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Entry level jobs won’t accept you unless you have experience? How weird is that!

~ fastcaranalysis ~ Leave a comment

Finding a job in the U.S. has been hampered by a series of roadblocks. For years job ads asked for everything and anything that could be imagined whether a person could really do it or not. After the Great Recession, to save money, companies were sometimes merging job roles to give to a single person what three people did in the past. Later, during the covid era, there was a requirement for people to take an experimental shot of mRNA. We all saw cancel culture and race-based hiring during the Biden Era. Now we have another roadblock: the scarcity of genuine entry level jobs. Modern entry level jobs often require degrees and years of experience.

In previous times, an entry level job had a lower salary but also came with some training. A friendly face would help the new guy learn the job so that they could make a contribution as soon as they learned how to do what was needed. In the past, sometimes a person would tire of one job and in order to get a change of profession, they would learn how to do another different job. Or maybe their old job wasn’t needed anymore so they learned a new set of skills to propel them into a new career. General skills were a useful base that could be expanded into some new profession with a little retraining. You could find work in a new job where you would be retrained. You didn’t have to go back to the university and start over.

That friendly face of a helpful trainer is conspicuously absent today. If you search entry level jobs, most of the jobs that come up require years of experience doing the advertised job’s work. That makes it seem that there aren’t really any entry level jobs. New guys aren’t going to be trained and if you need training, you’re not welcome to apply. If you do apply, and you don’t have previous expert experience, you will not be considered.

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People aren’t welcome to learn on the job and trainers won’t materialize to train the new guy and that means that you may not be able learn a new profession from another person at all. Going back to school is not economically affordable right now for a lot of people because of tuition inflation. Or if you are older, your return on investment for retraining may be doubtful which might suggest that re-education as a training option is ill advised. Should you remain stuck wherever you are because no one will retrain you? If your job goes away, do you have to find another similar job and what if you can’t find one? Even when you have some professional experience elsewhere and a good education, you aren’t welcome to change careers because there’s no budget to retrain you. And there’s no intention to train you.

For all of human history, people have learned from other people how to do a job. A worker hasn’t always kept the same job for a whole lifetime. People could grow by gradually expanding their skillset as they learned how to do new things. And an employment market that refuses to train new people is strange…an anomaly. It seems aggressively anti-labor and anti-human. Why is this happening?

One reason might be because the economy is shrinking instead of growing.

In a growing economy, there is demand for new workers. Every new worker might find a job because new jobs are opening all the time. But in a shrinking economy when a worker leaves, sometimes there’s no demand to re-fill the job space they once occupied. A new worker can’t fill a position that’s permanently closed after someone leaves. A shrinking economy is also less agile and new workers aren’t welcome. If a worker leaves, they are not there to train a replacement and no one else has time in the shrinking workplace to train a new guy. The position will either close or it can be filled with another experienced worker a lot like the guy that just left…not really entry level.

Yet people need to earn a living. High taxes and inflation keep nibling away at people’s resources. Nowadays, it’s heartbreaking to imagine that robots and AI are expected to replace people in the already shrinking job market. And somehow, someone writing policies and planning for the future thinks that that’s a great idea. I don’t think so.

I am hearing that there’s a sudden demand and need for bluecollar workers in practical kinds of jobs. An apprenticeship might be more like the old entry level job. But most whitecollar workers have been told for years that bluecollar work is dirty and low paying and represents a social step down. Why would they see this work as more acceptable now than before? An apprenticeship is an investment that doesn’t require the same indebtedness as a university education but most people aren’t so flexible as wanting to try out a new social position.

And so the world for the worker seems to be fracturing into something that is broken, can’t grow and can’t change. How strange. It feels like another workplace embargo like we saw during the Covid-era. Covid shots aren’t required for employment today, but previous experience is. If you want a job you have to do the same kind of job that you did before or go into bluecollar work.

For some of us, that means that the economy is closed to us. Older workers are expected to keep working until they are at least 67. But older workers probably are reluctant or unable to start over in bluecollar work. There’s also a lot of age discrimination. Some people don’t want to or can’t return to a previous profession because their old kind of work has disappeared.

Will some of us have to find a way to contribute economically without having a boss or by doing some sort of job that hasn’t even existed before? We may be on the cutting edge of reinvention. Because if people aren’t being retrained for new opportunities, they will have to make their own opportunities. Good luck to people who find themselves in that situation.

Since the University System is in all kinds of trouble with politics taking over where open mindedness once was, it may be time to allow people to learn on their own and test into new positions. Training materials might be made widely available at a low cost so that everyone who is willing can learn new things online or by buying a training manual without paying a huge amount. Then by passing an entry exam they could obtain new employment in a new field. The world of work might seem more friendly then because people could do something to determine a better outcome for themselves.

It seems like the emphasis on tech has led to overspecialisation in job ads and high costs for university tuition have made specialization unaffordable for people who want to retrain. Programming robots to replace people is a poor solution to this problem. It’s indicative of an imbalanced economy that is unfriendly to workers. I hope it gets better.

Back to the Future?

~ fastcaranalysis ~ Leave a comment

Are we designing a future or destroying a future? Years ago, people planned their future and a lot of structures were in place to facilitate that. Those were the years of interest bearing savings. Pensions were once commonplace. There were better schools and libraries. Jobs once were plentiful and innovation was how companies got ahead. Most people got married, bought a house and a dog and then started having kids and raising them to carry-on into next generations. People hoped to make social contributions that would improve the lives of their kids and even the lives of other people through jobs that produced goods and services used by others. Churches had big congregations and people talked about having a spiritual life. That narrative belongs to the long ago now.

Since then, a wartime economy formed. Taxes went up. Easy money came along and the derivatives markets unbalanced real estate. Most people can’t afford a home now. Family formation is flagging. Savings accounts don’t provide much interest. With inflation, a low interest or no interest saving account can’t grow a nest egg for the future. The future seems empty of promise. We hear that the disruptors in IT are winners leaving the rest of us to scramble for a future that we can’t quite reach or understand.

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Bill Gates once said that people who don’t learn computer moderated tasks will be frustrated and shut out of the modern economy. What I noticed at the time that he said that was that investment in computers was costly and reduced the profit margin. Yet everyday all the time people kept saying that the future relied upon computer moderated success. Now IT has combined with government to be funded by tax money…no profit making required. And computers, which we all buy now to use at home and at work seem to loom over us all. Will AI soon run or ruin the world?

Before all this government funded computer tech took us into a new trajectory that was less human centered, science was really doing science. Scientists weren’t promoting ideas that got them grants and ignoring obvious and truthful information that would exclude them from grants. Science was exploring the natural world and learning about it. Universities were full of people asking questions and getting answers that had the beautiful shimmer of truth or as near to the truth as we could understand and propose. New ideas were welcome and happening. Investigating the natural world often led to improvements and new ideas. There weren’t influencers trying to make people’s minds up for them. Influencers weren’t dominators changing people’s minds in order to shape someone’s fortune by creating a fantasy centered marketplace.

I was reading somewhere yesterday that the workforce is aging and old people will just have to keep working longer. This is a fantasy narrative. Old people can’t replace younger workforce displaced by policy decisions that have made universities more expensive and less powerful at really educating people to live in the real world. As we move into Halloween, the really scary thing is how fantasy-based AI narratives are becoming and how hopeless they are at providing actionable news that helps people make good choices.

As we all face a fantasy narrative world that dupes people into hopelessness, remember that humans without computers have built most of the useful human world we see around us. And the natural world doesn’t need us to believe in it for it to continue being a miraculous network of life and wonder filled beauty. If you can’t find a way to contribute to an economy that is in trouble right now, remember that you are a valuable part of the natural world. The fake computer-moderated economy can waste energy and raise your energy bill price but it can’t even understand the natural world that you are a part of. Keep making things and doing things and thinking your own thoughts. Find your way by connecting with the real world.

At some point we will realize what we are losing and then as a society we will begin choosing what could be a better world. That would be a world that empowers us all to do something good with our efforts, our ideas and life energy. A new future can embrace more of what’s real and leave all the fakery behind.

Social credit system foreshadowed by job market problems.

~ fastcaranalysis ~ Leave a comment

For years in the United States getting a good job was a matter of training to do a job that required a lot of training to do. Becoming a doctor of medicine took ten years of university and residency training. Becoming a scientist required several years of training. Getting a bachelor’s degree was the entry level requirement for a lot of good jobs and further university training was required for the best paid jobs, like engineering and pharmacy and teaching and nursing. Some jobs had their own entry level training and even if they didn’t pay well at first, you could eventually earn well after you were familiar with the job.

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That started to change with hostile takeovers that erupted in American businesses under financialization. The return on investment for an education was damaged when businesses were liquidated across the U.S. and well trained people became unemployed. That was pretty bad for a lot of otherwise employable people. The average time spent in a job went from a long time to less than four years, even in jobs that required five years of training.

The next blow to the American job market was AI screening and cancel culture and DEI and other ways of screening out job applicants instead of screening them in. When an algorithm rules out candidates who have no idea how to get past the algorithm, it becomes more and more true that getting a good education doesn’t lead to good employment anymore. Getting hands on training might not lead to long term employment either. That destroys the return of investment in training at American universities and also on-the-job.

Nowadays, the application process is contaminated, according to Kim Komando, with 40% fake job advertisements. In fact, a lot of people have no idea how to get a job these days. The job market is broken.

What I have been thinking is that the lack of legitimate job opportunities may be a gateway to aid the establishment of a social credit system. What if all you had to do to get a job in the context of a new social credit system is to get the appropriate ap on your phone for social credit credentialization? Wouldn’t that encourage you to bend the knee to a new social credit system?

As we see the American job market languishing through another year of having confusing mechanisms of application in an environment with little success in finding rewarding pay, rewarding benefits or even any position at all, it’s worth wondering what this is leading up to. Could it be a motivation to join social credit credentialing when it comes on the scene in the near future?