The New Jobs Landscape
I liked this article from the WSJ on how the e-commerce boom has created better and more jobs. It makes the point that traditional retail jobs’ pay has hardly moved in decades. I think a lot of people still like retail, because you can do little to nothing in many retail jobs while you post on Facebook about something else. It is also generally clean and temperature controlled. However, if you don’t mind doing the physical work of walking around a warehouse and picking goods, you can make a reasonable wage for a starting job. And, with the kind of growth we’ve seen, you can be a supervisor in short order and a shift leader in a year or two.
Those aren’t real jobs
I know, I can hear people scoffing about this already, but I have done this job and loved it. Also, I was no spring chicken when I did so. I loved walking around picking books for Amazon.com when all they sold was books. I’ll admit I liked it less when we moved into CDS, then DVDS, then everydamnthingelse. It was a good job and I saw lots of young people move up the ranks into other things. I saw them become coders, book review editors, customer service leaders, supply chain professionals, and warehouse managers. These were A-Level graduates (UK), Bachelors and Masters degree holders. They were from many places, including many west African immigrants. Some even wrote and sold books on Amazon. 😉
I think these are the “bridge” jobs of the new economy. We have a severe mismatch of job openings and skills as a nation. This gap has proven hard to fill with our traditional education models. However, jobs like Amazon warehouse jobs introduce people to cutting edge technology in the work place. Robotics, sorting technologies, transportation algorithms, etc. are well known in these fields. Proximity to them in the work place breeds familiarity and a level of understanding that is often hard to teach in a class. One can start by being trained quickly as a user of the technology, then move on to be a “manipulator” of locally run programs, then move to be a “configurer” of programs, then finally someone who knows enough about them to actually program them in some way. That is what a relatively short two year stint will get a switched-on graduate at an e-commerce warehouse. Unlike the retail and fast food industries, the new jobs landscape helps develop real skills that come with competitive wages.
If these are not the types of jobs we want for the masses, what would those jobs look like?
