Most Americans don’t need a college degree to get a job. Many do need to spend a lot of time on their feet and get some post-employment training if they want to keep it, according to a new Labor Department report detailing occupational requirements for American workers in 2017.
Despite the growing share of Americans with a bachelor’s degree, less than 20% of workers actually need one for their job, employers told the Labor Department. The vast majority of jobs require a high school education or less. Even so, the prospects for workers with a college degree remain brighter: The unemployment rate for college graduates dropped to 2% in October, while registering at 4.3% for those with a high school degree and 5.7% for those with less than a high school education.
The manager at McDonald’s might have more time on the job than the typical nurse or elementary-school teacher. Employers require food service managers to have clocked an average 1,511 days in prior experience, falling in behind chief executives, architect managers and lawyers. Of course, teachers and nurses put in their time at school. More than three-quarters of nurse practitioners are required to have a master’s degree and 96% of elementary-school teachers need at least a bachelor’s.
A hefty 76% of jobs require post-employment training, which can include time spent shadowing, on-the-job training and time spent learning basic tasks.
Many of the jobs in the U.S. economy require some desk time, but workers spent an average of 3 hours sitting and 4.4 hours standing or walking on the job. To be sure, there is a wide variance among occupations, with the average telemarketer spending more than 90% of his or her day sitting and electricians more than 86% standing or walking.
Think most jobs are super fast paced? Think again. The bulk of jobs require a steady pace of work, while 36% operate at a rushed pace. The Labor Department defines work pace according to the amount of time employees spend waiting. A customer service representative answering calls constantly would be classified as working at a rapid pace, while a lab technician monitoring experiments and tests with long pauses would be classified as working at a slow pace.
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The New Corporate Recruitment Pool: Workers in Dead-End Jobs (Sept. 10)
from Real Time Economics http://ift.tt/2zKw3e1
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