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IQ&A with Elizabeth Foy Larsen, Managing Editor
IQ gazes into the crystal ball with “The Tom & Tom Show”—Minnesota State Demographer Tom Gillaspy and State Economist Tom Stinson.
IQ: How will the Minnesota workforce transform itself in the next five years?
IQ: Which job skills should everyone make sure they possess?
TS: Minnesota lost 154,000 jobs between 2007 and
TS: Knowing how to learn is going to be important. The jobs that
2009. We’ve gotten a third back, which leaves us with 102,000 to go. We’re thinking that job growth will be 30,000 to 40,000 jobs in 2011. The job market recovery will be an uncomfortably slow process. We will also get older and more diverse. And if we are not careful, we’ll be a little less skilled. Looking out ten years from now, one of the challenges will be the mature worker, people who are approaching retirement age. We need to make sure we retain them as long as they want to work.
require on-the-spot decision making or an ability to make adjustments will have the largest demand. But transformation-
TG: Transactional jobs—such as the check-out person at Walmart—are relatively easy to computerize and mechanize. But jobs that require decision-making or critical thinking are not, and that’s where the growth in jobs is.
TG: The biggest change we are going to see is the aging of the boomer
IQ: Both of you talk about the importance of under-
generation and the waves of retirements. Those will start in later 2011. We will also see fewer young people enter the workforce; the high school graduation class of 2009 was the largest we’ll see in a decade. In Minnesota, we need about 35,000 jobs a year to stay even with the natural growth of the work force. With fewer young people coming in and more old people leaving, all of this has economic implications. The jobs that will be open will be jobs with very specific skills. There seems to be a growing skills gap in terms of what employers want and the skills workers have. That gap will become more obvious.
standing and accepting the “new normal.” What kind of attitude shift do workers need to make?
IQ: How have the past few years changed your thinking about education? TS: Given how technology evolves so quickly, we have to make sure that people who are already working are upgrading their skills. It’s a tricky problem because part of that responsibility falls on the individual, part on the employer, and part on the public sector. How the public sector engages with this is going to be a crucial issue.
TG: We need to teach children logic, creative thinking and critical thinking, which to a large
extent we aren’t doing.
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al jobs—such as jobs that turn iron into steel and steel into cars—will be less available. If you think that kind of job will be there for you in the future, you will be in for an unpleasant surprise.
TS: I think they need to recognize that productivity is going to be the most important factor in their employability. That doesn’t only mean making more things per hour, but also making things of better quality. TG: If you can accept that the world has changed, you can begin to look for the opportunities. Some
of the biggest corporations have seen their walls significantly weakened. That opens up the opportunity for more start-ups. There is great pressure to come up with new innovations. If you look for the opportunities, I think you’ll do really well.