March 20, 2004
The Miami Herald
By Analisa Nazareno, San Antonio Express-NewsIn the next 10 to 20 years the hottest job prospects for the world's best and brightest could have titles like chief ethics officer, biosystems security analyst, nanotechnology specialist, robotics maintenance engineer or genetics programmer.
But if Americans are going to grow these premium jobs in this country, futurists and economists say, the country is going to have to do a better job of educating workers and cultivating entrepreneurs. If not, they say, the nation's workers will be traveling to places like Hong Kong, Singapore or even the United Arab Emirates for employment.
When gazing into the future world of work, forecasters hedge about exactly what the jobs of tomorrow will be. They agree, though, that a great part of the nation's work force will be globally mobile, competing against an increasingly educated world labor force and needing continual retraining and education. And the jobs of tomorrow will be polarized, from the mundane service jobs that most definitely will stay in the United States, to the coveted high-tech and biotech jobs that will be up for grabs globally.
"Technology will allow workers to work anywhere and empower smart people, wherever they are, whether they are in Singapore or China, India or Pakistan, England or the United States," said John Petersen, president and founder of the Arlington Institute, a think tank in Arlington, Va., whose researchers use gaming and modeling to anticipate future trends and changes. "One thing that Americans tend to forget is that there are plenty of smart people throughout the world," he said. "There are a lot more educated people in India, than there are in the United States, simply because of the size of that country. And so it's all going to change, so Americans have to adapt."
The United States will be the origin of fewer and fewer manufactured goods, with production of everything - from the newest in nanotechnology to heavy concrete pillars - going overseas and becoming more and more automated.
"I think this will accelerate," Petersen said. "Information flows to wherever it wants to flow and it flows to the cheapest place, where it is that you can make something. At least the smart guys are going to do this and the not-so-smart guys are going to moan about it."
Futurist Thomas Frey of the DaVinci Institute in Louisville, Colo., said, while Americans bemoan the loss of jobs to nations like India and China, they've forgotten that investment in new technologies and innovation is what created those jobs in the first place.
"The problem is not that jobs are going overseas," Frey said. "The problem is that we've underfunded innovation in the past years. We don't have the next big thing that will employ all these people, who are out of jobs. We need to maintain the technological edge. We've been falling behind, simply because we've allowed the rest of the world to catch up."
Frey sees invisible nanotechnology playing a greater role in people's everyday lives. He sees automation having more of an impact on the workplace. And he sees biotechnology figuring greatly in our global economy. And, he said, he sees American scientists and entrepreneurs playing a great role in bringing these technologies to the market - if the United States responds to its current economic crisis by funding education and innovation.
"From inventing spray-on clothing to genetically repairing heart defects, innovation will be the key to pulling the United States out of its current employment doldrums. Each new technology creates the potential for thousands and thousands of new jobs. It's a matter of getting in there and understanding it," Frey said.
But while Frey sees a future of innovation and new jobs, other futurists worry that such economic activity will take place offshore. Forrester Research Inc., a Cambridge, Mass. research company, predicted that over the next 15 years the United States will lose 3.3 million high-end service jobs to offshoring, particularly in the information technology sector, adding up to a loss of $136 billion in lost wages. Congress is likely to respond to this trend by mandating protectionism for U.S. jobs. The consequences, they predict, eventually will be hurtful rather, than helpful to American workers.
"Politicians are going to call for protectionism and punish companies that offshore, making them non-competitive in the world market and encourage companies to move their operations overseas completely," said Paul Saffo, the director for the Institute for the Future in Menlo Park, Calif.
Saffo predicted in the late 1980s that electronic books would surface not to replace hard-copy tomes, but to offer different "experiences" in sound, music or offer historical context. And he said in 1999 that the Y2K computer problem wasn't as potentially damaging as the people thought, who were waiting for the apocalypse to come in the year 2000. Today he's predicting that the world's smartest engineers, biotech scientists and medical entrepreneurs will avoid coming to the United States altogether because of increased hostility toward foreigners and tightened immigration barriers in the wake of terrorist attacks.
"There is a wave of Indian engineers, who now are saying that they don't feel comfortable here anymore," Saffo said. "These engineers could be tempted to move to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates or to Jeddah in Saudi Arabia, where the demand for such engineers and the incentives for corporations to move there are becoming greater each year."
"Iran graduates 50,000 computer-science degrees a year and they're all looking for jobs," Saffo said. "You can bet they're not coming to the United States. What we're doing here is driving out of this country the very people, who are most likely to do the next technology startups. And along with those foreign engineers, who leave the United States will go some Americans, who will find their skills in demand in the countries, where corporations have relocated," he predicted.
And the jobs most likely to stay in the United States will be service jobs that could only be performed on-site. "Think of something like getting haircuts, where the location really matters," said Trinity University labor economist Barry Hirsch. "But our notion of location has changed, as well, because of the Internet and increased travel."
In fact, according to the Labor Department's predictions for employment through the year 2012, the jobs with the largest growth in the United States will be registered nurse, professor or lecturer, sales representative, customer representative, food preparer, cashier, janitor and waitress. The jobs that will grow the fastest will be in the health care field.
"With the graying of America and the growing field of biotechnology, we're going to continue to see a greater need along the health care spectrum," said Steve Pogorzelski, the president of Monster North America, the online job-search company known to its users as monster.com. In recent weeks, Monster has seen an increase in demand for sales representatives, accountants and auditors, administrative support service workers, as well as information technology positions. But Pogorzelski said that while other job categories might ebb and flow in demand, health care-related jobs always see steady and increasing demand.
According to the Labor Department, seven of the 10 fastest-growing occupations in the United States are health care-related, with lower-paying medical assistant jobs being the most in need. Though Pogorzelski isn't a futurist, he does see a future, where workers without higher education will receive relatively lower and lower wages compared with more educated workers, who strive toward ongoing educational attainment. "Increasing amounts of educational attainment will be a major issue for competitiveness in the global economy," he said. "It's also imperative for the individual, who is concerned about developing a career and making more money. We're going to see a greater scaling of jobs from one end of the educational perspective to another."
Here in San Antonio the sentiments toward the future of work echo national concerns. "No matter what the job is, there are always going to be changes in the nature of work," said Alan Miller, director for Alamo Workforce Development, Inc. in San Antonio. "There will always be new techniques, new processes of production and changes in the markets that will continue to change the workplace," Miller said. "While job titles may not go away, what we're to find is that the level of skills for jobs are going to consistently increase. And I think that's a given." Miller said he thought San Antonio would be well positioned for tomorrow's service-oriented, medical workforce of tomorrow because of the city's base of employment in health care.
The city and the nation may have a problem, though, finding the American nurses to take those jobs. San Antonio hospitals continue to hire nurses from the Philippines and other nations because of the shortage of certified and registered nurses. "This is a critical time for us to focus on education and training, because people are going to need a higher level of skills - more so, than before," Miller said. "Because we are in a global economy, we are competing with other nations in the world for skilled workers. And the country that focuses on developing its workforce, building the skills of its workers, is the one that will maintain a competitive advantage."