Official figures show that the US economy is improving, unemployment rate has reduced from 10% in March 2010 to 8.2% in March 2012, and we are slowly but steadily on our way to recovery from the recession of 2007-2008. Yet the 12.7 million- and growing- still unemployed people in the US tell a different story and present a grim picture for the future. This high number also indicates that students graduating in the near future are likely to encounter problems in entering the job market.
Here are a few reasons why:
Outsourcing Since the 1980's the US economy is increasingly getting incorporated into the global economy, and technological advancements have made it possible for graduates in India, Nepal, China and other Asian countries to compete with US graduates and to provide the same services for a fraction of the cost. This off shore outsourcing is not only taking away manufacturing jobs to China but now BPO's services are taking away front office as well as back office jobs to India, Vietnam and Philippines.
Automation Another technological advancement that is resulting in a dismal job market for students is automation. It is expected that around 750,000 US workers are going to lose their jobs in 2016, a significant portion of which are going to be replaced by machine and servers. State-of- the-art software development processes are amalgamating jobs requiring various workers into one and automation is eventually going to result in just as many job losses in the West as off shoring.
Fierce Competition There has always been fierce competition for mid level and mid skilled jobs. But the situation is expected to get tougher across all levels in the future. Approximately 4.5 unemployed people are competing for each job opening, a number which is more than twice of what it would be in a healthy economy. Students now not only have to compete against each other but they also have to compete with the influx of immigrant graduates from third world countries. As if this was not enough, companies are now able to expand without hiring. How is that possible? They prefer to hire their part time workers full time before they look outside. So now America's 13 million unemployed also have to compete with 8.8 million part-time workers.
Minorities face the biggest challenges in the future job market. Johnston and Packer in their book "Workforce 2000: Work and Workers for the Twenty-First Century" claim that as least skilled jobs disappear and greater levels of education are required for jobs, African American men and Hispanics, who traditionally have not gone for higher education, will suffer the most. Other statistics reveal that more than 26 percent of African Americans and nearly 22 percent of Hispanics are either unemployed or "discouraged workers".
These are some very serious and pertinent problems that students graduating in the near future are likely to face. The US job market is shrinking and some urgent rethinking is required by the government, large scale corporations as well as by students themselves to come out of this dilemma.
