White Collar Recession

Just as the once-stable ranks of white-color and professional workers benefited from the economy, their wobbly foundation now works against it, according to employment experts.
When the U.S. labor market finally starts adding more jobs than it loses, we may find that some of our old jobs don’t exist anymore.
The economy lost over seven million jobs since the downturn started two years ago. The jobless rate is averaging around 8%, according to the Labor Department. The recession is reshaping the labor market. While some lost jobs will come back, others are gone forever.

• Many jobs created by the housing and credit market booms have likely been permanently erased. Tremendous amount of economic activity was associated with housing. It was considered a very unhealthy part of the economy. Unhealthy, but a boon for men without a college education. It is unlikely to come back any time soon.
• Manufacturing sector lost every third job or six million over the last 12 years. Though it gained some jobs last year due to improvement in construction.With 1.6 million jobs lost during the last two years, the construction sector has accounted for more than a fifth of the jobs lost since the recession began.
• The recession also gave companies an opportunity to cut jobs no longer as critical as they once were. For example, advances in information technologies have made the secretaries and mailroom clerks less necessary and reduced the number of administrative workers by 10+ percent since the recession began.

In other areas, the recession accelerated job losses that were probably coming in any case. This is due to the popularity of new technologies such as mp3, Internet, and digital photography:

• 36% fewer people working in record shops than two years earlier, according to the Labor Department.
• 23% fewer people working at directory and mailing list publishers
• 46% fewer at photofinishing establishments
• Also the financial sector may no longer offer as many high-paying jobs as it has in the past. It was estimated that its share of the economy was 20% larger than it should have been. Since the start of the recession it has already lost 6.6 percent of its work force.

Before 1990s job losses were essentially temporary and used to rebound quickly after recessions. Employers let workers go with the implicit expectation that they would be hiring them back once the downturn was over. In recent years, jobs have been much slower to recover.
New technologies and competition from low-wage countries like China and India made more job losses permanent. Now it takes more time for new jobs to be created and for workers to acquire the skills needed to do them.
In any case the permanent loss of jobs may keep the labor market from fully recovering for a long time to come.
Finding work (not just looking for a job) is going to require a complete transformation of what you do and how you do it to find work.