Changing Demography and Your Future

More Winners and Losers for 2007

OK, OK here are some more winners and losers for 2007!

I knew this would be popular.

Public school systems in the United States will be losers as they continue to get a double whammy in 2007. Generation Y, now under twenty years old, has over whelmed kindergarten through 12th grade. The peak of Gen Y is now a sixteen year old sophomore. There are more kids in public schools right now than any other time in our Nation’s history. How many? In excess of fifty million! Under normal circumstances the system could handle this vast quantity of kids, but circumstances are anything but normal. What’s the problem? The experienced teachers are making a run for the door in alarming numbers. The Baby Boomer teachers, now forty to sixty years old, are retiring in force. They put in their time and they want out. But timing is everything and their timing is not good for the Nation. Generation X, now twenty to forty years old, simply can not provide the critical mass necessary to supply the needed teachers and administrators to cope with the volume of students. This is because of the low birth rate between 1965 and 1984. This will lead to relaxed hiring standards. If you have kids in the public school system watch the environment very carefully. You might want to consider an alternative.

Airlines will begin to catch a break in 2007 as Generation Y begins to flood the workforce. This forecast might be a bit premature but hey I’m a futurist. Heavy travel as a requirement for work is not a perk but a deterrent. No one wants to spend their life in the air or in hotels. When Generation X entered the workforce they shunned jobs requiring undesirable heavy travel because they could and they could because there were more jobs than applicants. With Gen Y the exact opposite is true. The jobs requiring heavy travel will have all the eager Gen Y applicants they need because the tables have turned and there will be many more applicants than jobs. So you can expect to see the very profitable business travel part of air travel spike. This should start about now and continue to grow 'til further notice. Look for young faces in the aisle seats. This is very good news for the airlines because business travelers pay much more for their seats than vacationers.

The transportation and shipping industry will dramatically benefit from Generation Y’s entry into the labor force. We are currently about 250,000 truck drivers short of our Nation’s needs. This has resulted in signing bonuses and higher salaries for existing drivers and has cut into company profits as higher shipping costs have not kept pace offsetting higher expenses. One of the first casualties of lower profits is vehicle maintenance. Yea, that’s right-BRAKES and TIRES! Give the tractor trailers a wide birth on the highway until Generation Y brings this labor shortage into balance. Starting now Gen Y will begin to alleviate the driver shortage and in about five years the transportation industry will have all the drivers they need. Very young men driving big trucks do leave me a little uneasy though.