October 28, 2009
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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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October 15, 2009
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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.
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October 8, 2009
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In my recent book 200 Best Jobs for Renewing America, I describe six large fields whose growth will be essential for the United States to remain competitive in the world economy. These fields are education, infrastructure, health care, information and telecommunication technologies, green technologies, and advanced manufacturing. For each, I describe the current state of the field, give examples of initiatives (mostly governmental, but also some in the private sector) that promise to renew the field, identify the occupations that employ the largest number of people in the field, and finally rank occupations in the field that are best in terms of their earnings, job growth, and number of job openings.
Although my scheme using six large fields was useful for organizing the book, the real world of work is not neatly divided into industries. Some occupations, such as industrial engineers, are employed in all industries. And growth (or stagnation) of industries does not happen in isolation. Often, when one industry grows, it stimulates growth in other industries.
This last point was driven home for me by a report by the Alliance for American Manufacturing, which is a partnership between several large manufacturers and the United Steelworkers union. The report, How Infrastructure Investments Support the U.S. Economy: Employment, Productivity and Growth, was written by three economists at University of Massachusetts–Amherst’s Political Economy Research Institute. It analyzes the need for repairs and upgrades to the nation’s infrastructure, including roads, rail, aviation, mass transit, inland waterways, drinking water, wastewater systems, dams, and distribution of electricity and natural gas. It notes that total public assets, excluding defense, were valued at $8.2 trillion in 2007, which is equal to approximately 50 percent of the stock of all non-residential private assets. Infrastructure thus represents one of the main pillars of our economy.
Yet, as the report points out, public investment in the infrastructure started to decline in the 1970s, has not returned to previous levels since then, and generally has lagged behind overall economic growth. The economists measure the needs for investment in the infrastructure in dollar terms and envision two possible scenarios for a response: one a low-end investment of $87 billion per year, the other a high-end investment of $148 billion per year. In each case, the ratio of public to private investments would be roughly two to one.
The report then looks at the impacts on job creation that can be expected from these two scenarios: direct effects, meaning jobs that are created to do the actual work; indirect effects, meaning jobs that are created to supply the projects; and induced effects, meaning jobs that are created because of the overall uptick in economic activity. The economists estimate that the low-end scenario would mean 1.6 million total new jobs, and the high-end 2.6 million new jobs.
The industry gaining the greatest number of jobs (about 40 percent of the total impact) would be construction, with 641,000 new jobs under the low-end scenario and one million under the high-end scenario. My book is consistent with this prediction, in that most of the occupations that I rank and profile in the section about infrastructure are construction jobs.
But what is especially relevant to the theme of today’s blog is the size of the expected impact on manufacturing: 146,000 or 252,000 new jobs, depending on which scenario you look at. This represents about 10 percent of the total predicted impact.
Accelerated construction and repairs of roads, bridges, pipelines, and other parts of the infrastructure would create great demands for manufactured goods, creating many new jobs: under the high-end scenario, 38,000 jobs in fabricated metals; 21,000 in concrete and cement; 15,000 in glass, rubber, and plastics; 9,000 in steel; and 8,200 in wood products.
The budget that the Obama administration passed for 2010 comes close to or even exceeds the low-end scenario, depending on whether or not you define some expenditures as infrastructure projects. A total of $72.5 billion was allocated for transportation. Some of the $47.5 for housing and urban development, the $26.3 billion for energy, and even the $42.7 billion for homeland security also count as infrastructure.
The authors of the report note that the proposed infrastructure investments “also can become a key driver in building a clean-energy economy.” In this way, the infrastructure field is linked to yet another pillar of the American economy of the future, green technologies—one of the six fields in the Renewing America book and the sole focus of a book I’m working on right now.
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September 30, 2009
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One of the most remarkable speeches that Robert F. Kennedy made was about what’s wrong with using traditional economic measures as gauges of our success as a society:
“We will find neither national purpose nor personal satisfaction in a mere continuation of economic progress, in an endless amassing of worldly goods. We cannot measure national spirit by the Dow Jones Average, nor national achievement by the Gross National Product. For the Gross National Product includes air pollution, and ambulances to clear our highways from carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and jails for the people who break them. The Gross National Product includes the destruction of the redwoods and the death of Lake Superior. It grows with the production of napalm and missiles and nuclear warheads…. It includes… the broadcasting of television programs which glorify violence to sell goods to our children.”
Bobby Kennedy went on to enumerate things that the GNP does not measure, such as “the health of our families, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play.” He concluded by saying that the GNP “measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile, and it can tell us everything about America--except whether we are proud to be Americans.”
I thought of these remarks when I read about a recent report issued by two Nobel-prize-winning economists, Joseph E. Stiglitz and Amartya Sen, that also criticizes traditional economic measures of well-being. Nowadays we generally look at gross domestic product (GDP) instead of GNP, but what has not changed is that we are still looking at economic growth and assuming that it is always a good thing. The examples in the report are perhaps a little more prosaic than Bobby Kennedy’s, but they make the same point. For example, the report points out that increased driving is considered good for growth, because it stimulates production of cars and gasoline, but the increased hours spent wasted in traffic jams and the increased burden of air pollution go unmeasured when we look at GDP.
The report argues that our national policies are based on our goals, and as long as our only goal is GDP-measurable growth, we will not enact policies that can contribute to the many aspects of happiness unrelated to growth. The report offers few specifics for alternative measures, although it says we should focus on the income and spending of typical people and measure their access to education and health care.
One of the reasons economists have focused on GDP is explained by the classic joke about the drunk who drops his car keys one night and cannot find them. A passing pedestrian finds the drunk searching on his hands and knees under a streetlight. The stranger asks, “Is this where you dropped your keys?” The drunk says, “No, but the light’s better here.” We use GDP as a measure partly because the numbers for compiling it are so readily available. Other measures of national happiness are harder to find.
One non-GDP measure that we often hear about is the Consumer Confidence Index, published monthly by The Conference Board. To be sure, this measure also is entirely about economic matters: current and future business conditions, current and future employment conditions, and future family income. However, it is based on the perceptions of ordinary citizens and therefore includes a psychological component that is missing from most other measures. It’s noteworthy that this measure fell this month even as most other economic indicators were pointing upward.
I’ll admit that I can be accused of the car-keys behavior in many of the books I write. The “Best Jobs” books rank occupations by a combination of three economic factors: median income, job growth, and job openings. Nevertheless, I should point out in my defense that I don’t use these measures solely because they are the most readily available. They also have the benefit of being the most commonly agreed-upon measures of job satisfaction. Income always ranks very high among rewards people want from work, and (for those of us without trust funds) none of the other rewards of work are available to people who don’t get hired, so it’s important to consider job opportunities. Finally, many of my “Best Jobs” books begin by focusing on a slice of the universe of occupations that’s premised on some noneconomic satisfaction. For example, 150 Best Low-Stress Jobs deals with the matter of how stressful a job is, and 50 Best Jobs for Your Personality deals with the fit between various occupations and six personality types defined by a psychologist. In fact, all of the “Best Jobs” include lists of occupations that suit certain personality types.
I always tell career decision makers to consider many aspects of their career options beyond just the economic rewards. Perhaps economists of the future will devise ways to measure these other aspects of our society so we can make better societal choices.
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September 21, 2009
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I have spent most of this month researching and writing about emerging green careers for a book about that subject, and the effort has made me aware of the many factors that must be in place before an emerging career can reach the point where it can be adequately described in a career information resource.
The Title. Before we can describe something, we information developers must at the very least have a suitable name to call it. This seems like an easy hurdle to overcome, but you’d be surprised how occupation names sometimes take some time to settle down. Sometimes a title that seems to make sense in an occupational taxonomy needs some adjustment to pinpoint the occupation accurately.
A case in point is Biomass Production Managers, one of several green occupations included for the first time in Release 14 of the O*NET database. The occupation is defined as follows: “Manage operations at biomass power generation facilities. Direct work activities at plant, including supervision of operations and maintenance staff.”
It appears that the O*NET information developers decided to give this occupation a title analogous to the titles of some other managerial occupations in green power-generating facilities, such as Geothermal Production Managers and Hydroelectric Production Managers. The problem is that “geothermal” and “hydroelectric” are both adjectives, whereas “biomass” is a noun with no adjectival form. Therefore, “Biomass Production Managers” can sound as if the worker manages the production of biomass itself, rather than the production of power from biomass. A better title for this occupation would be “Biomass Power Production Managers” or, even better, “Biomass Power Plant Managers.”
The Work Tasks. Just as Aristotle said that characters in tragedy should be defined by their actions, so an occupation is largely defined by the work tasks that are associated with it. The one or two sentences that O*NET provides as the definition of an occupation typically consist of a summary of the work tasks, which are spelled out in detail elsewhere in the database.
Here again, one of the O*NET database entries for an emerging green occupation, Biofuels Production Managers, shows some evidence of a definition that is still in flux. The occupation is defined as follows: “Manage operations at biofuels power generation facilities. Collect and process information on plant performance, diagnose problems, and design corrective procedures.” The problem here is that power generation from biofuels is almost unheard of in the United States. By far, the bulk of biofuels production is aimed at creating transportation fuels such as ethanol and biodiesel, which are shipped from the production plant and ultimately are pumped into the tanks of cars and trucks. Of the 14 specific work tasks listed for this occupation, only one mentions production of biofuels for the purpose of power generation: “Manage operations at biofuels power generation facilities, including production, shipping, maintenance, or quality assurance activities.” And even this one seems mistaken, because “shipping” is an activity appropriate for liquid fuel as a product, whereas if the output were electric power, the proper word would be “transmission.” It makes more sense for both the definition and this one task statement to be reworded so that “biofuels power generation facilities” becomes “biofuels production facilities.”
My point in this and the previous example is not to find fault with the O*NET database, which I prize for its storehouse of useful information, but rather to show some of the growing pains that new occupations go through in the process of becoming defined.
Sometimes the occupational definition reveals an ambiguity that is inherent in the occupation, perhaps indicating a fault line along which the occupation may some day split. A good example is Geothermal Technicians, which is defined as follows: “Perform technical activities at power plants or individual installations necessary for the generation of power from geothermal energy sources. Monitor and control operating activities at geothermal power generation facilities and perform maintenance and repairs as necessary. Install, test, and maintain residential and commercial geothermal heat pumps.”
Whereas the first sentence refers to a job performed at power-generating facilities, the last sentence refers to working with heat pumps that provide warmth and hot water for homes or businesses. One job is analogous to Hydroelectric Plant Technicians or Power Plant Operators, whereas the other is closer to Heating, Air Conditioning, and Refrigeration Mechanics and Installers. The two specializations share a common purpose--exploiting subsurface heat--but in the first case this heat is high enough to boil water or some other working fluid, whereas in the second case it is only modestly higher than air temperatures.
My guess is that, over time, as green energy catches on, this occupation will split into Geothermal Power Plant Technicians and Geothermal Heat Pump System Technicians.
The Preparation Pathway. Another crucial element for defining an occupation is the appropriate education or training route for career entry. As an occupation emerges, colleges begin offering appropriate majors, technical schools begin offering relevant programs, industry develops apprenticeships and perhaps certification standards, and in some cases governments impose licensure requirements.
The O*NET database does not include information on appropriate preparation programs (such as specific college majors), but it does suggest the level of preparation fit for each occupation. Therefore, it’s interesting to note that Release 14 has this information for only one of the nine emerging green occupations that I wrote up: Energy Auditors. This occupation, in fact, is probably the most fully emerged of the nine. Many educational and training programs are already in place, certification is also an option, and licensure is required in some jurisdictions.
For the other eight emerging green occupations, I had to search for colleges offering majors and industry associations offering training workshops. It was often enlightening to look at the help-wanted ads for workers and determine what level or kind of education or training is being asked for. I found a lot of variation, indicative of the continuing evolution of these occupations. (Of course, for some occupations the entry routes always remain highly diverse.)
Other Topics. It follows that while an occupation’s work tasks and preparation pathway are not completely jelled, other topics, such as the work conditions, skill requirements, and appropriate personality types will also remain in flux. The O*NET database does not yet provide these topics for eight of the nine occupations I researched (Energy Auditors is covered for some of these topics), and it’s probably premature for O*NET to do so. I gleaned what information I could on these topics partly by inference from the work tasks and partly by scouring the help-wanted ads.
For information on economic topics, such as income, workforce size, and employment outlook, I usually can turn to non-O*NET databases from the Department of Labor, but here again useful information was lacking. The bureaus within Labor that do salary surveys and make employment projections follow the Standard Occupational Classification framework, which does not yet include my nine green occupation titles except as specializations within catch-all titles such as Plant and System Operators, All Other.
For some earnings estimates, I was able to find reasonably close earnings figures for catch-all workers by zeroing in on specific industries where they would be most likely to be pursuing the green work roles. In other cases, I looked at help-wanted ads and industry sources for clues about earnings ranges.
Workforce size and outlook information were even harder to approximate. In some cases, I was able to find an industry estimate of how many workers are needed to staff a facility based on its output. For example, in plants that produce ethanol, typically three workers are needed to for each million gallons of output per year. Combining this figure with estimates of current and projected national outputs, I was able to give ballpark figures for the present workforce size and the anticipated job growth.
Of course, estimates of future production are based on shaky information. Future development of the industries that produce green energy will depend on many factors that are difficult to predict, such as the prices of competing energy resources, government’s commitment to shifting to renewable resources, and technological breakthroughs that may make green energy more economical. Projections of job growth are not foolproof for any occupations, but for green energy jobs they are especially unreliable.
But if you want to read about an occupation that is truly emerging, you have to accept that the definition, tasks, preparation routes, and especially economic information will not be as firmly established as they are for familiar occupations such as Welders, Accountants, and Dentists.
Look on the bright side: If you get in on the ground floor of one of these emerging occupations, you can help shape what it will turn into.
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September 3, 2009
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As part of my research for a book about green careers, I have been investigating the occupation Weatherization Installers and Technicians. I came upon an interesting paper by two researchers at the National Consumer Law Center that quantifies the societal benefits of weatherization in low-income housing.
One of the enlightened components of this year’s stimulus package is funding for weatherization. A federal program to help low-income earners weatherize their homes has actually been in existence since 1976, but it received only about $225 million of funding in 2008, weatherizing about 150,000 homes that year and employing about 8,000 workers in local agencies and contracting firms. (Another $770 million was added to the program from state money, energy company fees, and non-profit contributions.) By contrast, the Obama administration’s economic stimulus plan allocates $5 billion to this program, to be spent over 18 months. This expanded program is expected to increase the number of homes upgraded to one million per year, employing seven times as many workers, including 3,000 energy auditors (in place of the 1,000 previously working in this program), 2,000 quality control inspectors, and about 14,000 weatherization technicians. The budget for 2010 reflects a continuing commitment to fund weatherization at that level.
Let’s look at some of the benefits of this program, apart from job creation. (There’s another weatherization program in the stimulus package aimed at government buildings, but for the present discussion I’m going to ignore that one, even though some of the benefits are shared by both programs.) By reducing consumption of energy for heating and cooling in low-income housing, weatherization reduces the generation of greenhouse gases from power plants, furnaces, and water heaters. In the long run, prevention of global warming will avoid many economic disruptions and even threats to national security.
Consider also that much of the fuel that does not get burned for heating and air conditioning--petroleum and even some of our natural gas supply--comes from foreign sources. By avoiding these expenses on energy, householders and landlords have more money to spend on American-made goods and services.
Much of the funding for the program goes toward paying the weatherization workers, who live in or near the community and spend much of their earnings there. Another portion of the funding for the program goes toward purchase of the insulating materials, many of which are manufactured in the United States.
Weatherization also maintains the value of residential buildings, reducing the amount of demolition and rebuilding that is needed and preserving the architectural character of communities. It even reduces homelessness. For some landlords, weatherization can mean the difference between a money-losing property that they abandon--disrupting the lives of the residents--and an income-producing property that they maintain.
Weatherization sometimes does more than save money and energy; sometimes it saves lives, because many heat-leaking old buildings also have other problems. A weatherization program conducted by a utilities company in Louisville in 1997 found that 23 percent of the households served had gas leaks, 26 percent had inadequate draft for heaters, and 16 percent had elevated levels of deadly carbon monoxide gas. Weatherization also contributes to health by making apartments less drafty in winter and less stiflingly hot in summer.
The weatherization program has received some criticism for the large amount of money going to warm-weather states, which in past funding formulas received very little weatherization money. Texas, for example, gets 55 times as much funding as it received last year. This change in the allocation formula was largely an unavoidable political move so that Sunbelt states would not feel discriminated against. However, inefficient air conditioning in a warm climate can waste as much energy as inefficient heating in a cold climate, and most of the other social benefits of the program will also be achieved in these southern states.
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August 19, 2009
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A researcher at the University of New Mexico’s Anderson School of Management has found evidence that suggests female managers construct their own glass ceiling by underestimating how they are perceived by their associates.
Often in these blogs I discuss research that I find in academic papers, the formal write-ups of research studies. This week, however, I’m relying on a press release on the Web site of the Academy of Management, about a paper that was presented at the group’s annual meeting this week by Scott Taylor, the researcher in this study. The findings are so interesting that I don’t want to wait until I can get my hands on the researcher’s own write-up.
Taylor studied 251 male and female managers, of whom 171 had graduate degrees in management. The subjects were asked to rate themselves on nine skills or traits that are considered essential in managerial positions: communication ability, initiative, self-awareness, self-control, empathy, bond-building, teamwork, conflict management, and trustworthiness. Ratings on these same factors were also obtained from supervisors, peers, and subordinates. Each subject was asked to estimate the ratings that were given by two of those sources, chosen randomly. In other words, how am I perceived by others?
On average, the women expected lower ratings than they actually received. So did the men, but by a much smaller margin. The men received a mean rating of 3.86 (on a scale of 0 to 5), while making a mean prediction of 3.73. The women, by contrast, received a mean rating of 4.02, although they had predicted 3.64. The math: The men’s predictions were off by 0.13, whereas the women’s were off by 0.38, almost three times as much.
These low expectations were not the result of a lack of self-confidence. The women’s self-ratings were as high as the men’s. They did not doubt their own skills, but they believed that these skills were not recognized by others.
Nor were the low expectations the recognition of harsh workplace realities. Note that the average rating that the women received, 4.02, was higher than the men’s, 3.86.
Taylor theorizes that his findings show the legacy of past workplace realities. He said that "women are so accustomed to decades of being 'disappeared' and hearing histories of women whose contributions went unnoticed that they assume these conditions exist to the same extent today. As a result, women in our sample predicted others would not notice their work, when in reality others rated them higher than men on a whole range of emotional and social competencies basic to leadership."
That may also explain why older women showed a greater amount of misperception than younger women, although at all age levels the women had lower expectations than men of the same age.
One conclusion to draw from these findings is that women create a glass ceiling for themselves by expecting to do the work but get little of the glory. Taylor suggests that performance appraisals, which usually include workers’ self-ratings plus the ratings of others, should also include workers’ predictions of the ratings they will get. That would generate more open discussions about expectations and recognition, from which women in particular would benefit.
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August 13, 2009
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Recently in this space I’ve written couple of articles about immigration, making reference to the experiences of my grandparents. But the global labor market is now very different than it was a century ago. Although the United States is still a magnet for immigrants, many immigrants later return to their home countries, and some workforce migration even goes in the opposite direction. This week I came across a couple of articles about these phenomena.
One article, “Collaborative Advantage,” by Leonard Lynn and Hal Salzman (written in 2006), was based on a series of interviews the authors conducted with managers of American technology firms. The authors were concerned about the loss of high-tech jobs in the United States and found that offshoring of these jobs has become a bandwagon: Managers often are offshoring jobs to look as if they are cutting costs, without even doing a cost-benefit analysis to determine whether the savings are real or illusory. The trend also snowballs, as managers find that their local capabilities are so diminished that work on new projects must be assigned offshore. And the trend threatens to be self-perpetuating, if corporations cut their funding of domestic universities as they reduce their recruiting from those institutions.
Lynn and Salzman argue that in this environment, the best strategy for the United States is to maximize our potential for international collaborative work. We used to do all the engineering for new products here (although many of the high-tech workers were immigrants). The value we added to the development process was our expertise in STEM (science, technology, engineering, math), and thus we skimmed off the cream of the work tasks and left the lower-paying manufacturing tasks to offshore workers. Now, however, other countries have developed their own cohorts of STEM workers, in numbers that we can’t hope to match.
Given this environment, Lynn and Salzman argue that nowadays our competitive advantage is to skim off the crème de la crème of the work tasks--to accept that offshore STEM workers will do the lower-level engineering work and to focus here on the most creative, collaborative parts of the product-development process. They point to the success of the information technology industry, which creates its innovative products by bringing together experts from widely diverse disciplines, such as linguists, psychologists, and visual artists.
A good example of this kind of collaboration on an international scale (not mentioned in Lynn and Salzman’s article) is the development work that was done for the Boeing 787 Dreamliner, in which key engineering tasks were handed off to suppliers around the world. For example, the wings are manufactured in Japan, the horizontal stabilizers in Italy, the passenger doors in France, and the cargo doors in Sweden. These foreign suppliers have done more than just stamp out parts. They were involved in the design process, using the Global Collaborative Environment, a Web-based system incorporating a computer-assisted design program developed by the Dassault Group in France, plus components developed by Boeing. Boeing also developed a set of standards for the business processes that suppliers would follow as part of the development project.
This kind of collaboration is something we do better than most other countries, so the authors advocate policies to encourage it. One suggestion is the creation of a visa that allows foreign workers to reside here for three to eight months, which is a reasonable amount of time for collaborating on a phase of a project. They also suggest reshaping STEM education to encourage collaborative skills, especially across international borders. Study (or internship) abroad should be as important for engineering majors as it now is for liberal arts majors.
These recommendations connected, in my mind, with an article in The New York Times last week that profiled some American college graduates who are using China as a launch pad for their careers. Faced with few job prospects here in the U.S., these young people are going to China, often with no knowledge of Mandarin but with skills that Chinese employers value, including understanding of Western culture and a willingness to take the initiative. These expats find that they can advance up the career ladder there much faster than they could in the U.S. Those with an entrepreneurial bent are finding that it is much cheaper to fund a startup business in China. The article implies that most of these young people intend to return to the United States, but they are not sure whether American employers will recognize the skills they will have acquired from their experience in China. I think that American businesses should be actively recruiting people with such a background.
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August 5, 2009
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Perhaps you saw the article in the New York Times this week, “Income Loss Persists Long After Layoffs.” If you missed it, I recommend that you read it, but I warn you that it is depressing news.
The article reports on the recently released research study by Columbia University’s Till von Wachter and two other economists. Using longitudinal data from the Social Security database covering the years 1974 through 2004, the economists analyzed what happened to people who lost their jobs during the recession of 1982. Their sample of people who were laid off consisted only of those who were the victims of mass layoffs, and thus the researchers didn’t count the experiences of people who lost their jobs because of incompetence.
As you’d expect, being laid off meant a cut in earnings, especially in a recession, when it’s hard to bounce back with another job. Compared to similar people who were not laid off, these workers experienced an immediate loss of 30 percent in annual pay. However, you would expect that these workers would eventually find a position paying as well as or better than their lost job. Remember, a decade after they lost their jobs, our economy entered a boom period. One would expect that layoff victims of the 2001 recession would have had a hard time rebounding during the “jobless recovery” that followed, but wouldn’t the victims of 1982 do well?
In fact, the economists found an income gap of 20 percent even 15 to 20 years after the 1982 layoff. And they found a similar, though slightly smaller, income gap for workers who lost their jobs in mass layoffs at the peak of the recovery in the late 1980s.
One reason is that workers who experience one layoff are likely to be laid off again. When they do find work, they have the least seniority and may be in a new firm or industry in which their experience and network are limited.
Typically, the most severely impacted workers are those who have been with one company for many years--until a layoff. The long period of stability has allowed them to build up skills that the employer values, but those specialized skills may be less valuable to other employers. This skill disconnect is especially great if a worker has to move to a different industry.
In some of my books, such as 50 Best College Majors for a Secure Future, I suggest strategies to avoid layoffs. One suggestion is to focus on the core mission of your employer rather than a peripheral function. Many businesses diversify and serve several functions, but usually there’s a central mission that makes money and determines whether the business will succeed or fail. I suggest that workers identify that central function and play a role in it, acquiring the skills that the business needs for future development of this function.
This research report indicates that an additional suggestion is needed: Don’t become overly specialized. If possible, develop skills that can be applied in more than one setting.
In last week’s blog, I discussed my family’s experiences as immigrant workers a century ago, and I referred briefly to one highly successful great-uncle. He had originally been trained as a wood turner, but when he came to the United States he had some success in a business that used the same technology, lathes, to make ornamental plastic umbrella handles. Unfortunately, when the Victorian era ended, ornamental umbrella handles went out of fashion, but my great-uncle bounced back and achieved great wealth in a new business that manufactured cheap pens, again using plastic turned on lathes. His skills were flexible enough to adapt to changing times. Although he was highly skilled--both as a lathe operator and as an entrepreneur--he was not overly specialized.
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July 29, 2009
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This week I came upon a study of the importance of networks in the job-seeking efforts of immigrants, and it reminded me of my own grandparents’ experiences as immigrants. It also led me to some research about the entrepreneurial activities of recent immigrants.
The researchers studying networking behavior, Deepti Goel and Kevin Lang, focused on recent immigrants to Canada. They found that for many immigrants, their likelihood of finding a job was much stronger if they exploited their network than if they went through formal channels. (Actually, research has shown that this is true for everybody.) What made a network particularly strong for an immigrant was knowing somebody in the community when they first arrived there. A weaker network was one in which they had only ethnicity in common, and not a previous bond of friendship or kinship. The size of the ethnic community was not as important for job-finding as the strength of the personal connection.
However, in such cases, the pay of the jobs that the immigrants obtained tended to be lower than those obtained through formal channels. My guess is that immigrants who found work through formal channels were more likely to find high-skilled jobs, because as part of the formal job search they had to demonstrate their skill credentials. The immigrants who found job through their friends, on the other hand, were less likely to have to demonstrate their skills and therefore more likely to end up in lower-skilled jobs.
Both of my grandfathers were immigrants, and both of them exploited strong networks when they arrived in the United States. My maternal grandfather came from a small town in what is now Belarus and had several relatives in Brooklyn, where he first settled. He also had relatives in Detroit, and through one of them he got a job working for the Ford Motor Company, but the job did not suit him, and he returned to Brooklyn, where he eventually became a masonry contractor. The business was successful (although Donald Trump’s father once defaulted on a substantial contract) and allowed him to raise six children and become the landlord of a row house.
My paternal grandfather came from a medium-sized city in what is now Ukraine and had a smaller family network but a good network of hometown friends. He was a skilled lathe operator, but his efforts to unionize his co-workers caused friction with his employers. One of his brothers had made a small fortune by applying his lathe-operating skills to manufacturing cheap pens, so my grandfather decided to pursue his own entrepreneurial dreams and started a company that made inexpensive silver gift items. He never matched his brother’s success and died in considerable debt, but the business found new backers, kept my father employed, and put me and my siblings through college.
Entrepreneurship has always been a popular career option for immigrants, who see America as a land of boundless opportunities. I was reminded of this by a report on “America’s New Immigrant Entrepreneurs,” by Vivek Wadhwa, AnnaLee Saxenian, Ben Rissing, and Gary Gereffi, who found that at least one immigrant was a key founder of 25.3 percent of all engineering and technology companies established in the U.S. between 1995 and 2005. In 2005, these companies generated $52 billion in sales and had created just under 450,000 jobs.
It’s interesting to note that immigrant networks are still playing a role in the foundation of these high-tech companies. One indication is the fact that immigrant entrepreneurs tend to cluster in different states, depending on their ethnicity. California is a popular destination for high-tech immigrant entrepreneurs of all ethnicities, but for those from India it accounted for only one-quarter of the companies, whereas for the Chinese it accounted for half and for the Taiwanese four-fifths. About 14 percent of the Indian-founded companies were in New Jersey, whereas only 6 percent of the Chinese-founded companies were here in the Garden State, and an insignificant number of Taiwanese-founded companies. Of course, some of this clustering may be caused by geographical concentrations of particular industries for which immigrants from one country may be especially well prepared. It’s interesting to note that high-tech firms in Denver and San Diego tend not to have been founded by immigrants, because military-related businesses (from which immigrants are often excluded) dominate those locales.
Most immigrant entrepreneurs did not come here for the sole purpose of entrepreneurship. In a survey of immigrant-founders, Wadhwa, Saxenian, Rissing, and Gereffi learned that only 1.6 percent had this goal. The overwhelming majority came to the U.S. to study or (like my grandfathers) expecting to work for someone else.
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