The jobs of tomorrow are here today — there’s just going to be a need for many more of them, officials at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting predicted on Wednesday.
At a roundtable discussion of staffing-company officials, academics and trade groups, the prognosis for future job growth pointed directly toward medicine, nursing and traditional jobs that have often been overlooked in an era of high technology: plumbers, construction and electricians.
”It’s a critical issue, not just in North America, but also in some of the fast-growing consumer economies worldwide, like China and India,” said David Arkless, of Manpower USA.
Given that an estimated one billion workers from emerging economies have become part of the global labour market since 2000, curiosity about what sort of jobs will be needed has become greater.
At the annual meeting in this Swiss Alpine resort, there was unified agreement that more jobs will be needed, but that training to give new workers the skills they need is also necessary, as well as retraining workers who have been laid off.
”How do you produce the right people in the right volumes with the right skills in the right place at the right time?” Arkless said, adding that countries, and companies, need to synchronise the demand for certain professions with training to ensure those are filled.
”The war for talent that was there in the 1990s and that supposedly disappeared? It was a skirmish. Producing the right people without doubt will be something that is huge in national agendas and company agendas in the next 10 years,” he said.
United States Labour Secretary Elaine Chao said the US has forecast a demand for millions of nurses and health-care workers to help take care of an ageing population.
She said the nation’s construction industry, too, is looking at shortages of skilled labour, particularly electricians and carpenters.
”We need about 1,2-million nurses in the next 10 years. We need about 3,4-million health-care workers,” she said. ”We need skilled tradespeople — plumbers, construction workers, electricians, carpenters.”
Chao also said the US hiring situation, currently at about 4,9%, is not showing signs of going soft, despite the temporary loss in jobs in the aftermath of the string of hurricanes along the Gulf Coast last year. — Sapa-AP