Saturday, May 03, 2008

The Job Market May 2008


Yesterday's jobs report (http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm) is the press release from which much of what you read and hear is based on. It shows a less than expected decrease in jobs in the US of 20,000 plus unemployment declining to 5.0% from 5.1%.

I haven't had a chance to dig for the numbers in the current report but found them in the last one.

What you don't read about is that unemployment for people who have "some college" is 3.8%. For those with a college degree, unemployment is now 2.1%.

It lets us know that the fear of recession is driven by the fact that Wall Street (or the financial services sector) has been hit extremely hard in this slow down and that there are some specialty functions from that sector that may never come back to where they were.

The same is also true with those businesses that specialized in sub-prime lending . .. obviously, no one is rushing out to become such a lender or to borrow from such a firm.

So as far as employment, there are choices for most people in the market. Someone may lose your job as a mortgage broker or real estate agent but they can move into a different form of sales. They may lose their job pricing CDO's; they can move into a different discipline . . . obviously at a lower price. I am reminded of an earlier time of cathartic change in the economy.

In 1989, in an astonishing chain reaction, the Iron Curtain fell, first in Poland through the courage of Lech Walesa and the people of the Solidarity movement and then throughout Europe.
As peace broke out, the desire to spend money on national defense dropped and, as a result, jobs were lost in that industry.

To give an example, the defense industry designed much of their technology at that time using a programming language called ADA that was not used in the private sector. The ADA programmers, developers and their managers, needed to adapt to change and often that resulted in painful change--an ADA developer might have been making $90,000 and would need to pay for education to take a $45,000 network administration job. Some lost their homes, too.

So, as I read the current lamentations about the economy, I think of the ADA developers. As disconcerting as things are, the responsibility a person has is to get themselves going and get to work on finding work.


Jeff Altman

The Big Game Hunter
 Concepts in Staffing
thebiggamehunter@cisny.com

© 2008 all rights reserved.

Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter, is Managing Director with Concepts in Staffing, a New York search firm, He has successfully assisted many corporations identify management leaders and staff in many disciplines since 1971. He is a retired certified leader of the ManKind Project, a not for profit organization that assists men with life issues, and a practicing psychotherapist.

He is the author of “Get Yourself Hired NOW! The Big Game Hunter’s Guide to Head Hunting Your Next Job and Every Job After That” (in ebook and audio formats) and “Get Your Job Search Organized NOW!” (ebook) Both are available at www.getyourselfhiredNOW.com Register at the site and you will receive free copies of The International Job Board List and a Guide to Resume Writing.

To receive a daily digest of positions emailed to you, search for openings that The Big Game Hunter is working on, to use Jeff’s free job lead search engine, Job Search Universe, to subscribe to Jeff’s free job hunting ezine, “Head Hunt Your Next Job, or his staffing ezine, “Natural Selection”, or to learn about his VIP program, go to www.jeffaltman.com.

Explore some of The Big Game Hunter's products in "The Universe" series

Plus

Labels:

posted by Unknown at 5:51 AM