
Young Americans Have No Interest in the Most In-Demand Jobs, New Data Finds - paulpauper
https://www.inc.com/christina-desmarais/young-americans-have-zero-interest-in-the-most-in-demand-jobs-infographic.html
======
Frenchgeek

      - Retail salespeople     
      - Office clerks    
      - Registered nurses    
      - Customers service reps    
      - Waiters/waitresses    
      - Secretaries and admins   
      - Freight and stock laborers   
      - Janitors    
      - Operations managers   
      - Stock clerks and orders fillers   
      - Truck drivers    
      - Personal care aides    
      - Bookkeepers and accounting clerks    
      - Nursing assistants    
      - Maids and housekeepers    
      - Sales reps wholesales and manufacturing    
      - Maintenance and repair workers    
      - Elementary school teachers    
      - Accountants    
      - Childcare workers    
      - Teacher assistants    
      - Landscapers and groundkeepers    
      - Construction workers    
      - Cooks     
      - Security guards
    

So jobs difficult physically and/or emotionally, some with long hours and
little pay and often portrayed as really boring...

I wonder why they don't want these jobs...

~~~
maxerickson
I'm sure someone will tell me it just isn't possible, but it sure does seem to
be the case that the economy is miss-pricing labor, badly.

~~~
cmdrfred
Demand is only so elastic, things can only be mispriced for so long until it
corrects. I suspect that it will correct once the stock market stays up for
some time and the existing workforce begins to retire.

~~~
lowbloodsugar
s/retire/die/ There is no retirement any more.

------
riskable
The entire premise of this article is based on the old fashioned idea that
"work" will always be performed by humans and that human labor will always be
in demand. I mean, it literally opens up with this:

    
    
        "In a decade, who's going to fix your vehicle, deliver your mail or landscape your yard?"
    

Whoah there! Don't you mean, " _what_ is going to fix your vehicle, deliver
your mail, or landscape your yard"?

Now that we've injected some reality into the situation I think the answer is
quite straightforward: Robots (and other forms of automation).

Bearing that in mind is it really all that surprising that kids want to go
into entertainment in large numbers? Logically, if robots take over all the
"physical work" humans have traditionally occupied going into entertainment
seems like the perfect solution.

Entertainment can be produced from nothing, can be delivered to a nearly
infinite audience size thanks to the Internet, and has no upper bound on how
much can be produced or consumed in any given time frame. It seems like the
perfect replacement to fill all those gaps in human labor.

Also, with robots replacing so much "work" it should--in theory--free up the
time of _so many_ humans that would otherwise be working hard for basically no
reason other than to earn some money. That means there's going to be more
_demand_ for entertainment as well.

There's always going to be a wide variety of human occupations but it wouldn't
surprise me in the slightest if 70% or more of the "workforce" is occupied by
various forms of entertainment in the future.

~~~
andyjsong
Shameless plug, but this is one of the reasons why my company makes musical
instruments anyone can play. Currently, of the people that know how to play a
musical instruments, 91% started before the age of 14. [1] and only 12% of the
US population knows how to play a musical instrument [2]. We hope to change
that by making music playing more accessible to everyone starting with a
guitar.

[1]
[https://www.dropbox.com/s/qh58bojug92segl/NAMM%202011%20Gall...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/qh58bojug92segl/NAMM%202011%20Gallup%20Poll.pdf?dl=0)

[2]
[https://www.dropbox.com/s/fqmrxdqoz4tjehk/US%20adults%20who%...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/fqmrxdqoz4tjehk/US%20adults%20who%20play%20a%20musical%20instrument.pdf?dl=0)

~~~
runamok
It would be a better plug if you linked to your company's blog/website/store
than dropbox. ;-)

~~~
andyjsong
:) magicinstruments.com

------
taylodl
Is this newsworthy? Teens still want to grow up and be rock stars. That dream
goes back to the 1950's at least. What would be more interesting to know is if
this apparent misalignment is worse than any other time or is this the same-
old, same-old misalignment of teenage dreams and reality?

~~~
JSeymourATL
"Hey, Let's Put on a Show": This trope was made popular by Judy Garland and
Mickey Rooney in the 1930s.

------
TheCoelacanth
It seems like these are just the most common jobs, not actually the most in-
demand jobs. Many of them are very low paying. If they were actually in-
demand, they would pay more. For example,

    
    
        - Retail salespeople      
        - Janitors    
        - Personal care aides    
        - Maids and housekeepers    
        - Childcare workers    
        - Teacher assistants       
        - Cooks     
        - Security guards
    

are all pretty low paying jobs.

~~~
dragonwriter
> It seems like these are just the most common jobs, not actually the most in-
> demand jobs

People confuse "demand" with "quantity traded at the current market-clearing
price" all the time.

------
ImTalking
My kids school had a career night where parents from all sorts of different
jobs came to answer kid's questions. I was the IT rep and I thought I would be
inundated with kids all night. Well, I had 3 kids. 2 were definitely geeks and
one was a smart kid who said he would try other jobs before he would think
about IT.

I couldn't understand it. Here we have an industry that is full of
billionaires and success stories and yet only 3 were interested. I thought
maybe they felt is was too boring just staring at a screen all day. Maybe they
didn't understand how pervasive software is and how it basically drives
everything. Or maybe they have a different definition of happiness which
programming seemingly won't give them.

~~~
laughfactory
Well, IT and software and engineering are all _hard_ domains where it's well
known that it'll be 1) hard work, and 2) hard work, and 3) how likely is it
that they'd be able to create the next Google or Facebook. I think between the
slope of the skill acquisition curve and the sense that everything's (or will
be) done before by these huge success stories, kids just don't see a gap for
them to fill there. It's really hard for them to imagine that Google (or any
of the current hot properties) will have its day, like IBM or AOL, and then
fade into irrelevance. So they can't connect the hard work to making the next
big thing.

------
camgunz
I generally agree with the sentiment of everyone else in this thread, which is
"no one grows up wanting to be a Wholesale Sales Rep". Another "kids these
days are coddled" article.

------
pillowkusis
if americans at large had interest in holding these jobs, the market demand
would be filled and they wouldn't be in demand.

this statement feels vacuous to me?

~~~
popopobobobo
Yeah, if they conduct the same survey to adults, the result would be similar I
suppose.

~~~
thebigspacefuck
I'm a programmer and I daydream about doing landscaping or being a mechanic or
renovating houses. I spend the weekends working in the yard or on my
cars/motorcycles or my house. There's just not enough pay in something like
that, at least in the city. Maybe some day I'll move back to my small hometown
and start a business in one of those areas. If I didn't have to make as much
money, I'd do a job like that. Physical labor is good for the soul.

~~~
laughfactory
You've just got to dream bigger. Figure out how to do it better than the
traditional model of either 1) doing it all yourself, or 2) hiring cheap labor
to do it for you. And got God's sake, hire some analytics help so you
understand how much help you need, what you can afford to pay, how much demand
you've got (and when), etc. But yeah, I hear you: the six years I worked at
the airport back in college were some of the best working days of my life (I
worked at a private FBO). You're outside all the time, moving, physical
active... You see sunrises and sunsets, work in the rain, snow, and scorching
heat. And you mentally and physically feel much better than being chained to a
desk.

------
stevenspasbo
This article isn't very surprising, of course the kids are going to pick
glamorous careers like "musician, athlete or video game designer".

When I was in high school I had to write a paper on what I wanted to be, and I
picked video game programmer.

I just can't imagine that very many kids would pick janitor, landscaper, or
security guard as dream jobs.

------
laughfactory
To me this sounds like a list of where the money will be in the future. Be the
people who figure out how to solve for the supply issue and you'll be rich.
Figure out how to construct houses with less labor, build automated mowers and
lawn maintenance equipment, etc.

------
dirkg
So in other words, American kids and millenials are lazy, delusional, don't
want to work hard and want all the glamor with none of the work. Is this
really news?

------
lowbloodsugar
Interesting that more teens want STEM jobs than actually exist. Somebody
slipped up and failed to toe the company line.

~~~
nikdaheratik
Just like how in the 60s more teens wanted to be astronauts than actual space
explorer jobs existed, but somehow many of them managed to find good jobs
either in aerospace or something else.

~~~
lowbloodsugar
Sure. But NASA isn't claiming there's a shortage of astronauts and demanding
the government opens the H1B floodgates.

------
xacaxulu
476 teens. Not a big sample.

