A new study released last week by the MetLife Foundation and the San Francisco based Civic Ventures announced some interesting and somewhat surprising predictions for the United States job market in the next ten years. According to their results, by the year 2018 the American labor force will suffer a worker shortage. As many of us struggle to fund work in this unstable job market, it’s hard to imagine in just ten short years we could be facing a shortage in workers not jobs.
According to the results, as Baby Boomers near retirement age there are too few replacement workers to take their place. This will leave an unexpected shortage in the labor market. Government analysts say that 14.6 million new nonfarm payroll jobs will have been created between 2008 and 2018. If Self-employed, families working in the family business and farming jobs are included that total could reach 15.3 million jobs.
But in that same period only 9.1 million new workers are expected. It’s estimated that only about 9.6 million of the 15.3 million new jobs will be filled. This leaves about 6 million jobs looking for new workers.
It’s odd to think that ten years from now companies could be competing for workers versus workers competing for jobs. An oddity that could lead to an increase in wages in many markets as well as incentives to keep employees form retiring or leaving early.
An article in Forbes disputed the results though claiming that what was not taken into account was the ongoing automation of many jobs as well as the ongoing trend of off shoring many jobs.
Federal Analysts list the following industries as the lace where the greatest increase in jobs will be seen between 2008 and 2018.
- Registered nurses, 582,000 more jobs
- Home health aides, 461,000
- Customer services representatives, 400,000
- Food preparation and serving workers (including fast food), 394,000
- Personal and home care aides, 376,000
- Retail salespeople, 375,000
- Office clerks, 359,000
- Accountants and auditors, 279,000
- Nursing aides, orderlies and attendants, 276,000
- Postsecondary teachers, 257,000
[...] team consisting of HR executives, CEOs and CFOs suggest that this will remain pattern before employment really starts to pick up. Temporary help will be leveraged to ‘try’ new approaches of keeping costs low as [...]