Friday, January 25, 2013

New Book Shows What Careers and Jobs Will Be Good! Choosing a Lasting Career To Be Available Soon


Are you, your friends, or your loved ones starting or changing careers?  You probably already have information on assessing personality, aptitudes, and interests, and much more on the tactics of job-seeking.  You're all set with knowledge on what fields would be personally suitable, and are well-versed on how to handle resumes, interviews, and hiring managers.  What are you missing?

There will finally be a book that fills the gap between these needs.  Choosing a Lasting Career:  The Job-by-Job Outlook for Work's New Age assesses 25 careers and 506 individual jobs.  It focuses on their future - not the next few years, when new high school and college graduates will still be getting started, but through 2033 when, due to automation, globalization, efficiency, changing health insurance requirements, and many other trends, America's job landscape will be profoundly different from today's.  It evaluates work fields on personal factors such as on-the-job conditions and compatibility with family lives, and wraps up the influence of the changes we can expect over the next 20 years into an overall forecast for each.  Choosing a Lasting Career will show you what opportunities will still be around when today's graduates are reaching the middle of their working lives, and which ones are not worth your education and training money, hope, and effort. 

Choosing a Lasting Career will be available for shipment the first week of April or earlier, through a late-February prepublication offer.  It will be generally available in bookstores, Amazon.com, and other venues by May 13th.  More information, including the cover, is available on the Royal Flush Press website at www.royalflushpress.com .

Here is the official communication:


NEWS RELEASE
For Immediate Release                                                                                            Contact:  James B. Huntington 845.456.0115

WHAT CAREERS WILL BE GOOD THROUGH 2033?

Many sources tell which jobs and careers have high pay and many opportunities.  They do not try, though, to show which positions will succeed in the future.  Automation, globalization, and efficiency will barely touch some, but will devastate others.  Scientific and social progress will make various opportunities more plentiful and will cause others to go away.  Some employing few today will demand many tomorrow, and the opposite is true for others.  But which jobs and careers, specifically, will stay and justify the education, preparation, and training time and money in this declining job market?

The jobs crisis is permanent.  Many positions around for a long time, such as postal service workers and telephone operators, have lost at least a tenth of their workers since 2000.  Others, for example glaziers, market researchers, and physical therapy assistants, have gained greatly.  A connection with technology has been no guarantee.  Computer operators and semiconductor processors, to name two, have been decimated, and personal care workers and iron and rebar workers have gained handsomely.  On which jobs will flourish over the next 20 years, the past is no guarantee.  Some positions recently adding workers, such as database administrators and pharmacists, project to be slashed before today’s graduates even approach middle age.  Others, for example aerospace technicians and food service managers, have dropped lately but are poised for comebacks. 

A book will soon be available to reveal the jobs and careers most worthwhile for the next 20 years.  Choosing a Lasting Career:  The Job-by-Job Outlook for Work’s New Age provides a detailed, multiple-perspective look.  It names the prospects, advantages, and disadvantages of 506 jobs and 25 entire careers.  It assesses our national work situation, and provides what that means for career choices.  The book also addresses self-employment as it really is, and alerts us to related, stunning events probable in the decades to come.  It is comprehensive, broad-based, and well-grounded not only in the past and present, but especially, and uniquely, in the future.  Choosing a Lasting Career fills what had previously been a gap between personality career assessment and the tactics of job-seeking. 

James B. Huntington also wrote 2012’s IPPY-winning Work's New Age: The End of Full Employment and What It Means to You.  His 2007 dissertation, Prospects for Increased Post-65 Career Employment for the Baby Boom Generation, is the only book ever published on that subject.  He is also creator and keeper of the AJSN (American Job Shortage Number), the key economic indicator showing latent demand for American jobs.  He has a B.A. in sociology, an M.B.A., and a Ph.D. in Applied Management and Decision Sciences from Walden University.  He has also been a business professor, teacher, and professional speaker, and has written scholarly works on leadership, organizational change, and human development. 

Choosing a Lasting Career will be available starting May 13th on www.amazon.com and www.barnesandnoble.com, at bookstores (on the shelves or special-ordered through Ingram Book Company), and directly from the publisher at www.royalflushpress.com or 845-456-0115.  Kindle and Nook electronic versions are also on the market.

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Choosing a Lasting Career:  The Job-by-Job Outlook for Work’s New Age by James B. Huntington.   Original edition.  8½ x 11, 192 pages, 29 figures.  ISBN 978-0-9835006-7-4.  $14.95.  See pressroom for a 300 dpi JPEG of the cover.
Royal Flush Press, P.O. Box 190, Eldred, NY 12732-0190 USA
Tel: 845.456.0115, Fax: 845.557.0353
jhuntington@royalflushpress.com                                                     http://www.royalflushpress.com

Wednesday, January 9, 2013

How Can We Evaluate Jobs and Careers?

What is good or bad about a work opportunity, when looking beyond the next few years?  
Here are 9 ways of comparing occupations:
1.       Local-boundness, or to what extent a job must and will be performed locally by someone living within commuting distance from the work location
2.       Resistance to robotics, or the chance of a job being replaced with robot technology
3.       Resistance to computing and connectivity, or the chance of a job being replaced with automated performance of computing algorithms or with improved computing connectivity
4.       Connections with other principles which are positive or negative – for some meaningful principles, see the September 23, 2013 post on this blog (http://worksnewage.blogspot.com/2012/09/what-jobs-will-be-good-twenty-lasting.html)
5.       The number of workers currently on the job
6.       The chance the job offers for a good living wage
7.       Quality of work conditions
8.       Family and outside activities compatibility, or to what extent the job is typically limited in hours, regular in scheduling, and restricted enough in overnight travel to allow for a commonly regular family life and extensive work on unrelated projects and efforts
9.       Forecasts for the number of opportunities available.
All of these are valid, and most for many are critical.  How do jobs and careers stack up on these criteria?  Much more will follow.

Friday, January 4, 2013

Official Unemployment Steady, but December AJSN Shows Latent Demand for American Jobs is Up Over 400,000, To 21.0 Million

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported this morning that the December unemployment rate was unchanged at 7.8% from last month.  (Revisions to their seasonal adjusting algorithm retroactively changed November’s from 7.7% to 7.8%.)  Once again, the official rate failed to get worse, but the American Job Shortage Number (AJSN), the definitive measure of underlying job demand in the United States, showed that the gap between jobs and job seekers has widened once more. 




AJSN - DECEMBER 2012
Total
Latent Demand %
Latent Demand Total
Unemployed
11,844,000
90
10,659,600
Discouraged
1,068,000
90
961,200
Family Responsibilities
222,000
30
66,600
In School or Training
346,000
50
173,000
Ill Health or Disability
181,000
10
18,100
Other
797,000
30
239,100
Did Not Search for Work In  Previous Year
3,252,000
80
2,601,600
Not Available to Work Now
667,000
30
200,100
Do Not Want a Job
82,914,000
5
4,145,700
Non-Civilian and Institutionalized, 15+
6,940,248
10
694,025
American Expatriates
6,320,000
20
1,264,000
TOTAL


21,023,025


The number of unemployed (the AJSN is not seasonally adjusted) rose 440,000 from 11,404,000 to 11,844,000.  Other pools of people not working increased almost across the board, led by those discouraged up 89,000 to 1,068,000, for a 31% increase over the past two months.  The actual number of Americans with jobs, not seasonally adjusted, fell 489,000, a drop of almost 1 million since October.  Once more the count of those who would work in the United States if given an opportunity has risen.
Other indicators were much unchanged.  According to this morning’s BLS news release, for the third straight month there were 4.8 million unemployed for 27 weeks or more, and the labor force participation rate stayed at 63.6%.  Those working part-time for economic reasons came in at 7.9 million, described as unchanged from November due to adjustments.    
In summary, for yet another month the American employment situation got worse.  While it was a very good thing that the federal budget compromise allowed extended unemployment payments to continue, the payroll tax cut is now history, which will discourage employers at a bad time. 
This shortfall of over 21 million American jobs is not a small problem.  The jobs crisis is permanent, and, at the least, being unaware of that will cause continued problems in other areas.  It is past time for both political sides to bring some sincere, substantive ideas to the table.