The Labor Department reported this morning that U.S. employers lost 33,000 jobs last month. This was their first loss in seven years ending a streak of 83 straight months of adding new jobs, which was the longest stretch of job growth ever! Additionally, workers’ wages only gained 12 cents, or 0.45%, from a month earlier.
Though much of this bad news was distorted by two hurricanes: a) Hurricane Harvey, which hit Texas in late August and b) Irma, which hit Florida in early September, a lot more needs to be done to create more high paying American jobs!
Answer: More R&D, Scientific, Technical And Engineering Jobs
My recruiting teams in all of our six divisions including R&D, scientific, engineering, IT, technical and manufacturing have all reported a surge in technology hiring over the past 12 months. In particular, new innovation in such fields as artificial intelligence or AI, virtual reality or VR, Big Data, robotics and Internet of Things or IoT are all driving these recruitment gains.
However, a lot more needs to be done to fuel the job gains in these new technical fields. For example, IoT, which is heavily involved with devices exchanging data with other computer systems will be a $19 trillion economic opportunity unfolding over the next 10 years according to many market observers.
Additionally, the new currencies like bitcoin have led to strong demand for R&D, engineering and computer science talent. Particularly those IT professionals, data scientists and engineers with C#, .Net, SQL, MySQL, Oracle, OCR, AI, RPA tools, VR, and Python skills within an Agile IT environment.
More Jobs Answers In Three Future Articles
The next three parts of this four part series will focus on such topics as: 1) why we should provide more focus on engineering, scientific, IT, R&D, technical and manufacturing technology jobs? 2) the need for more and better STEM education to better prepare workers for a job in technology and 3) what are the best strategies to drive technical, engineering and scientific job growth?
The key is technical, engineering, IT, R&D and scientific jobs tend to be hiring paying and less discriminatory than other jobs. As a result, a job in technology can be a boon for American workers who are well educated and trained to perform.
