Gee whiz, almost every comment on this post is a link to some company trying to sell something.

Foreign Policy should do more against spam on its website, damn

Which is why I keep trying to shout from the tree tops that we need to do something to make college education cheaper.

The "charge what the market will bear" attitude of universities will destroy our economy and the employability of our kids faster than anything else will.

What's described here doesn't have to be the only way it ends up.

Apres moi le deluge ! Some want to be young again and start anew - but who would want to be young again in the scenario which is now unfolding. (You can't even go for escape to Herminias on the corner of Avenida Maximo Gomez and Felix Evaristo Mejia - it's a parking garage since the end of the Great Party in the Caribbean - end decade 1980's...)

"labor market institutions" and "creative destruction" are nonsense phrases. Stop using Rovespeak and start making sense.

obama, hillary, nancy, joe and the senate.

Looks like there are plenty of jobs to be had in the highly-paid field of spam comment generation. A real growth industry apparently. Though you may have to be a "co-worker's aunt" to earn the real money.

Come on FP, hire some kids to manage your comment section.

I reject the premise. Among the principal reasons so many jobs go unfilled here is simple risk-aversion on the part of HR and hiring managers. With applicant tracking systems that mechanically screen out the vast number of potentially qualified candidates (Oh, no, this person sold prunes to grocery chains west of the Mississippi for 12 years. I need someone who sold walnuts west of the Ohio for 13.8 years) and hiring managers insistent that there are at least 50,000 people with precise, granular "skills matches" for every imaginable role, there is little chance that the right people can be found.

What's needed is an entirely new kind of thinking. The kind of common sense one used to find at the neighborhood hardware store, perhaps, where the owner would hire a kid because he had a great attitude and the right relevant skills, like being helpful to customers, figuring out problems, and understanding the math inside the cash register.

Oh, right. Today that neighborhood hardware store is a Home Depot, where you can have a crap attitude entirely, not know a quarter from a loonie, but if you've had 18 years of POS experience with 12 years on a Hyster 2-ton forklift (no CATs, please), managed no fewer than 123 people and have 11.1 years at the paint mixer, well, there's a job for you.

The point is this: even when the skills are vastly more complex than the cash register and customer focus needed at Bob's Fix-It Center in 1972, there are still vastly more trainable and transferable skills than anyone seems to understand or care to look for. Mostly the fault lies with the sheer terror painted across the faces of burned out morons in HR departments who now have one more slick piece of technology to help them say "no thanks" to great people.

I think that, The future of work in advanced economies, there is examination of how future employment patterns will alter and, significantly, what the influences will be. In the introduction to this report the authors recognise that even though growing unemployment is a regular feature of advanced economies, there is a belief that companies cannot obtain workers with the requisite skills. The report acknowledges that even though the global recession caused by the financial crisis has been a primary cause for increased unemployment, its end will not automatically result in the return of jobs lost. Instead, it is argued, there are a number of influences that will cause the labour market to alter. Accordingly five such influences are examined: