Career Trend #1: The labor shortage will continue. The U.S. is facing a labor shortage of at least 20 years duration. Between now and the year 2020, when people of traditional working age (20 to 64 years old) increase only 15% in number, the over-65 age group will increase 100%. The nation will need a rapidly growing economy to support this dependent population.

As career strategy advisors, we believe the right strategy is to continue the phenomenal increase in worker productivity and, most important, remove the disincentives for workers to stay on the job after age 65. Studies continually indicate that one of the most influential variables on future American prosperity will be how early or late people retire.

Career Trend #2: Workplace privacy issues will escalate. In a new threat to personal privacy on the job, some companies have begun using surveillance software that covertly monitors and records each keystroke an employee makes: every letter, every comma, every revision, every flick of the fingertip, regardless of whether the data is ever saved in a file or transmitted over a corporate computer network. As they process those bits and bytes, the new programs, priced as little as $99, give employers access to workers’ unvarnished thoughts - and the potential to use that information for their own ends.

Say you draft a nasty letter to the boss or to a client and then, thinking better of it, delete the whole thing. Too late. One by one, all the keystrokes have been sucked up and stored on your computer’s hard drive or sent as an e-mail that a computer system administrator or manager can retrieve at their convenience. All of this ultimately proves that the 4th Amendment will be under increased privacy attacks in the future.

Career Trend #3: People without spouses or children will represent one of the fastest growing segments of the workplace population. In 1994 there were 44.2 million never-married adults in the U.S., more than double the number of never-married adults in 1970, according to Census Bureau data. The number of childless couples is expected to grow nearly 50% by 2010. Already, people without spouse and children are seeking benefits that are better suited to their lifestyles. Employment law experts warn that discrimination suits based on parental status are likely to emerge. As a result, employers will have no choice but to explore a wider variety of work/life benefits instead of work/family benefits.

Career Trend #4: Baby boomers will reach retirement age in record numbers. The first of the baby boomers will turn 65 in 15 years. Many boomers, thanks to improved health care and lifestyles, will continue to work past traditional retirement age. At the same time, increased burdens will be placed on already stressed Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid systems. Early retirement trends, coupled with an aging boomer population, will require innovative benefits and compensation strategies. When boomers finally retire, employers will have a difficult time finding skilled, experienced employees from a smaller pool of available workers.

Career Trend #5: Rapid staff turnover will continue to escalate. Competition for people with strong employment skills is so great today that trying to retain them is an uphill battle. In fact, a recent Harris and Associates survey shows that more than 50% of workers expect to change jobs within the next five years. Just when companies are devoting more time to finding new talent, they now have to find ways to encourage current employees to stay. Often that second challenge gets shortchanged. Some managers will counteroffer and dangle money in front of departing employees in an effort to win them back but fail to reward those who haven’t left their desks, many times taking them for granted and providing little in the way of mentoring or appreciation. In the next ten years, companies will have to do a better job nurturing employees than ever before. As a result, more and more companies will acknowledge the fact that retaining talent must begin long before a valued employee is weighing another offer.

Career Trend #6: Workplace violence will become the number one security concern in the workplace. Thirty percent of human resource officers at more than 100 of the nation’s largest companies reported deaths from workplace violence in the past five years. More than 70% reported an average of 18 minor injuries and 66% reported an average of 31 incidents of minor property damage from office violence in the same period. In the future, an increasing number of companies will cite office violence as the number one security issue as opposed to a management or organizational culture problem. So it’s not surprising that 40% of the companies surveyed have a formal written policy on organizational violence, though 57% said they have a plan of action for handling such incidents. We all tend to believe that bad things are not going to happen to us. A large number of managers guilty of that attitude will need to re-examine their opinions to prevent future acts of workplace violence.

Career Trend #7: The line between work and life will blur in a big way. Recognizing that work is becoming home for many people, companies are taking the best aspects of home and incorporating them into work. Pick just about any aspect of private life and it’s being subsumed into the workplace. Start with domestic chores: 46 of the 100 best companies offer take-home meals to liberate people from having to cook dinner. Twenty-six of the 100 offer personal concierge services (up from 15 two year ago), allowing employees to outsource the time-consuming details of buying flowers and birthday presents, planning bar mitzvahs, etc. The payoff? Well, LesConcierges in San Francisco estimates that each dollar spent to provide its services yields $1.75 in gained employee productivity. The proliferation of such fancy workplace amenities is, we’re told, a function of the tight labor market and the war for top talent. But it’s also part of another war: the war for time. Americans are working longer, harder, and faster, creating a ‘time famine’ that has been documented in such bestsellers as Juliet Schor’s The Overworked American, Arlie Hochschild’s The Time Bind, and the 751 time-management titles listed on Amazon.com. However we all need to recognize that the rise of the new company town raises some serious questions. Can it be healthy to do so much of one’s living on the job? If work is where the heart is, where does that leave families and communities?

Career Trend #8: Loyalty, gratitude, and fortitude will die a slow death. And who is the culprit? Maybe corporate America. After all, it was big companies that in the late 1980s and early 1990s ended the traditional employment contract. That whole loyalty in exchange for lifetime employment and a gold watch thing no longer made sense. So they got rid of it. Hundreds of thousands of workers were fired. Now employees would be self-sufficient and responsible for their own careers. That new deal worked fine when there weren’t a lot of jobs. But now that there are too many jobs, it’s an employer’s nightmare. Changing jobs every two years is no longer frowned on; instead, it’s encouraged. How else do you expect to get a huge raise? If loyalty isn’t rewarded, what’s the point of being loyal?

These eight career trends will continue to change dramatically as we go through the first ten years of the 21st century. Surprised? Of course not. Like most individuals who have spent even a minimum amount of time in the workplace, you’ve probably started to experience one or more of the trends listed above. But unless we become proactive and self-reliant in our careers or businesses, we will get a surprise - and it probably won’t be a pleasant one.

Joe Hodowanes, a career strategy adviser in Tampa, Florida, offers a free resume and career analysis. Fax your resume to (813) 936-0201 or email it to jmwanes@jmwanes.com For questions, call Joe at (813) 936-0091 or visit www.jmwanes.com on the Web. All Job Search Advisor articles on this website are the property of www.jmwanes.com (J.M. Wanes & Associates). You may download
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