Recession: Where do Jobs come from?

Where do jobs come from?

Having taught Maths for a few years, I have a sense that getting 5 GCSEs including English and Maths is crucial to a child's future in getting a job.  However the more I experience of work, the more I wonder: what sort of Jobs are available if you can’t get a C at GCSE ?  And: Where will the Millions of jobs come from that are needed to reduce the UK unemployment.  Simplistic thinking took me down the following avenue:

• Jobs exist if they add value to a good or providing a service
• To get a job, you either need a rare skill (Engineer), or be willing to work for very low wages (clothing industry), or you need to located in the right place (cleaner), or some combination of all 3.
• Other countries are willing to work for lower wages than the UK.
• Therefore the only jobs that are likely to continue to exist are ones that are skilled or can’t be outsourced, or some combination of the 2.
• Is a C in GCSE Maths going to help with any of the above?

Obviously that is a cynical view of UK Education and the Jobs market, and not one that I believe in.  However this thought process get me pondering about the jobs market in a more abstract way and then inspired me to create something for “OrdinaryExperts”  28/1/2012.

Creation of jobs is such a political topic, subsequently unemployment and GDP are 2 of the key measure that any opposition will use to highlight a government’s failings.  The 2 main political ideas are: “The Government should do more” and “The Government should do less”.

The More sayers want the Government to spend more money on the public sector to create jobs directly, as well as spend more money on infrastructure to give a boost to the private sector.  Also this camp would probably want incentives for small businesses and specific industries.  In the extreme example of this (Communism) this government would own all industry and would dictate the amount of stuff produced.

The Less sayers want the Government to get out of the way of the free market and want to reduce the amount of regulation and barriers to entrepreneurship.  In the extreme example of this, they would expect to abolish all the public sector including the NHS and free schools.

In practice almost all countries and Governments have a bit of both, and probably lean different ways depending on the industry or other wider circumstances.

This divide brings us to 2 case-studies that I shared at ThinkToChange.  I have been involved with 2 organisations since their inception which was around Jan 2009 and they are interesting in their similarities, as well as their differences.  One is a Charity that provides a service for the government, the other is a startup technology company that gets money by selling equity to investors in the hope that one day the company will be worth loads of money. 

However both organisation have a similar model, as do almost all other organisations out there when it comes to funding and jobs: They get money from Initial investors, demonstrate they can do something great, then start paying people to make stuff.  The lines are fairly clear between producer, consumer and investor/owner.  I challenged the group to work out what happens when we blur some of these lines.  There must be other models of employment out there, and perhaps a new way of doing business in this high tech social networked world, what does a 2.0 job look like?