With unemployment numbers still hovering around 10 percent, many are nervous about their prospects for finding work. A lot of people blame technology for making human workers obsolete. They look at factories that have replaced skilled assembly line employees with robots capable of working at much higher speeds. They see new gadgets that enable one worker to do the job of three or more in certain fields. They look at technological advances that enable jobs to ship overseas where there are cheaper and less educated workers who can produce a product that reflects the same quality of workmanship. These are all good reasons to blame the scientific and technological advancements of this era for the high rate of joblessness. But at the same time, these growing areas are creating new jobs in fields that didn’t exist a decade ago. And these jobs are often higher paying than the ones that have recently disappeared.
As large companies choose to keep all of their IT work in-house, they are hiring specialists to oversee very specialized facets of the larger network. Instead of one person overseeing a large and less complicated system, 10 people now focus on a single aspect. These are very specialized jobs and require a high degree of training, but the investment in education often pays off with very generous salaries and a high degree of autonomy.
The advance of social networking and the need for companies to maintain a “casual” online presence to sell to a new demographic have created an interesting niche job market; companies now need a social media specialist. These people often monitor teams that utilize Twitter, Facebook and StumbleUpon to keep the company’s presence youthful and relevant. They are experts in assisting everyday people in selling products to their own friends and family via their existing social networks. Without the recent leaps forward in technology, these are two areas that would have never experienced such job growth.