Sorry 'Bout Yesterday

Sorry about the lack of posting yesterday. I had to make an emergency trip down to Sebastian and didn't get back until late. Plus, by the time I got back, I wasn't exactly in the mood for writing anything.

On the way back, I stopped by parents house and had an interesting conversation with my father. He had read the post about my job fair experience and how I saw the internet changing the job market. He pointed out that there was another explanation for the dearth of middle management jobs nowadays: demographics. It's a point that has some validity.

When I first hired on as a broker, in one of the first training classes they told us that stockbrokers really had about 25 more years in which to make any real money. Reason being that in 25 years a significant portion of the wealth holding portion of society will be reaching retirement age and most will pull their money out of the stock market. And the demographics of the baby boomer generation do point towards that outcome.

My dad pointed out that there is also one other effect of baby boomers: they have led to an unnatural efficiency in the workplace.

Many of the baby boomers are now reaching 20 - 25 years on the job. For a large chunk of them, they have been working in the middle ranks of the business community for years. As a result, companies have a much, much higher ratio of experienced to inexperienced workers than they have in the past. This has led to reduced training and supervisory needs, which has led to an unnaturally high rate of efficiency.

And for right now, that's great. But in the next decade or so, most all of that experience will be retiring and the following generation (read: mine) won't have the experience in real positions of authority or decision making and eventually we will likely end up in a period of unnatural inefficiency as we get up to speed.

Interesting to muse on, but I got to keep it behind me as I find this new job. I can do better than this thing I got now.