As someone who worked his entire life in the manufacturing industry I am sympathetic to the plight of those who are now facing the loss of their livelihood.  The reality is that in the foreseeable future manufacturing will not play a significant role in the American economy.  In the late 40’s and early 50’s 42% of our GDP was generated by manufacturing.  Today that number is 9%.  For those of us who are older the transition to an entirely new career is probably unrealistic.  Other functions are also becoming obsolete.  This article that appeared on AOL.COM offers some worthwhile observations and valuable suggestions.

By Lydia Dishman, Posted Jun 6th 2011 @ 10:00AM

If you’re knocking on doors looking for work, there are some doors you may want to skip. The economy continues to show signs of rebounding, with increases in consumer spending and a jobless rate that has declined to 9 percent. But, be careful.

While career opportunities are predicted to grow in thriving industries like health care and technology, the flip side is that some industries have a lot of occupations that are becoming obsolete.

The majority of these dead-end positions are in manufacturing, production and administrative support, all of which are affected by automation technologies and lean business practices, which reduce the need for workers in plants, factories and traditional office environments, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). The limited job openings expected in these sectors won’t necessarily come from job growth, but from the need to replace employees who will transfer to other industries or retire.

So how can you tell if you are in a dead end job? Here are five of the sectors that are expected to decline between now and 2018, according to the BLS. We asked career experts to discuss how to take the skills you may have acquired in these industries, and leverage them to make the leap to a more sustainable position.

1. Manufacturing

Sewing machine operators, textile winding machine setters, and cut-and-sew apparel makers will experience the sharpest declines in employment opportunitiesin the next decade, with as much as a 40 percent drop in number of those employed, according to the BLS.

Dorothy Tannahill Moran, an Oregon-based career coach, says textile industry jobs often have the same or similar counterparts in many manufacturing companies. A person moving from the declining textile industry should spend time researching job requirements in other industries to find companies needing comparable skills, such as those in automotive manufacturing.

The automotive industry is now experiencing some growth thanks to the introduction of alternative fuels and increased investment by foreign automakers in U.S. facilities. Assembly workers can expect to make over $16 per hour, according to online salary database PayScale.com.

2. Sales

Door-to-door salespeople and telemarketers may soon go the way of the milkman, with declines of 14 and 11 percent respectively for each occupation. The good news is that communication and people skills transfer very well to other industries, such as retail, which is expected to grow by 8 percent over the next 10 years. Sales associates in the retail industrycan earn between $7 and $12 per hour, not including performance bonuses, according to PayScale.

Larry Stybel, executive-in-residence at the Sawyer Business School, at Suffolk University in Boston, says that when you’re leaving a dying industry, it’s best to keep the focus on you when talking to a prospective employer. “Your mission is not to change other people’s views about your old company or industry. Your mission is to differentiate yourself from the public perception of that company or industry. Talk about what you accomplished and how you were different.”

3. Office Support

File, mail and information clerks and other administrative support staff can expect double-digit declines in employment by 2018. Fortunately, the BLS predicts that executive assistants, receptionists and bookkeeping clerks will still be in demand, especially in the health care industry, where medical records clerks can earn over $11 per hour, not including bonuses.

Angela Martin, owner of Defining Success Coaching, advises job seekers to highlight universal skills, such as time management, attention to detail, and effective communication that will translate from office to office.

4. Computer Technology

Data processors and computer operators, who manually maintain a log of computer system errors, aren’t safe, as the latter occupation is expected to shrink by more than 18 percent by 2018. On a positive note, computer skills are a good jumping off point for moving up in the information technology industry, where the field of computer software engineeringis headed for growth. An associate’s degree may be the only thing standing between you and earning $57,800 per year.

Before making the leap to a new career, Stacey Hawley, principal and owner of Credo, a career counseling and leadership development firm, recommends developing your resume using an executive summary that highlights your key competencies and areas of expertise, honors, awards and accomplishments.

5. Management

First-line supervisors or production managers and workers can expect to be phased out with lean manufacturing practices, but success in those jobs depends on a capacity for leadership and inspiring teamwork. You can take that job title and move from the factory floor to an office environment where office managers can expect 11 percent growth and a median annual wage of $37,200 per year.

Additionally, career coach Paula Gregorowicz reminds those looking to switch industries that if you are a diligent employee, learn quickly and have strong management know-how (abilities she considers innate and “not teachable the way that skills are”), you’ll be valuable in nearly any job.

Everyone knows the president is an outstanding speaker.  He has the ability to convey his message with an emphatic call to action.  He did just that in this evening’s speech to a joint session of Congress.  You just wanted to jump out of your seat and make his proposals happen.

However, his proposals did not address the problem of an economy stuck in neutral or more likely in a downward slide.  His ideas on improving infrastructure from schools to bridges will certainly put people back to work.  The problem is there was nothing in his proposals that would reinvigorate the private sector.  Specifically, there was no discussion of methods to stimulate manufacturing activity.

Bill Gross, CEO of PIMCO, pointed out on “Piers Morgan Tonight” that manufacturing accounted for 45% of America’s GDP after WWII but today accounts for 9% of GDP.  There is the crux of the problem.  Mr. Gross pointed out that globalization and cheap labor elsewhere are barriers to re-employing the millions of people who have lost their job in the United States.  Mr. Obama’s solutions are short term in nature and do nothing to address this issue.

So while Republicans and Democrats might come together to implement some of the president’s ideas, they will not have addressed the real problems facing this nation.

So your last employer terminated you, and your interviewing for a new job?  Forget full disclosure.  Think spin.  Do I think this works?  I know it works becasue I did it repeatedly.

From Businessweek magazine

By Liz Ryan

Read her  entire article here> link

Here is the summary:

It doesn’t matter how horrible the bosses were at Acme Explosives or how badly they treated you. Something about the words “I was fired” makes prospective managers’ blood run cold.

If you left your last job on less-than-sensational terms, there’s got to be a way to address that issue without summarily ending your candidacy, right? As a longtime HR director, I can tell you, there is. First, shake off some misconceptions.

There is zero requirement ever to tell a hiring manager or HR person that your previous employer let you go.

Here are some ideas on explaining why  you left your job.

Option No. 1: The Learning Was Done

“It was a fantastic learning opportunity for me—I credit those folks with teaching me everything I know about SEO, for instance, but it was time for me to go, and we agreed on that just as I was getting interested in social marketing.”

The “we agreed on it” is key. If the “agreement” took place only in your own mind as the security guard escorted you out of the building, that’s fine. In the first place, your new employer’s HR folks probably won’t find out you were fired—that information is typically not conveyed to a prospective employer in an employment verification process. And if they do find out and end up claiming the “we agreed on it” was a lie and terminating you because of it, you’ll know those people are pure evil. You don’t want work for them.

Option No. 2: My Interests Shifted

“I got to do so many fantastic projects at Acme Explosives, but my focus was shifting into project management, and the opportunities for that were very limited over at Acme. I didn’t know what I would do next exactly, but my friend from college was starting a consulting practice, and I decided to collaborate with her on that as I shifted to the next thing.”

This way, you never mention who said what to whom, or in what order. What does it matter, truly?

Option No. 3: We Went in Different Directions

“When I got to Acme Explosives, the mission had everything to do with building the brand fast, and we had great results on that front. Two years later, I was becoming a zealot for branding and customer evangelism, but Acme was moving more into OEM work, where the branding piece was almost nonexistent. I was very glad to have been around to help the company advance its value to the point where the Motorolas of the world found it and formed partnerships with it, but as the business moved more and more backstage and away from the customer-facing arena, it wasn’t a great fit for me anymore, and we decided to move apart. I still have tremendous relationships there, of course.”

Those relationships are with managers who “get” you, and with your amazing colleagues, not with the turkey who fired you, but that’s a whole ‘nother Oprah.

The idea that Ms. Ryan is proposing is that you must be creative.  Practice that interview with someone who will be critical of your words and behavior.

Beneath Jobs Report Surface Lies Some Ugly Truths

Published: Friday, 5 Aug 2011

By: Jeff Cox

CNBC.com Staff Writer

Before getting too excited about the modest uptick in net job creation and a slight downward move in the unemployment rate, it’s probably worth a look under the hood.

As is usually the case, there is far more than meets the eye to the Labor Department’s report that the economy added 117,000 jobs last month and the unemployment rate fell to 9.1 percent.

Let’s start with the reality that fewer people actually were working in July than in June.

According to a Bureau of Labor Statistics breakdown, there were 139,296,000 people working in July, compared to 139,334,000 the month before, or a drop of 38,000.

But the job creation number was positive and the unemployment rate went down, right? So how does that work?

It’s a product of something the government calls “discouraged workers,” or those who were unemployed but not out looking for work during the reporting period.

This is where the numbers showed a really big spike—up from 982,000 to 1.119 million, a difference of 137,000 or a 14 percent increase. These folks are generally not included in the government’s various job measures.

So the drop in the unemployment rate is fairly illusory—stick all those people back in the workforce and you wipe out the job creation and the drop in unemployment.

For once, some of the government’s other tools of economic voodoo didn’t help the count.

The vaunted birth-death model, a byzantine approximation of business creation and failure, actually subtracted 18,000 from the total job creation after a five-month run where it added a total of 741,000 positions to the count.

And the so-called “real” unemployment rate, which adds in discouraged workers and others not counted as part of the headline unemployment rate, actually pulled back one notch to 16.1 percent.

But there’s plenty of bad news to go around otherwise.

The average duration of unemployment rose for the third straight month and is now at a record 40.4 weeks—about 10 months and now double where it was when President Obama took office in January 2009. The total number unemployed for more than half a year now stands at 6.18 million, 130 percent higher than when the president’s term began.

Among the nuggets of good news—the jobless rate for blacks slipped to 15.9 percent and for Latinos to 11.3 percent, both at four-month lows.

But how good or bad the unemployment picture really may not come into view until next month, because of distortions from seasonal adjustments.

Including teachers and others who experience seasonal unemployment, total joblessness actually rose 1.23 million.

via Beneath Jobs Report Surface Lies Some Ugly Truths – CNBC.

I am posting this column because it reflects my ideas.

Immediate government spending cuts would only make things worse. A new jobs tax cut for companies repatriating their profits could help.

By ALAN S. BLINDER reprinted from the Wall Street Journal

Last Friday’s employment report landed with a loud thud. Only 18,000 net new jobs in June? How could that be? One Wall Street economist said he thought it was a misprint at first. He was not alone.

The horrific June employment number made it two in a row. With the latest revisions, job growth in May is now estimated to have clocked in at only 25,000 jobs. So that’s 25,000 and 18,000 in consecutive months. Given the immense size of total U.S. payroll employment (around 131 million) and the sampling error in the survey, those numbers are effectively zero. Job creation has stopped for two months.

If we were at 5% unemployment, two bad payroll reports in a row would be of some concern yet tolerable. But when viewed against the background of 9%-plus unemployment, they are catastrophic. And going beyond the headline jobs numbers reveals an even bleaker picture.

The fraction of the population that is employed (58.2%) is now lower than it was when the recession officially ended in June 2009 (59.4%). The share of the unemployed who have been jobless for more than six months is now a stunning 44.4%. In a strong labor market, that number would be in the teens. I could go on.

All this adds up to a national jobs emergency. Tragically, however, it is not being treated as such. When is the last time you heard one of our national leaders propose a serious job-creating program?

The operative word here is “serious.” Every day brings new proposals to slash government spending. But as I noted on this page last month, those are ways to kill jobs, not create them. As a matter of fact, despite all the cries of “big government” or even “socialism,” public-sector employment has been falling.

Over the past two months, while private businesses were adding a measly 130,000 new jobs to their payrolls, governments at all levels were shedding 87,000 workers. Looking over a longer period, public employment at all levels is down by 522,000 jobs over the last two years. Does that make sense in a jobless recovery?

We may be on the verge of doing much worse. If we crash into the national debt ceiling next month, Washington will be forced to reduce its rate of spending by 40%-45% immediately. Do the math. The implied reduction in federal spending would be equal to about 10%-11% of gross domestic product. If cutbacks of that magnitude were maintained for more than a very brief period, it is hard to see how we could avoid another serious recession.

Worse yet, this little back-of-the-envelope calculation ignores the financial panic that might ensue. Since markets are thoroughly convinced that Congress will raise the debt limit on time, a failure to do so would come as a big shock. Shocked markets are often panicky markets. And panicky markets can devastate economies.

Important as it is to get the debt-ceiling issue behind us, that would only preserve a pretty miserable status quo. What might a real job-creation program look like?

Let’s start with an admission—two actually. First, there are no magic bullets. Nothing policy makers can do will fill the employment hole quickly. We’re talking about mitigation, not cure. Second, there is no such thing as a free lunch.

Creating jobs costs money—whether it’s via tax cuts or more spending. (The Federal Reserve normally can create jobs without budgetary costs, but with interest rates already near zero it says it’s out of ammunition.) If Congress and the president are fixated on reducing the federal budget deficit to the exclusion of all else, we are not going to make headway. So yes, let’s enact a major deficit reduction program right away, but start the cutbacks only in the future. For now, we need a jobs bill.

What are some realistic options? For several years many economists have promoted a tax credit for new jobs. (I advocated the idea on this page in November 2009.) While the details matter, the basic idea is to offer firms that boost their payrolls a tax break. As one concrete example, companies might be offered a tax credit equal to 10% of the increase in their wage bills (over 2011 levels, say). No increase, no reward.

You might think Republicans would embrace an idea like that. After all, it’s a business tax cut and all the new jobs would be in the private sector. But you’d be wrong. Frankly, I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s seen as “left-wing social engineering.”

A variant may hold more promise in the current political environment. Major corporations are clamoring for a tax holiday that would let them repatriate profits held abroad at a bargain-basement tax rate. They claim that all kinds of wonderful things would happen if this money came home. Trouble is, we’ve seen this play before, in 2004, and nothing wonderful happened—unless you were a shareholder or executive of one of the beneficiary corporations.

However, the tax holiday idea can be married to the new jobs tax credit. Suppose we allow firms to repatriate profits at some super-low tax rate, but only to the extent that they increase their wage payments subject to Social Security. For example, if XYZ Corporation paid wages covered by Social Security of $1.5 billion in 2011, and then boosted that amount to $1.6 billion in 2012, it would be allowed to repatriate $100 million at a tax rate of 5% or 10% instead of the usual 35% rate. The tax savings to the company would thus be $25 million-$30 million for raising its payroll by $100 million. That’s a powerful incentive.

There are two main reasons for using Social Security wages as the base. The first is administrative simplicity: Every company already reports this number to the government, and it is next-to-impossible to “game” it without committing outright fraud. The second reason is fairness. Companies would be able to claim the full tax credit only for earnings under (in 2011) $106,800. No subsidies for raising executive pay.

There may be better ideas. We should be open to them. But sitting by passively is no longer acceptable. In fact, it constitutes cruel and unusual punishment of the American work force. Isn’t that unconstitutional?

Mr. Blinder, a professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton University, is a former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve.

The summer before enrolling at my local community college, I spent my nights stuffing flyers into newspapers until my fingers bled.

I already had another part-time job, working 25 hours each week at a local music store for minimum wage ($8 per hour). But I knew I had to take on another job in order to help pay for my upcoming tuition. When I saw the newspaper warehouse job advertised in the local paper for an entire dollar above minimum wage, I jumped at the chance.

For three months I worked on call from 11 p.m. to 7:00 a.m. I wouldn’t know if they needed me to work until at least 8:00 p.m. the evening of the shift.

The work was hard and tedious. I stood in a freezing cold warehouse stuffing flyers into newspapers, and then bundling those newspapers into stacks of 25 to go out for delivery. My fingers started to bleed after the first week on the job, and my hands were too small to wear the plastic gloves provided to us.

Bouncing from working days at my music store job, then nights at the newspaper warehouse seemed like a good idea at the time. But after a few back-to-back shifts, I quickly realized that the $1 per hour extra instead of sleeping wasn’t worth it. I was having a hard time staying awake during shifts at my other job, and my social life was non-existent because I was always exhausted.

My experience as a night shift newspaper bundler might have been different had there been co-workers I could relate to. But most of the employees kept to themselves or didn’t speak English, so I kept my mouth shut for each eight hour shift.

Now, nearly 10 years later, every time I have an awful day at work, or encounter a freelancing client that drives me crazy, I think back to my time as a newspaper bundler, and all of a sudden my day doesn’t seem so bad anymore.

What was the worst job you’ve ever had?

Written by Krystal Yee and posted in the Toronto Star. FYI income and pay in Canadian dollars is almost exactly the same as in the U.S.A.

Krystal Yee is a marketing and graphic design professional living in Vancouver. She also blogs at Give Me Back My Five Bucks. You can reach her on Twitter (@krystalatwork), or by e-mail at krystalatwork@gmail.com.