Digital Age Workers and Jobs of the Future
As a mother and aunt of a few young digital-age millennials, I often ponder the particular challenges these emerging adults face in our overwhelming and rapidly changing world, and how they will fare in the future.
In the last century, post-war changes to society, including wider access to education, industrialization, a growth economy, the sexual revolution, and changing social values tended to have a flattening effect on social hierarchies and increase opportunities for advancement and success. The world we now live in is very different.
“Canada’s economy is built on a simple but deeply entrenched belief: that every new generation will do better than the one before it.” MacLeans Magazine
Personal observations lead me to agree with Jason Kirby’s opinion back in 2009 that the above may no longer be true. The reality for today’s youth is increasingly the opposite. Costs of living are higher, incomes lower and debt even greater than they have been in previous decades.
Young graduates have a much harder time getting established than did previous generations.
Economic recessions combined with competition for jobs with established and as-ever numerically advantaged baby boomers, as well as a rapidly evolving, technologically changing job market, mean that young graduates have a much harder time getting established than did previous generations.
Evidence that today’s young adults suffer from anxiety and depression in unprecedented numbers, as well as often cited statistics about late launchers and boomerang kids, support this notion.
The January 24th issue of The Economist included a pair of articles pointing to “America’s New Aristocracy” and “An Hereditary Meritocracy” which reveal that America’s founding principal of equal opportunity for advancement and success is being undermined by systemic filtering.
Wealthy, educated and powerful couples tend to beget more of the same, and both educational and career advantages, from cradle to college, accrue to the children of the existing elite, meaning that opportunities for success are slipping away from the rest.
The amount of recent political dialogue about the fate of the “middle class” and ensuing debates about how to define this term shine a light on the growing struggle average Canadians have to survive and thrive.
There seems to be general consensus that the “middle class” is growing, and the gap between the middle class and the privileged elite is widening.
While it’s no surprise that politicians are free with this term, even economists who insist on statistical definitions do not agree. Despite this, there seems to be general consensus that the “middle class” is growing, and the gap between the middle class and the privileged elite is widening.
This phenomenon in part explains the widespread growth in income disparity. “[An] OECD report shows Canada is near the top of the heap in terms of both growth in income disparity over the past three decades and in absolute terms.” http://www.macleans.ca/economy/business/canadian-income-disparity-growing/
Add another ingredient to the mix: the changing nature of our economy in terms of both the types of jobs that are emerging (and disappearing) and the emergent alternate economy that social media and the internet have spawned.
Jeremy Rifkin, American economic and social theorist, presents the argument that an emerging zero-marginal-cost sharing economy will make itself felt most strongly in the labour market, where “new employment opportunities lie in the collaborative commons in fields that tend to be nonprofit and strengthen social infrastructure — education, health care, aiding the poor, environmental restoration, child care and care for the elderly, the promotion of the arts and recreation.” (The Sunday Review, March 15, 2014 and on CBC Ideas.
To be continued July 1, 2015…