Care to guess where the hot jobs will be in the future? Follow the societal trends.
Got an aging population, with the need to control health care costs? That leads you to home health aids, physician assistants, and physical therapist aides.
Intrigued by the never-ending technological march, especially with information technology? Then it should come as no surprise to find that network systems and data communications analysts increasingly are in demand.
How about Wisconsin manufacturers shedding their reputations as dumb, dirty, and dangerous? No surprise, then, that computerized numerical control (CNC) operators are among the highly skilled positions coveted by the companies that make things.
In this age of economic sluggishness, including inadequate job growth, it’s easy to wonder, “Where are the jobs?” In truth, these societal trends point the way.
Family-supporting occupations
The Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development surveys employers and its own economists, and relies on organizations like Manpower to forecast occupational needs. In the manufacturing realm, where 7,500 jobs have been added in the past year, employers continue to identify things like CNC machinist jobs, welders, fabricators, maintenance technicians, and electricians.
“These are family-supporting jobs, paying $20 or $30 an hour for people with experience,” said Reggie Newson, secretary of the DWD. “The entry-level wages are also family-supporting.”
In health care, he cited registered nurses and physical therapists. With technology, computer, and mathematical occupations, computer system analysts and software engineers will be in high demand, as will be people who can manage and supervise.
| “People who stop learning in today’s world, with all the data and all the information out there, are pretty much going to become unemployed, and it may be hard to find another role.” – Katie Uhalt
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“Executive jobs in corporations and small businesses, as well as financial managers and salespeople and customer service, those are the jobs that will be in high demand,” Newson said.
Needless to say, the state will continue to promote its three-legged stool of manufacturing, mining, and agriculture, but especially manufacturing because the state is pushing that sector as a career choice.
Among the targets of that push are new unemployment insurance claimants, who are required to register on a jobs website, jobsinwisconsin.com, on which employers post openings. The objective is to make a match as quickly as possible. Manny Perez, one of Newson’s predecessors at DWD, said it’s important for people not to be on UI for too long or their skills, including technology capabilities, could erode, rendering them unemployable.
“We’ve added additional counselors, re-employment counselors, at DWD workforce development, to do one-on-ones with claimants,” Newson said. “We really want to push hard to get claimants employed and have them take advantage of the technology (website).”
At some point, the DWD wants to track how quickly matches are made, which means additional enhancements to the website. “We just had a series of statewide focus groups with employers,” Newson stated, “and over the next several months we are going to be making enhancements and investments to make the website more user-friendly for both employers and job seekers and, yes, have the ability to track people using the website to connect with a job.”
Lifelong commitment
Whether the hottest jobs reside in health care, science, or technology, the world is changing so fast that lifelong learning will be the key to unlocking long-term success. Katie Uhalt, a staffing/talent consultant for KU Consulting in Madison, realizes that’s hardly a new observation, but it’s not universally practiced.
“People who stop learning in today’s world, with all the data and all the information out there, are pretty much going to become unemployed, and it may be hard to find another role,” she said. “Looking at technology as a whole, there is always going to be that need for individuals that have a technical expertise: architects, sales, engineers, and pre- and post-sales individuals that really have a niche or focus within that sector.
“This is what drives us forward because we have this idea that we can implement and have it work right for the business. This allows business to grow and protect its information, and it allows their salespeople to go out there and sell things.”
Fortunately for job seekers, computer skills can be maintained with social media, which can be used in personal and professional settings. Uhalt cited the networking advantages of LinkedIn, but Twitter, Facebook, and others enable job seekers to stay connected and technologically up to date.
She also noted that the job search is not all a young person’s game. “In this economy, which has been down for such a long time, statistics show a lot of people have gone out there and started their own business,” she noted. “So the would-be small businesses, they are going to be looking to hire individuals that are from the mature audience, or maybe the employers are not making an expensive annual salary because they don’t have the cash flow to do it and they want to pay somebody with experience.”
Home sweet home
The DWD reports that home health aides and personal and home care aides will be among the fastest-growing jobs over the next 10 years. The aging baby boom generation is one explanation for this, but not the only one. Home care is not only an increasingly popular care option for aging patients, it’s also much less expensive than acute care – not a small consideration when curbing the cost of health care is a national priority.
“The reason why we see an increase in the need for home health aides is we need to look at ways to reduce the cost of health care across the board,” said Rick Bourne, president of Home Health United in Madison. “We all have to take responsibility for that, and this is one of the cost-effective ways of doing that.”
If anything, the projected 38% increase in home health aides, and the projected 34% increase in personal and home care aides, are conservative estimates, Bourne concurred. There could be shortages in nursing and other health care positions, as an aging population stresses every facet of the industry, but for the most part these are family-supporting jobs. Compensation is related to the extent of a job’s private-duty functions – shopping, cooking, cleaning – because the cost of these are not reimbursed by third-party payers.
“Many of those individuals do have a tendency to work for a multitude of different agencies to make sure they get enough hours in place,” Bourne noted. “If the position is in relationship to licensed services such as licensed home health aides, either a hospice program or a home health program, yes, they are basically decent wages that can help sustain people and families economically.”
Licensed or not, the occupations offer a healthy level of variety in terms of skill sets and tasks. A home health aide might have to do everything from accompanying clients to doctors’ offices or administering prescribed oral medications, but perhaps the most important skills are the interpersonal soft skills. They need to keep cool in an emergency, and they might be caring for an elderly person with dementia who could lash out at them at any moment, which requires a degree of emotional intelligence.
“When you’re in a hospital, when you’re in a nursing home, or in a hospice care setting, you have resources you can draw from right there,” Bourne noted. “In the home setting, it’s more difficult. Yes, you can always get hold of a supervisor or someone like that, but nobody is there with you. These individuals need to be highly trained and knowledgeable in how to troubleshoot.”
The home-care profession is hardly a “no-man’s land” proposition because many elderly men would prefer a male caregiver.
If Bourne could change something about the home health trend, it would definitely be the limited reimbursement for the aforementioned private-duty tasks. He believes third-party payers, including the government, would see savings because patients would be more satisfied with their care and heal faster, especially if they can avoid institutionalizing someone who basically needs a healthy meal.
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