Switching careers doesn’t have to be hard.
A New York Times review of the activities and skills that jobs entail, based on a Labor Department database, shows how much overlap there is among many seemingly dissimilar occupations.
Many skills needed to do fading jobs are applicable for growing jobs. For example, service industry jobs require social skills and experience working with customers—which also apply to sales and office jobs.
But a big part of the problem is the labor market does a poor job of matching employers with employees—in hiring, and in educating and retraining them to meet employers’ needs.
“To solve this problem, people will need to have more skills, but the generation of skills is more an effect than a cause,” says Byron Auguste, co-founder of Opportunity@Work, a nonprofit for job seekers with nontraditional backgrounds. “It works for half our workforce but not for the other half.”
For some whose jobs have disappeared—particularly those without college degrees who worked in jobs requiring routine, physical labor—it can be nearly impossible to find a stable, well-paying new one. These jobs are more isolated, in terms of skills, from the rest of the labor market. Extensive research has shown that there are fewer middle-skill jobs, and that some displaced workers never recover, especially if they live in communities that no longer have jobs similar to their old ones or they don’t have higher education.
