What happened to our technological society? More and more people are going to college. Computers have become a part of nearly every aspect of our life. Yet, technology has not created a society based on high-tech jobs. In fact, even when we look at the six occupations in the chart that require a degree, we can see that despite the over-education of society spoken of in a previous panel, five of the six will still face a shortfall of workers10.
Although more people are receiving degrees, there is a mismatch between degree and job. This is confirmed by a study done by the U.S. Department of Education. The department tracked 1992-1993 bachelor's degree recipients a year after graduation; 43% reported having jobs in which a bachelor's degree was not required; 26% said that their job had no career potential.
As a society, we still like to see a friendly face in the checkout line at the retail store. We still want salespeople to wait on us and answer our questions. We still prefer to be served in restaurants by waiters and waitresses. Even in fast-food restaurants, we still want our meals our way. There is, thus, a high demand for food preparation workers. Our lawns need cutting. Our flowerbeds need tending. Landscaping and groundskeeping crews are in demand. Our security is important to us; there is a high demand for guards. Some packaging can't be totally automated; therefore, there will be quite a few jobs for packagers. Nursing aides, orderlies, and attendants are needed to tend to the hospital patients' daily needs. In the office, office clerks, receptionists and secretaries have not been totally eliminated by automation. The high demand for bookkeeping, accounting and auditing clerks seems to mean that we prefer knowledgeable people to handle the company finances rather than computer programs.
Despite advances in technology, the jobs with the most job openings in the 1998-2008 period will involve mainly human-to-human rather than human-to-computer interaction. Automation has eliminated some jobs and created new high-tech ones, but despite our fascination with computers, we seem to resist automation in some forms. If automation is one of the driving factors of productivity, and the tendency in the future is to resist automation in some forms, does that mean that productivity11 will level out? Not as long as educational attainment levels increase.
Automation, technology will continue to push up productivity, as will a more educated workforce. But these patterns of mismatch may be telling us something new: productivity may not be the be-all and the end-all of future development. Educational strategies may have to change to prepare people better for jobs that are available — and pay scales may have to improve to attract people to jobs where the "people-to-people" component is predominant and abstract knowledge or machine-skills are less important to deliver a product the customer will value. Anyone who has, lately, "interacted" with a polite but deadly voice-mail system or been served by a surly clerk surely will agree.
Sources: Chart data: "Occupations with the Most Openings." America's Career Infonet. Retrieved January 31, 2002 from http://www.acinet.org. McCormick, Alexander C. and Laura J. Horn. A Descriptive Summary of 1992-93 Bachelor's Degree Recipients: 1 Year Later, August 1996. National Center for Education Statistics. U.S. Department of Education. Digest of Education Statistics, 2000. Paul Decker. "Issues in Focus: Education and worker productivity." The Condition of Education 1996. Retrieved February 1, 2002 from http://nces.ed.gov/pubsold/ce96/c96004.html. Underemployment data: Kristina J. Shelley. "The future of jobs for college graduates." Monthly Labor Review, July 1992.
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