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.