Book Information
NEW EDITION
Future Jobs
Solving the Employment & Skills Crisis
by Edward E. Gordon
Independent Publisher Award Winner!
Publisher: Praeger
March 2018
- Explains how the current job-skills crisis is due to a broad structural failure of the talent-development system & has sweeping socioeconomic consequences
- Focuses on the mismatch between the skills required in today’s workplaces and the current talent pool
- Provides examples of regional cross-sector partnerships that are making headway in solving the skills-jobs disconnect
America’s low unemployment rate overshadows the fact that tens of millions of Americans are unemployed while employers are reporting that finding qualified candidates for vacant jobs is their top-ranked problem. In Future Jobs, historical economist Edward E. Gordon explains how increasingly complex technologies, global demographic shifts, and outdated education-to-employment systems are converging toward a labor-market crisis. How can we create the skilled talent urgently needed for the jobs of today and tomorrow? This books points to a solution gaining traction across the United States: Regional Talent Innovation Networks (RETAINs), alliances of businesses, educators, government agencies, and nonprofit organization that are successfully bridging the talent gap. Additionally, it provides information on the most promising jobs and careers of the next decade for early-career job seekers and for workers who are looking to change career paths.
Diverse audiences will find it useful: businesses seeking to fill vacant jobs, community organizations and governments trying to attract new enterprises and retain current businesses, educators preparing students for careers, and students and parents concerned about job and career options.
Today!
Reviews and Endorsements for FUTURE JOBS
“Edward Gordon’s new book Future Jobs: Solving the Unemployment and Skills Crisis has brought a number of disciplines to the top macroeconomic problem of our day. His analysis provides a proper perspective of structural unemployment and the many avenues to address this problem. Gordon’s book is a must read for any serious policy maker and students looking at today’s labor market.”
—John E. Silvia, Chief Economist, Wells Fargo
“Ed Gordon, a business consultant, examines how the United States can reduce skill shortages by offering comprehensive regional solutions. … Recommended”
—Choice, February 2014
“Edward Gordon brings a good deal of data, insight and clarity to a hotly debated topic: the skills required by the workers of the Postindustrial Age. … Future Jobs maps out the dimensions of an underappreciated crisis confronting not only the United States, as well as many of the world’s developed and emerging economies: the rapidly growing shortages of adults who possess the basic skills to qualify for high growth, information-intensive jobs of what the author calls the age of “cyber-mental work.” … Future Jobs makes a convincing case that there is an urgent need to provide tens of millions of U.S. workers — both the unemployed and employed — with advanced cognitive skills. … He concludes that the only effective means by which America can timely address its workplace skills crisis is through local initiatives: Employers collaborating with educators, government, and civic leadership to provide millions of individuals with the specific skills required to perform the jobs of our Cyber-Mental Age.”
—David Pearce Snyder, The Futurist
“In Future Jobs, Dr. Gordon presents well-documented information about the mismatch of needed and available job skills and proposes workable solutions to the education-to-employment dilemma.”
—Patricia Nellor Wickwire, Career Convergence Web Magazine, National Career Development Association
“Ed Gordon has effectively described the perfect storm — the Talent Cliff — as well as our safe harbor — RETAINs. In the United States we face an absolute crisis in education and training that can be absolutely flipped into the foundation for a truly sustainable society. His prescription for RETAINs gives us the kind of independent public-private partnership that’s essential for success and overcoming the public and private sector silos that have prevented breakthroughs in education and workforce development. Future Jobs: Solving the Employment and Skills Crisis is an essential resource for community, educational, labor, governmental and business leaders throughout the country.”
—Dan Swinney, Executive Director, Manufacturing Renaissance
“If you care about the future of our economy for the next generation, read this book. Gordon delivers a wake-up call and it’s time for us to wake up. Future Jobs provides all you need to know to get engaged — really engaged — in the single most important challenge we face as a nation: transforming our economy by investing in people and skills. With each of us taking small steps, our nation can make a huge leap. That’s how it’s done. That’s how it’s always been done.”
—Ed Morrison, Director, Purdue Agile Strategy Lab
“Skill mismatches create opportunities to raise the skills, employment and earnings of American workers, but only by developing new policies that change the nation’s thinking to attach more importance to occupational and employability skills. Edward Gordon’s distinctive contribution points the way to this new thinking and, more importantly, offers constructive proposals for substantially improving the match between employer demand and worker skills.”
—Robert I. Lerman, Professor of Economics, American University & Institute Fellow, Urban Institute
Today!