Our future potential
Do crystal balls really work? Is it unwise to ignore the messages my tea leaves are sending me? Is it possible to know what the future will look like?
An individual’s future seems to be up for grabs by a gaggle of mystical methods. But the future of a country is, of course, an incredibly complex system of potentialities. We would need to hook our crystal balls up with an ace cloud computing service, or send those tea leaves through a powerful pattern recognition software. But to get a good idea of where America’s headed, we could also just, you know, take a look around.
Around the world
Indeed’s new report on trending jobs around the world is a great place to start. Job growth data is the pulse of a nation’s economy, and Indeed has gathered stats on the most popular searches in their jobs database worldwide.
Australia is searching overwhelmingly for nurses, indicating that their health care industry is on the rise. Germany is in desperate need of English translators as they grapple with a massive influx of global refugees. And Ireland is looking for . . . models. Yep, pretty faces and bodies are in high demand there: the future of the Irish economy is looking glamorous.
American’s top five
Most relevant to us here at the AG are the American job search rankings. If you’ve spent any significant amount of time on job boards in the past few months, you won’t see many surprises. Here are the top five American job searches of 2016, according to Indeed:
- Ruby Developer (up a whopping 656.1 percent)
- User Interface Designer (up 557.2 percent)
- Devops Engineer (up 191 percent)
- Application Developer (close behind at 190.6 percent growth)
- Welder Fabricator (up 125.1 percent)
Breaking down the trends
One of these things is not like the other – let’s talk about number 5 first. The rise of “Welder Fabricator” searches is telling. This is a role that pays decently well and requires very little technical skill: just a high school diploma and some training. That means that someone who doesn’t want to enter themselves in the student loan Hunger Games can start earning good money soon after their high school graduation.
Similar positions may begin to see comparable growth as the cost of secondary education continues to rise exponentially.
And now, the bigger trend. Compared to other nations, Americans are searching for tech jobs at an explosive rate. Our country has struggled over the past few years with a skills gap as the economy’s fervor for tech overtook job seeker’s technical skills – but in 2016, it seems like that gap began to close. As Indeed notes, the growth in “Devops Engineer” searches is especially encouraging. Prior Indeed research has shown that that role has the second worst supply vs. demand imbalance, and was the third highest employer-sought role.
Unfogging the future
So, we have our tea leaves, and the crystal ball is unfogging. What do we see? Clearly, America is tech-crazy. But that’s nothing new – we’ve been bent on innovation and technical invention for decades, centuries.
[clickToTweet tweet=”Our economy is catching up to itself – businesses & potential employees are matching each other.” quote=”What’s new are the signs that our economy is catching up to itself, that businesses and potential employees are starting to match each other.”]
This could mean, among other things, even more of that trusty innovation, even faster, even better.
