After in the previous article I talked about the demands/offers of the employer and the employee, now I will discuss about the reasons why the demands/offers of the employer don't meet with the ones of the employee.
I think that the main changes on the job market have as their source the development of technologies which increases at a very big rate. We live in a time where every day there are new technologies, new frameworks, new things which are the next great thing.
And this can be a big problem because the employer will want you to know all these technologies which increase extremly fast. More than that, you have all these companies where some will use some newer technologies while others might use older technologies. So if you have an experience of 10 years in a company which may use an older technology how do you learn the new technology? I've worked in very small companies which didn't use any software development cycle. After that I got hired in a company which used the W model in software testing and their own internal strategy and tools for QA and software development. After that I got in a company who use Agile and totally diferent tools.
More than that you, as employee, are expected to learn all the time the newest technologies. Of course, this is pretty hard. We are not machines and most of us have a social life. It's like employers expect from you to be like a machine which has no free time and every day and night stays to study the new framework or the new technology. More than that, schools can't keep up the pace with all these technologies because if they would do that, than all the time they would have to teach something totally different than the previous year. Usually IT colleges wait a little for a technology to exist so they might be sure that it won't change again but than the students won't have the experience in that new technology.
The IT area has a development in the job market like no other so there are cases with people who have no background in IT and changed their career to become software testers, software developers, network administrators, and other type of IT engineers. These were the happy cases. Today, in Romania at least, if you make a college in any other domain than IT, electronics, automatics, telecommunications, computer science and electrical engineering, you have no future. What we do with all these people?
Another big problem with the development of the new technologies is the integration of older people in the new world. In the last years a new branch of technology appeared and developed extremely fast and that is computers. So older people who didn't had so much work with this area tend to be rejected by the employers. Employers consider that because they are old and don't have experience in that domain, the old employees will not be able to integrate fast enough in the demands of the job. What do you do with people who got at a certain age with no computers and can't find any job which doesn't demand to know to work with the computer? I remember when in the Sam Raimi's Spiderman, uncle Ben was searching for a job as an electrician and couldn't find one where it was demanded simply an electrician. At a certain point he said seeing a job anouncement: “Now even computers need assistants?”. It might make you smile but this is a serious problem for older people who can't keep up the pace with the technology.
I've seen some tries made by some state institutions, very small ones, to create some free courses for people who are unemployed where they might learn web development, programming, network administration. And I think this would be a solution for employees of today.
Of course, the state institutions can't do everything (even though they do very little today). It is needed for some understanding on the employer side also. The employer could organize trainings for some technologies they demand once the employees showed at their interview that they have the potential needed by the company. I don't know how it is in other countries but here, after you have the first interview with the person from human resources you have a technical interview with your future manager who might be able to see your raw talents which he can grow and transform in something good. Another thing would be nice that the employer would not reject some people based only on their age. And for an older person who woke up with fired it is extremely hard to find another job because most of the employers would reject that person simply because it is too old.
Another problem with the development of technologies is one which it is not noticed by most of the employees and employers. Once with the development of the internet, people tend to waste work time socializing with others on social application like facebook, watch videos on youtube, read news on different sites, post on forums and other activities. So the time when the employee actually works becomes from 8 hours to 6 hours or less. Most of them may think that they work 8 hours but they don't. The employer can't really afford to hire only people who work 8 hours a day because those people are extremely rare.
Some companies tried to create a workplace with a couple of restrictions and this might work but here will remain usually people who can't find a better job. No one likes having no or little freedom. Another strategy of the employer is to give the employee as much freedom as possible, but he must finish his job at time. In this case we have people who stay overtime. More than that, employers are forced to give even more work to their few serious employees he has.
But the development of technologies doesn't affect employees only at work. There are people who go home and waste time on computer games, on TV, on movies so at work they are extremely tired. And in this case companies can't do anything because they can't control the employee's personal life.
What is the solution in this case? Of course the solution would be for the people to realize that there is a problem with these kind of hobbies which instead of helping them to relax they make them feel even more tired. Today there are so many children sick with diseases which our parents and grandparents didn't had: obesity and ADHD. This violence of technologies will have a strong effect on ours and our children' life. A biophysicist said once that in 50 years someone with no need of a therapist will be something very rare and this is because of the technology. Employers didn't really change much. There are good ones and bad ones. There are the ones who care about quality, who remember to be human and there are the ones who doesn't care except money. What really changed is technology and its impact on our life: employers and employees.
This would be my analyses about the job market of today. What we will expect from the future I don't know. If the world continues to spin faster and faster I don't know how much our brain will be able to handle. And if people won't be able to say stop to all these entertainments and increase their effort on what really is important than the end (how this end will look like I have no idea) will come even faster. I think that it is important to remember that we all are human and live in the real life. People who grew up in an environment where they were encouraged to try different activities outside computers and television, to work a lot, to study will adapt a lot easier. People who grew in an environment made of movies, cartoons, computer games, TV will have a hard future because they are not able to focus except under stronger and stronger stimulus.
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