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I found an article that was talking about the huge number of job vacancies even with the over 15 million people that are currently unemployed. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 2.4 million vacant jobs in July. I can’t help but wonder how much it would help the U.S. economy if those 2.4 million were employed right now.
I am sure you will never be able to eliminate that gap, just because of the nature of the jobs, the skills required, and the limited tools to connect prospective employees with the places that are hiring. But, I wonder how many of those people are middle managers who got laid off from their $60,000 a year job and who will not consider jobs that don’t pay at least what they were previously making.
The author of the article estimates that about 40% of the 2.4 million vacancies are in that salary range.
Get any job right away after getting laid off…
When I got notified that I was getting laid off last year, I immediately created a layoff survival plan. After doing some number-crunching it became very apparent that finding ANY job was better than not having a job for a month or two (or more). Having a reduction in income will allow you to survive a lot longer than not having any income at all.
So my plan involved trying to find a job paying the same as what I was making until the day I got laid off. If at that point I didn’t have anything secured, I was going to go to a temp agency just to keep some income coming in. The other benefit of the temp agency is the flexibility that they often allow. I would have been able to go on interviews when they came up, while many 40-hour jobs wouldn’t have been as easy to get time off with.
How else could we minimize the gap?
Getting workers to take lower paying jobs as a temporary measure would help, but what else could be done to minimize that ratio of unemployed workers to vacant jobs?
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Comments
10.07.09
Hi Bob,
A perfect job market would be one without any barriers to entry. Skills and location are two of the largest from what I can tell. So unfortunately, the only thing that can be done besides the retraining is to encourage people to move. There are many jobs in certain parts of the country, but not in others. Being in the mid-west, I know there are a lot of people unwilling to pick up and move to where there are jobs.
Other than that, the retraining is an important thing to focus on. Too many people got content only pushing paper, selling bogus financial products or telling others what to do. The thing that really pushes an economy forward is creating value (REAL value), something middle management and stock speculators aren't known for. It takes time for people to realize some jobs are paying better than others and then training will shift that way. So the only other thing I would be able to think of is to encourage people currently in school to go into those positions, lessening the push of thousands more into a desolate financial/management/whatever job market.
Just my thoughts.
~Chris Gammell
10.07.09
I saw this article later in the day and thought I'd come back and share. Apparently engineering employment is lower right now than it is historically. So while there may be 60k+ jobs in the electrical engineering profession, this gives credence to the idea that people may not be willing to live where the jobs are. http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-10/i-tqe100709.php
Chris
10.08.09
These are ideally somewhat based on the blog post but that takes
longer.
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