Hint: We have no idea.
Dean Dad has an excellent post on the concept of the next wave of jobs:
I’ll admit to considerable uneasiness anytime I hear arguments like “X is the wave of the future. We need a program to prepare students for all those jobs!” Partially that’s because I entered grad school in the early 1990’s, prepared to capitalize on the Great Wave of Retirements; we all know how that wave turned out. Partially it’s because I worked at Proprietary U during and after the dot-com boom, so I saw an entire industry go from “desperate for talent” to “desperate to survive” almost overnight. Partially it’s because I’m seeing our Nursing grads suddenly struggle to find work, after many years during which new grads could write their own tickets. And partially it’s because so many of the giant corporations of my youth are unrecognizable now, if they still exist at all. (Government Motors? Really?)
If I knew what the hot industry would be five years from now, I’d buy stock in it. I don’t, and neither does anybody else. I read somewhere that at Clinton’s economic summit in 1992, nobody used the word “internet.” (You’d think Al Gore would have!) Back then, Kodak thought its major competition was Polaroid. Remember Polaroid? Hell, remember Kodak?
He also delves into the differences between job training and economic development.
June 19th, 2009 at 2:37 pm
How very true. But I guess that fact doesn’t fit neatly into op-eds, newspaper columns, and magazines, does it?
June 22nd, 2009 at 6:49 am
I think that’s absolutely right.