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As Published in Business
2 Business, April 2010
(Excerpt from What Jobs Won't Return)
By Ira S Wolfe, Success Performance Solutions
Download a pdf version of "What Jobs Won't Return."
Edna V. Baehre, PhD,
President, Harrisburg Area Community College
Between HS and BA
The fact is that there is a strong force in place that is helping to create the talent pool that will move Pennsylvania forward. Pennsylvania’s 14 community colleges are turning out thousands of individuals every year with professional and technical expertise.
It’s no secret that many jobs in the coming years will require education or training beyond high school. However, most of those jobs won’t require a 4-year degree. In fact, 80 percent of the jobs in the future will require postsecondary education but will not require a bachelor’s degree.
This is part of the reason that community colleges are seeing a boom in enrollment. At Harrisburg Area Community College (HACC), we had another record enrollment of nearly 23,000 in 2009—up from 10,585 in 2000. Coupled with our Workforce and Economic Development training and community education programs, we serve more than 75,000 students in our eight-county primary coverage area in nearly 200 degree, diploma, and certificate programs.
Those students will see a very tangible return from their investments. In fact, a HACC graduate earns an additional $240,000 over his or her working lifetime compared to someone with a high school diploma. And if you look at our total economic impact, the 30,000 HACC graduates living in this region will capture more than $7 billion in higher lifetime earnings.
However, beyond the personal financial gain, our graduates help to enrich the region. They form the backbone of middle management and perform vital functions in business and industry and will be vital as business and industry changes in the 21st century.
William E. Griscom, EdD,
President, Thaddeus Stevens College of Technology
The Labor Mismatch Was Predictable
It’s a challenge when significant numbers of the un- and under-employed have skills or might even be college grads but lack a match with the needs of the economy. Frankly, while we associate success with at least a 4-year degree, how many oceanographers, marine biologists, teachers, or criminal scientist grads do we need? Just look at Ira Wolfe’s list that reveals projected demand for 479,000 jobs for grads, while the many who graduate in excess of that number will wipe out the “employment” gain.
In fact, the demand for skilled jobs is not gone forever if you look carefully at the composition of jobs in this region. Most residential and a significant component of commercial construction, for example, is still labor-driven, and jobs for electricians, plumbers, and mechanics cannot be outsourced. Dig into the numbers and it becomes apparent that even the “new” green jobs are simply casting for existing skills with new names.
We seem to have a cultural bias against any form of hands-on work and are obsessed with sending everyone to a 4-year college as the only road to success. The result? That mismatch between the skills of the workforce and the needs of the economy. And as Ira mentions, the failure of our K-12 system to produce graduates with competitive competencies is an additional drag. This is the result of continuing to teach to mainly one learning style and reward only one type of intelligence. Students who learn differently or are under-resourced become disaffected and do not learn.
Craig Edelbrock, PhD,
Chancellor, Penn State Great Valley School of Graduate Professional Studies
The Master’s Is the New Bachelor’s
Higher education has a major role to play in closing the training gap and fueling more rapid and complete economic recovery in Pennsylvania. As Ira Wolfe has described, the jobs that will emerge will be at a much higher level than those that went away. Moreover, in hiring to fill those jobs, employers will be looking specifically for people with more advanced education and training. Expanding degree completion programs at the bachelor’s level is a priority for Pennsylvania, which has excess capacity in lower-skills workers, mismatched with projected job growth in higher-skills job areas. That is a serious training gap—one that can significantly slow economic recovery in our state.
For many higher-paying, higher skills jobs, however, a bachelor’s degree will be necessary but not sufficient. As a quick look at any online job search will show, more and more job descriptions state: “Bachelor’s degree required. Master’s preferred.” Is it realistic for employers to expect new hires to have master’s degrees? Here is a sobering answer: According to U.S. Census data, a greater proportion of adults in America today has a master’s degree or higher than had a 4-year college degree in 1962. Quite literally, in the 21st century, “the master’s is the new bachelor’s.” Increasingly, a master’s degree is the entry level education required for the most desirable, higher paying jobs—and those jobs are exactly where we will see significant growth in Pennsylvania.
Lastly, more than any time in our history, employers will expect their employees to keep up-to-date through ongoing professional education, even after earning a master’s degree. The need for continuing professional education never stops throughout one’s career, and the role of education in ingraining a habit of lifelong learning has never been more important.
Anna D. Weitz, DEd,
President, Reading Area Community College
The Price of Willful Ignorance
By nature, educators are optimists believing in the inherent power of both individuals and systems to improve by analyzing problems then making appropriate adjustments in both behavior and attitude. Ira Wolfe’s sobering, on-target analysis of Pennsylvania’s current labor market situation and immediate future, however, gives pause to even the most optimistic among us.
Mr. Wolfe decries the “poverty of talent” that economists predicted and regional employers now face on a regular basis. Those of us in higher education have our own version of this reality—the significant number entering colleges of all types woefully underprepared in basic academic skills and, therefore, requiring remedial coursework to address these deficiencies. While there are multiple contributing factors to this situation, the reality is that upwards of 40 percent of those entering a Pennsylvania community college within 3 years of graduating from high school are not capable of going right into college-level courses without first spending time and money in pre-collegiate instruction in reading, basic composition, and mathematics.
This is not a time to pit educators against business people or state policy makers versus economists, for we simply do not have the luxury of being “armchair sociologists” trying to decide who’s fault it is we got this way. Educators must continuously discuss local real-life examples that explain in specific terms these workplace realities and the social as well as personal implications of ignoring them. While we may well want to continue emphasizing our tradition of “all work has value”, this needs to be tempered with scenarios that bring home, in straight-to-the-point, personal financial examples, what life will be like for those who opt out of mastering more complex marketplace skills. Being honest with both the unemployed and young people about the lifestyle implications of trying to find a low-skill job or what daily existence will be like even if someone has such a position are not scare tactics. This is simply much needed straight talk—and willful ignorance is no shield from its consequences.
Wholesale implementation of up-to-date workplace preparation will demand more not less from individual learners, educational professionals, entire systems and undoubtedly will cost more too. There is a lot riding on our ability to develop the collective will that it will take to be up to the challenge.
Download a pdf version of "What Jobs Won't Return."
Read more about the loss of job and the shortage of skilled workers.
Read more about "What Jobs Won't Return - An Era of Joblessness and Job Shortages"
About the author
As president of Success Performance Solutions, Ira S Wolfe helps organizations find and hire the right employees and identify high-potential leaders. He speaks nationwide on hiring, workforce trends, managing the generations in a presentation titled Geeks, Geezers, and Googlization. He is also the author of Perfect Labor Storm 2.0: Trends That Will Change the Way You Do Business.
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