If you’ve been following the news at all of late, you would think there are no open jobs, and that getting a post-high school education isn’t worth the money it costs. But two articles expose that as wrong. The first article notes that there are lots of jobs for workers with the right skills; in fact, there are significant shortages. This includes jobs for people with the right college degrees (computer science being one of them), or jobs for people with appropriate technical skills. A simple high school diploma simply isn’t enough. This is echoed in another article, which talks about the tough job market for people with only high school diplomas. Quoting from that article:
A recent Rutgers University survey of young people who graduated from 2006 to 2011 finds that:
- Nearly a third are unemployed
- Only 27% have full-time jobs, and another 15% are employed part-time but looking for full-time work
- Most of those working full-time earn barely enough to keep them out of poverty; their current median wage is $9.25 an hour
- Fewer than 10% said their high-school education prepared them “extremely well” for their first job
- Most remain financially dependent on their parents or relatives for housing or other needs
- More than half said their generation will have less financial success than the previous generation
If you don’t get a good education, what jobs are open? Well, you could do crowd-sourced short-term labor through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. These are “micro-gigs”, such as taking little surveys, transcribing insurance claims, writing product description, subtitling porn movies, assessing search engines. This is a growing field, but it doesn’t pay much. Crowd labor revenues were up 75% in 2011 to $375 million. And the number of crowd workers is growing even faster, climbing more than 100% last year, with about 40% of the 6-million-member workforce living in developing countries.
Music: Live in the UK (Tom Paxton): Come Away With Me
