Lizzy O’Leary this morning wrote “I repeat my refrain of the past few years: if you want a job, train in health care.” And it’s certainly true that in the aggregate health care employment is America’s jobs dynamo.
But if you look above you’ll see that in percentage terms, it’s blogging that’s the dynamo of the future. That’s health care employment vs other information services (OIS) with both indexed to the pre-recession peak of GDP. What’s OIS? Well, the BLS breaks “information services” down into a few sub-sectors. There’s non-internet publishing, there’s motion pictures, there’s non-internet broadcasting, there’s data processing, there’s telecommunications, and then last but by no means least there’s Other Information Services—i.e., the Internet. Its your Google, your Yahoo, your Slate, your Business Insider, and all the rest. In an ideal world you’d be a genius computer programmer and make the big bucks at Google. But the point is that the liberal arts majors of the world aren’t doomed. Knowing how to read, write, and research continue to be skills with some labor market value. You just may need to be able to work really fast.
