It's difficult with the noise of bad economic news to hear about the fastest growing industry in the United States. Since October of 2009, this growing business sector has added 495,000 new jobs. While December of 2010 was a slow down in recovery for most, this sector was up slightly month-to-month and still 19% higher than the same month last year in total employment.
This business is Staffing. The professional services sector most people know as "temp agencies". Full disclosure, I do work for a staffing company and have learned first-hand that American business is utilizing this resource in a different way than they used to.
Staffing has traditionally been a bell-weather for recovery in the minds (and charts) of economists and government analysts. Most experts will tell you that a six-month lag between the return of Staffing industry growth and the return of "regular" employment in business has been a common trend in the modern era.
Yet the turn-around in Staffing was Q4 '09. Now that we're sitting in Q1 '11 you would be excused if you expressed some urgent concern about the fact that jobs have not yet appeared to be moving up the trend charts in any respect. Experts forecast a "jobless recovery" and a possible 18-month, 2-year or even longer period before employment starts moving into "normal" territory.
The reasons are consistently being tied to housing starts, construction, and Corporate spending which are all traditional leading indicators of recovery. Today, that's simply not the case. Housing surplus numbers, mortgage loans and the population of individuals who can quality are scary numbers. Corporations are sitting on huge piles of cash yet they continue to "rent" people from Staffing companies instead of hiring new employees.
Is this trend temporary? Or has something fundamentally changed in the idea that regular employees are required to design, develop, produce and distribute your product or service?
I tell my current applicants and client contacts the same thing: There is no such thing as "permanent" work. You can apply that same matra to most things that surround you as you read this.....your computer is not permanent, your chair is not permanent, your job, your house, your lifestyle and many of your personal relationship will indeed change in the next few years.
Likewise for the service product I deliver in my job. I don't like the work "temps" because it devalues the important work they are given to complete: learn this role/function quickly, ask some smart questions, stop talking, get the work done, do it very well and please leave my building when it's finished.
All work is project work. All companies are trying to create, fix or avoid something very specific. And when that's done, there's a new project at hand.
Maybe the nature of work itself is changing. Your ideas on that are welcome.
Thursday, January 20, 2011
Tuesday, December 28, 2010
Like I was saying......
The Economic Policy Institute may be a great organization with really smart people but it's hard to tell from where I'm sitting. I don't have the time to do research on this non-profit think tank. I'll break my Personal Rule Number 8 and suggest that because they are featured on Yahoo! News that they are a legitimate organization.
This article comes from the AP (Pallavi Gogi, Business Reporter) and features a familiar diatribe about US jobs going overseas:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_overseas_hiring;_ylt=ArBZlCbNRoAECtBQ1QZCK2.s0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTNpNTNzb3M0BGFzc2V0A2FwLzIwMTAxMjI4L3VzX292ZXJzZWFzX2hpcmluZwRjY29kZQNtb3N0cG9wdWxhcgRjcG9zAzIEcG9zAzcEcHQDaG9tZV9jb2tlBHNlYwN5bl90b3Bfc3RvcnkEc2xrA3doZXJlYXJldGhlag--
What's different here is the comparison between sending jobs overseas and the perceived market value of the company that does business like that. In short, investors like it when companies get rid of "regular jobs" here in the USA.
Robert Scott, the Senior International Economist from the Economic Policy Institute puts this very clearly: "There's a huge difference between what is good for American companies versus what is good for the American economy," says Scott.
What is good for American Companies may not be good for America, but what about you? Is this good for your job prospects? Career opportunity? Your economic outlook?
I'm not a protectionist or a nationalist in any way. I agree that in the international market for work, Americans have out-priced and underperformed themselves out for the market. Is that bad?
Could that be good? What if you understood this reality and worked within that new world market to better yourself and your economic outlook by changing your ideas on what work really means?
Good or bad is not the issue. Change is the issue. Work is changing because of this and many other critical factors in the business equation of the 21st century.
It's not a 1900's job market here in America, and certainly not in India, China, Brazil or the Russian Republic. Think about how the job market has changed in those places. Think about those people and their expectations for the kind of work you have always known as "work".
You would be naive to think that the jobs we send overseas are always a boon to the lifestyle, financial health, culture and environmental outlook of the people who's lives are different doing this new work. Again, I'm not saying it's good.
It's a dynamic and fundamental change in the way we think about work. It's one of the reasons your life will not be the same.
Very soon.
This article comes from the AP (Pallavi Gogi, Business Reporter) and features a familiar diatribe about US jobs going overseas:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_overseas_hiring;_ylt=ArBZlCbNRoAECtBQ1QZCK2.s0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTNpNTNzb3M0BGFzc2V0A2FwLzIwMTAxMjI4L3VzX292ZXJzZWFzX2hpcmluZwRjY29kZQNtb3N0cG9wdWxhcgRjcG9zAzIEcG9zAzcEcHQDaG9tZV9jb2tlBHNlYwN5bl90b3Bfc3RvcnkEc2xrA3doZXJlYXJldGhlag--
What's different here is the comparison between sending jobs overseas and the perceived market value of the company that does business like that. In short, investors like it when companies get rid of "regular jobs" here in the USA.
Robert Scott, the Senior International Economist from the Economic Policy Institute puts this very clearly: "There's a huge difference between what is good for American companies versus what is good for the American economy," says Scott.
What is good for American Companies may not be good for America, but what about you? Is this good for your job prospects? Career opportunity? Your economic outlook?
I'm not a protectionist or a nationalist in any way. I agree that in the international market for work, Americans have out-priced and underperformed themselves out for the market. Is that bad?
Could that be good? What if you understood this reality and worked within that new world market to better yourself and your economic outlook by changing your ideas on what work really means?
Good or bad is not the issue. Change is the issue. Work is changing because of this and many other critical factors in the business equation of the 21st century.
It's not a 1900's job market here in America, and certainly not in India, China, Brazil or the Russian Republic. Think about how the job market has changed in those places. Think about those people and their expectations for the kind of work you have always known as "work".
You would be naive to think that the jobs we send overseas are always a boon to the lifestyle, financial health, culture and environmental outlook of the people who's lives are different doing this new work. Again, I'm not saying it's good.
It's a dynamic and fundamental change in the way we think about work. It's one of the reasons your life will not be the same.
Very soon.
Monday, December 27, 2010
So, What Do You Do for a Living?
Why is it that your work.....what you do for a job.....seems to define you as a person in the social world? After your name, this question seems to come up rather quickly in introductory conversation. People get tagged with certain occupational labels and a myriad of sterotypes start flying across the room.
Work is important in human interaction. You don't have to be a cultural anthropologist to understand how the world started changing when proto-humans developed tools to allow for productive time spent outside of hunting, gathering, fighting and having sex. I'm sure there are some that trace this functional identity issue to some of the core challenges in behavioral psychology, sociology, law, and our basic culture itself.
Let's focus on what's outside your window right now, in the real world, and leave the academic pursuits to others. What do you do for for your normal job? How is that related to your long term career goals? Are either of those part of who your really are?
For many people, your job is not your career and it's not what you'd like to be identified with as a deep and lasting personal commitment. Because work is sometimes not your identity. It's what you do to be able to be yourself when you're not working.
The nature of work is different in the 21st Century than it was even a few months ago. For centuries, we've done a variations on the master-slave, capitalist-consumer, tradesman-society, and corporation-workforce transaction. Now things have drastically changed. Corporations cannot support the normal employment transaction within the international economic arena. Outsourcing, contracting, "Lean" process design, cheap transportation, and real-time information exchange have all given your normal work a huge make-over. If you have not experienced those changes yet, don't worry. You will.
The evidence is so clear and frightfully in our face that lots of people refuse to take a look: The Postal Service, American Auto Workers (and now their international counterparts) , IBM, General Electric, US Steel (does that still exist?), Japanese Electronics, Ship Building, European Banks, even Wal Mart (one of the worlds largest employers) is re-thinking their normal employee transaction.
This blog will start to look at the dynamics of work, and how this basic part of your life is (or will be) completely changed in the next 18-24 months. That seems like a short time frame and in the internet world, it's probably 3-5 years.
You are welcome to post here on how your job has morphed, changed, disappeared, or multiplied in the recent past. How do you plan on "making a living" in the future? How is that a part of who you are? Or should it be?
I'll keep you posted from the inside of the employment transaction machinery. I work with employers and applicants on matching up people with work.....project work, regular work, any kind of work. It's been what I've done for about 30 years and it's a fun, enlightening, and scary job.
It's apparently part of who I am. Which was my original question. Why is that?
Work is important in human interaction. You don't have to be a cultural anthropologist to understand how the world started changing when proto-humans developed tools to allow for productive time spent outside of hunting, gathering, fighting and having sex. I'm sure there are some that trace this functional identity issue to some of the core challenges in behavioral psychology, sociology, law, and our basic culture itself.
Let's focus on what's outside your window right now, in the real world, and leave the academic pursuits to others. What do you do for for your normal job? How is that related to your long term career goals? Are either of those part of who your really are?
For many people, your job is not your career and it's not what you'd like to be identified with as a deep and lasting personal commitment. Because work is sometimes not your identity. It's what you do to be able to be yourself when you're not working.
The nature of work is different in the 21st Century than it was even a few months ago. For centuries, we've done a variations on the master-slave, capitalist-consumer, tradesman-society, and corporation-workforce transaction. Now things have drastically changed. Corporations cannot support the normal employment transaction within the international economic arena. Outsourcing, contracting, "Lean" process design, cheap transportation, and real-time information exchange have all given your normal work a huge make-over. If you have not experienced those changes yet, don't worry. You will.
The evidence is so clear and frightfully in our face that lots of people refuse to take a look: The Postal Service, American Auto Workers (and now their international counterparts) , IBM, General Electric, US Steel (does that still exist?), Japanese Electronics, Ship Building, European Banks, even Wal Mart (one of the worlds largest employers) is re-thinking their normal employee transaction.
This blog will start to look at the dynamics of work, and how this basic part of your life is (or will be) completely changed in the next 18-24 months. That seems like a short time frame and in the internet world, it's probably 3-5 years.
You are welcome to post here on how your job has morphed, changed, disappeared, or multiplied in the recent past. How do you plan on "making a living" in the future? How is that a part of who you are? Or should it be?
I'll keep you posted from the inside of the employment transaction machinery. I work with employers and applicants on matching up people with work.....project work, regular work, any kind of work. It's been what I've done for about 30 years and it's a fun, enlightening, and scary job.
It's apparently part of who I am. Which was my original question. Why is that?
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