Coping with our changing jobs scene

So where are the jobs of tomorrow? One of the disturbing features of the present recovery is the uneven nature of job creation.

The economy is thumping out huge numbers of new jobs — at an annual rate of a million a year — but they are a higgledy-piggledy collection.

Many are part-time, many are self-employed, many are low-pay, a few very high-pay — and many are done by people beyond normal retirement age. There are stories of skill shortages, particularly in engineering, yet 20% of graduates are reportedly doing “menial” jobs. On top of this are huge regional differences, though the North-South divergence is more complicated than is often supposed.

Underlying everything is a deeper concern about the impact on inequality: will there be a further hollowing-out of the centre, with lots of jobs at the bottom and quite a few at the top, but not so many in-between?

Of course we cannot know, any more than anyone could have predicted 20 years ago about the surge of the online world and the jobs this has created. But I have been looking at a thoughtful and actually quite encouraging study by the Institute for Public Policy Research think tank on job creation in Britain through to 2022.

The big message is that, although just more than a third of the new jobs will be high-skilled and a lot will be low-skilled, there will be another 3.6 million medium-skilled jobs too.

The think tank makes the basic point that you have to look not just at the jobs which will be created but at the ones that will be vacated — by people retiring or leaving the workforce. We are in the period of peak retirement for the post-war baby-boomers, and although many may keep working for a few more years, this merely postpones the impact on the job market.

The top 10 occupations of the future are:

1. Caring and personal service (jobs such as dental nurses);

2. Social care associate professionals (social workers and probation officers);

3. Health professionals (pharmacists as well as doctors);

4. Media (including, somewhat surprisingly to some of us, journalists);

5. Company managers (senior executives as well as middle managers);

6. Cultural and sporting professionals (actors, dancers, photographers);

7. Leisure occupations (sports coaches, hairdressers);

8. Property-related services (estate managers, developers);

9. Customer services (telesales, retailers); and

10. Business services (insurance, accounting).

These might seem a rather mundane bunch — an extrapolation of present trends rather than a brave new world — but that is fine. Job patterns shift incrementally and, if we are looking eight years ahead, it is reasonable to take what is happening now, adjust for retirement, and project it forward. We have been remarkably flexible both in our use of labour and willingness to accept structural change in the economy.

Because we have not artificially preserved employment, we should not expect to see huge swathes of jobs disappear, as they did in manufacturing in the Eighties.

There are, however, implications for training, particularly for vocational training. We need more of it and we need to celebrate its values. I suppose devices such as VQ Day last week do help a bit to promote vocational qualifications. But the big driver to push people to get them is the likelihood that is how you get the better job.