Just a few days ago I wrote here about the impact of the poor U.S. educational system and the negative affect on talent in the near future (my wife tells me that my poor writing combined with my refusal to proof read is exemplary of this crisis). My basic premise was that the gradual decline of U.S. education combined with the erosion of senior U.S. talent, further combined with the growth of talent abroad would yield a fairly bleak outlook for the U.S. economy. Ok – I admit this was a gross simplification of the situation, but the fact is there’s a talent problem, not a population problem.
Then I ran across this report on the Canadian job market. It’s quite interesting to read a comparison between the unemployment rate, and the overall quality of the jobs. Perhaps my previous argument is not really connected to the Canadian report here,
CIBC and Tal’s analysis basically states that part time and self employed jobs are lower paying (apparently proven through research in Canada) and are therefore lower quality. There is some discussion on quality as a function of employment satisfaction, but that may have been more difficult a measure quantitatively. At any rate, while Canadian unemployment has been trending downward, the total quality of employment has gone the same direction. Canada saw a surge in self employment as well as a downward trend in the full time employed compensation rate. While jobs were being created, they were being created in less skilled industries.
So when we connect this with my earlier post, I wonder about the future state of outsourcing and offshoring again. While the current offshoring trend seems to be for lower skilled labor, perhaps when the growing industrials catch up in a decade or two, we’ll have a sort of equilibrium effect and get the lower skilled labor back as China and India take some of the higher quality talent work.
