes the names of employing industries (derived from the North American Industry Classification System) are a little difficult to understand for those who don’t work in the career information industry, but for the most part this section is easy to follow.

The section on “Job Outlook” also provides some unique information by explaining the economic forces that are causing the occupation to have a rosy or dismal outlook. For example, for Correctional Officers, it starts with the statistic for job growth, then states, “Increasing demand for correctional officers will stem from population growth and rising rates of incarceration” and proceeds to explain why more people are being imprisoned. This information not only lends credibility to the job-growth projection, but also allows readers to decide whether changing conditions, following publication of the book, have rendered the projection invalid. Sometimes this section acknowledges a reason for uncertainty, such as changes in legislation, so readers know they need to investigate the outcome of the possible game-changing factor.

Another vital topic that is obtainable almost nowhere else is an indication, where appropriate, of the level of competition that the job-seeker can expect. The Department of Labor is very good at giving figures for the demand for workers (projected job openings), but it is unable to provide quantitative data about the supply of workers for occupations. Nevertheless, in the “Job Outlook” section, you will sometimes find statements about the balance of supply and demand. For example, in the article about Correctional Officers, it says, “In the past, some local and State corrections agencies have experienced difficulty in attracting and keeping qualified applicants, largely because of low salaries, shift work, and the concentration of jobs in rural locations. This situation is expected to continue.” (This quotation points up one gripe I have with the editing of the OOH: their insistence on capitalizing “State.” In the JIST edition, we correct this practice.)

The OOH figures on earnings are based on figures from May of the previous year, so they are already about 19 months old when they first appear in December, and they go further out of date about six months later, when new figure appear on the BLS Web site. On the other hand, for some occupations, OOH supplements the BLS estimates with figures based on salary surveys of professional organizations. These often provide a level of detail--for example, earnings within certain specializations or industries, or for workers with certain degrees--that the BLS figures lack.

As I mentioned at the outset, JIST’s print edition of the OOH, which will be out in April, will include some additional material you won’t find on the Web site: a Personality-Career Quiz, an article on how to use the book in the classroom, and a section on emerging green occupations. Because the green occupations are new, reliable figures are not yet available for their earnings or employment outlook, and so we are not able to provide every topic of information that an OOH article normally includes. Nevertheless, these occupational descriptions are a useful introduction to a part of the economy that is likely to grow rapidly in the coming years and is attracting a lot of interest, especially from young people.

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Some News from the Latest Employment Projections

On Wednesday, December 9, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released their employment projections for the ten years from 2008 to 2018. These projections come out every two years, and I’m always interested to see how the BLS economists have changed their projections. Some occupations that looked very promising two years ago look less promising now; conversely, some occupations now have a much rosier outlook.

Here are some winners and losers, based on the tables they released. First, note that in my sorting procedures I removed all occupations requiring less than an associate degree, on the assumption that readers of this blog would be less interested in careers that require little formal education. Secondly, I removed all occupations with a 2008 workforce of fewer than 50,000 workers.

Of the remaining occupations, the following ten had the greatest positive difference in their projected growth between the 2006 estimates and the 2008 estimates. That is, their expected growth has improved the most, from a high of 40.3% change to a low of 28.1%. The percentage figures below indicate the presently projected growth for 2008-18.

• Medical scientists, except epidemiologists 40.3%
• Vocational education teachers, secondary school 9.6%
• Credit analysts 15.0%
• Physician assistants 39.0%
• Operations research analysts 22.0%
• Tax examiners, collectors, and revenue agents 13.0%
• Employment, recruitment, and placement specialists 27.9%
• Probation officers and correctional treatment specialists 19.3%
• Budget analysts 15.1%
• Market research analysts 28.1%

It’s  hard to find a common thread here, but I think it’s easier to do so in the following list, which shows the ten occupations with the greatest negative difference in their projected growth. That is, expectations for their growth have been downgraded more than any other occupations, from a high of 15.5% change to a low of 8.0%. As before, the percentage figures below indicate the presently projected growth for 2008-18.

• Securities, commodities, and financial services sales agents 9.3%
• Financial analysts 19.8%
• Substance abuse and behavioral disorder counselors 21.0%
• Appraisers and assessors of real estate 4.6%
• Education administrators, postsecondary 2.2%
• Education administrators, preschool and child care center/program 11.8%
• Multi-media artists and animators 14.1%
• Social and community service managers 13.8%
• Personal financial advisors 30.1%
• Computer software engineers, applications 34.0%

For these occupations, I think the chief common theme is automation, with offshoring a secondary theme. The BLS economists probably realized two years ago that many of these workers’ tasks could be done by Web applications or, in a few cases, by offshore workers, but I suppose the economists have had to revised their estimates of how rapidly automation and offshoring are catching on.

You may want to think about the possible effects of these trends on your own career, or on a career you’re considering. These forces may erode opportunities in your field faster than you now expect.

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Waiting for Green Energy

Recently I’ve been working on a book about green careers, which will be part of a four-volume set called Progressive Careers, to be published by JIST next fall. As I noted in a previous blog, much of the information about green careers is difficult to obtain or, at best, still in flux.

One hard-to-research topic is the number of workers presently employed and the anticipated job growth and openings. In November, the Employment and Training Administration made the first moves toward obtaining this information by awarding grants to labor market information (LMI) agencies in several states. For example, the Alaska Department of Labor and Workforce Development was awarded $800,000 for a research project that “will quantify green jobs in Alaska, determine the supply and demand for green workers, identify green training programs, and enhance Alaska’s online labor exchange to enable green-related job searches. Data collection strategies include the distribution of green job surveys to both experts and employers, development of green career lattices, and creation of green jobs skills profiles using the Skills Based Projections system. This project will deliver several LMI products to better target training, education, and investments, leading to more informed public policies.”

In some cases, the grantees are partnering with adjacent states. For example, Vermont put together a consortium with the rest of New England, plus New York and New Jersey, and was awarded a $3,999,923 grant.

These grants, totaling $48.8 million, are funded out of President Obama’s stimulus plan--specifically, the $500 million part that’s intended to encourage training for green jobs and thus promote economic growth. The LMI projects being funded are likely to take at least a year to produce any useful information, and they’re one more example of how the stimulus plan is taking a long time to deliver jobs to a recession-weary nation. Yes, the funded projects are already creating or saving jobs for labor economists, data analysts, survey researchers, and other people involved in the occupational information R&D effort. (And I love these people! They make my work possible.) But the large employment impact intended to result from these grants--people finding jobs in green industries--won’t happen until after the information has been created and disseminated.

Consider this one more example of how slowly America is transitioning toward a green economy. Yesterday’s New York Times ran a story called “Elusive Goal of Greening U.S. Energy,” featuring some discouraging news, such as the laying off of nearly half the workers at the Gamesa wind turbine plant in western Pennsylvania. However, the article was not all gloom. “The administration notes that Solyndra, a company that makes solar photovoltaic panels in Fremont Calif., received a $535 million loan guarantee to finance a manufacturing plant, creating 3,000 construction jobs and 1,000 permanent jobs. In addition, the government’s $11 billion program to modernize the nation’s power grid--to make it easier to absorb electricity generated by wind and solar power--is just getting off the ground, officials say. They say the weatherization part of the stimulus package has already put many people to work in California, Ohio, Georgia and other states, and that number is expected to more than double this winter and spring.”
Nevertheless, green energy will continue to be a slow starter in this country until we impose a requirement that a certain percentage of our energy be derived from renewable sources by a specific date--for example, 20 percent by 2020. It’s true that several states have imposed such mandates. But if you look at the summary of these mandates on the Department of Energy’s Web site, you’ll see that some states have set very modest goals (for example, Arizona’s goal of 15 percent by 2025), and other states have set no goals at all (for example, the Sunshine State).

Expect to hear fine rhetoric about energy efficiency at the United Nations Climate Change Conference that opens in Copenhagen next week, but I’m waiting for concrete actions that will encourage investors to put their money into the green energy industries.

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STEM Picks Up Steam

Recently, I’ve written several blog entries on fields that are likely to experience growth now that priorities for the U.S. economy are shifting. These are the fields that are covered in my book 200 Best Jobs for Renewing America. I also will be discussing these fields as a featured speaker at the 2010 Careers Conference, hosted by the Center on Education and Work at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

These are the six specific fields:

• Education
• Infrastructure
• Health care
• Green technologies
• Information and communications technologies
• Advanced manufacturing

The first three are pillars of the economy and enable other sectors of the economy to function and create jobs (and they also create jobs in their own right); the other three are fields that need to expand rapidly to provide good jobs that cannot be exported.

If these fields are to prosper, they will require skilled workers. So let’s stand back from this listing and consider: What skills will workers need to fill the jobs within these fields? The skills will vary, of course, but the most commonly shared skills will be in science, mathematics, engineering, and technology--what is commonly referred to by the acronym STEM. STEM skills may be relatively unimportant in many education careers, but not in all, and they are crucial in the other five fields. In other words, they are crucial for America’s future economic competitiveness.

Therefore, I was greatly heartened to learn that this week President Obama launched the “Educate to Innovate” campaign, a nationwide effort to boost STEM achievement by America’s students. “Reaffirming and strengthening America’s role as the world’s engine of scientific discovery and technological innovation is essential to meeting the challenges of this century,” said President Obama. (The former English composition teacher in me wishes he had said “are” instead of “is.”) “That’s why I am committed to making the improvement of STEM education over the next decade a national priority.”

The President’s goals for the campaign are not just to help American students match the STEM performance of students in other countries. Another goal is “increasing STEM literacy so all students can think critically in science, math, engineering, and technology.” Presently, one-quarter of Americans say they “do not believe in evolution,” and over one-third have “no opinion either way” regarding it; for progress in the life sciences, we need every student to have a good understanding of the fundamental principles of biology. (For example, we would have no effective flu shots without Darwin’s insights.)

Still another goal for the campaign is “expanding STEM education and career opportunities for underrepresented groups, including women and minorities.” The pipeline of learners who prepare for careers in STEM leaks women and minorities at each level of achievement. For example, although women earn nearly half of bachelors’ degrees in math, they earn only 27% of doctoral degrees. Of all African Americans working in professional specialties, 80 percent were working in STEM fields in 2000, but by 2004 that percentage had declined to 69.

Interest in STEM careers, as evidenced by choice of college majors, has flagged in recent years among both sexes and all ethnic groups, while interest in business careers has grown. I think one important reason is the rapidly climbing cost of college. Students with bachelor’s degrees graduate with an average debt of between $15,000 and $20,000. They think their best strategy, therefore, is to prepare for a business career, where they expect many opportunities for high income. The business world also has high prestige now.

Of course, STEM careers also offer many opportunities for high income and prestige.

My publisher, JIST, is encouraging interest in STEM careers by including a volume about these occupations in the four-volume set Progressive Careers, which is scheduled for release in autumn of 2010. I’m currently helping my colleague Dave Anderson write that volume, so this week’s presidential press conference was very heartening news.

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Great Opportunities in a Shrinking Industry Sector

Yesterday it was announced that Fisker Automotive, a company based in Irvine, California, will buy and retool a former GM assembly plant in Wilmington, Delaware, with the goal of manufacturing plug-in hybrid cars. The purchase of the Delaware site will cost about $18 million, and retooling the facility will cost an additional $175 million.

Fisker already makes a luxury electric car, called the Karma, to go on the market next year. Last month, Fisker obtained $529 million in loan guarantees from the government to support the plan to develop and manufacture a plug-in hybrid car to be priced at under $40,000.

It’s no surprise that the loan guarantees came from the Energy Department’s $25 billion Advanced Technologies Vehicle Manufacturing Loan Program, part of the stimulus package. I wrote my new book, 200 Best Jobs for Renewing America, to identify the industry sectors that are likely to become engines of growth for the American economy largely because of encouragement from the government (but also because they are essential in the changing global economy).

One of the six industry sectors that I profile there, together with related occupations, is Advanced Manufacturing. (You’ll also find this industry sector among those highlighted on the Career Voyages site, created by the U.S. Department of Labor.) It’s well known that America has lost thousands of manufacturing jobs, and that this hemorrhaging of jobs began well before the current recession. First we lost manufacturing jobs to the maquiladoras just over the Mexican border; then we lost even more to China and to other distant countries. Therefore, you may wonder how manufacturing can ever regain a place as an important industry sector.

The answer lies in that word “advanced.” Although there is no precise definition of what makes a manufacturing operation “advanced,” it is generally assumed to mean use of the most up-to-date technologies in the manufacturing process, from design through production and distribution. Used intelligently, high tech can bring down costs, improve quality, accelerate the product development schedule, and perform innovative processes, all of which allow a manufacturer to underprice foreign competitors and stay one step ahead of them. Besides the use of technology, another key ingredient that makes a manufacturing operation “advanced” is input from workers, who often are organized into teams and communicate to engineers and managers what works well or poorly in the manufacturing process. This input contributes to quality control, still another ingredient of advanced manufacturing.

Because advanced manufacturing uses a lot of technology, it typically requires a smaller number of workers to produce the same output as old-fashioned manufacturing. In 200 Best Jobs for Renewing America, I point to the example of a wind turbine plant being built on part of the site in Fairless Hills, Pennsylvania, where a U.S. Steel plant used to operate. The manager of the unsold parts of this property is said to be receiving inquiries from many other potential buyers and believes that the site ultimately could generate 4,000 new jobs. But consider that U.S. Steel once employed 10,000 workers at the site.

Something similar is expected to happen at the Delaware site where Fisker will manufacture plug-in hybrids. The retooled auto plant is expected to support a peak of 2,000 jobs (in addition to 3,000 vendor and supplier jobs), but consider that the GM plant, which opened in 1947, employed more than 5,000 factory workers at its peak.

Because advanced manufacturing employs a comparatively small workforce, the figures for projected job growth and job openings in this industry sector are modest compared to those for other sectors. In fact, for some occupations the job-growth figures are negative.

But this smaller workforce doesn’t mean that advanced manufacturing is a bad career choice. Advanced manufacturing requires advanced workers--that is, highly skilled workers--and there will be many opportunities for those who bring technology and teamwork skills to the job market. In fact, the opportunities exist already. A recent survey by the National Association of Manufacturers and the Manufacturing Institute found that 81% of American manufacturers said their biggest problem was finding qualified workers; 13 percent reported severe shortages. An article in The New York Times described how one manufacturer took 18 months, starting with the beginning of this recession, bring on board 80 experienced welders with the skills required to weld pipes for an oil refinery.

The fact that manufacturing jobs have sometimes been perceived as having low status may also mean less competition for job openings.

The lesson to take away is that job-growth figures don’t always tell the whole story about job opportunities. Keep that in mind when you peruse the new job-growth projections that will be released in mid-December.

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The Status of the Stimulus Plan (2)

In mid-June, I posted a blog entry about the status of the stimulus plan, which I have been following closely ever since writing a book about it (Great Jobs in the President’s Stimulus Plan). I rushed out this book before the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009 had actually been passed by Congress and signed by the president.

Today, the White House released its first numbers on the effects of the stimulus, so it seemed like a good time to take another look at what’s been accomplished. But the truth is that it is still too early to get a realistic picture.

At least once a week I drive my car over roads that have been targeted for repairs to be paid for with stimulus funding. One place is a bridge in Ringoes, New Jersey, where repairs started about a month ago and are still in progress. Another is a road in Ewing, where uneven places on the pavement are marked with paint, indicating where the repair work will be done--eventually. My point here is that much of the stimulus money has not been spent yet and, in some cases, not even allocated yet. The workers for the paving project in Ewing may already have been hired (or saved from a layoff), but the paving materials may not have been purchased yet, and there certainly has been no circulation of the money that the paving company will spend on fuel for the trucks or that the workers will spend on their lunch breaks. Those dollars, when they go into circulation, will be spent numerous times and contribute to a lot of economic activity, which means jobs.

Therefore, if you are not impressed by the news that the stimulus plan has saved or created 30,383 jobs so far, according to today’s report from the White House, or you’re alarmed by the unemployment figures that are creeping upward and are close to double digits, keep in mind how preliminary these job figures are. They are based on only a small fragment of the $787 billion committed by the ARRA: the $16 billion to be awarded directly by federal agencies, of which only about $2.2 billion has been spent to date. Job figures based on money that went to the states will not be released until the end of this month.

I can understand that the American people are impatient to see quantifiable results from stimulus funding, but sometimes I get exasperated at the short-sightedness of sniping comments, especially when they betray a political agenda. Yesterday’s New York Times reported that some states are not bothering to put up the road signs that indicate a project is being funded by the ARRA. For example, Georgia has 119 such projects funded through September but has decided to stop erecting the signs, which cost an average of $1,200 each. Senator Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, a Republican who voted against the ARRA and tried to prohibit the use of the signs, commented, “These signs are simply for political self-interest, and it’s high time we stop using stimulus dollars to fund them, and instead use these dollars for their intended purpose of creating economic activity.” I’d like to point out to Senator Gregg that the manufacturing, distribution, and erection of these signs are economic activities; manufacturing, in particular, is an industry sector that needs a lot of stimulus right now.

The truth is that stimulus funding passes through many hands (this is what’s called the multiplier effect), so it is difficult to predict its effects on the basis of who is the first recipient. But it is a well-established rule in macroeconomics that tax cuts, which amount to 38 percent of the $787 billion stimulus plan, have a smaller multiplier effect than most other ways of using stimulus funds. So let’s wait and watch the effects of the spending parts of the ARRA, and let’s not pay attention to Senator Gregg and other champions of tax cuts as the solution to all economic problems.