Employment: Making people ‘job ready’ not what it once was

President Trump’s winning issue, “jobs, jobs, jobs," is not being addressed by our national government. The central focus should be how, with increasing technology and artificial intelligence, the U.S. is going to be able to employ the “average” person.

Experts have known since the 1970s that our economy was going to switch to high-end manufacturing; they also have known that more workers would be employed in service jobs, which traditionally pay less, and that the financial service sector would grow in importance.

No longer would employers automatically offer health insurance; even Wal Mart encourages employees to sign up with a government health plan.

Since the ‘70’s, the goal at the high school where I taught was to educate everyone, mandating that kids stay in school until age 18 and educating the disabled.

All this, plus the need to have buildings that could support new technology, made education more expensive as we tried to make everyone “job ready."

So when Trump promised to bring our jobs back, he was promising a return to the past. Future leaders need to think about future jobs!

This story was originally published July 16, 2017 at 3:25 PM with the headline "Employment: Making people ‘job ready’ not what it once was."