Why America has 8.4 million unemployed when there are 10 million job openings

The global economy is undergoing massive changes. In  the US now, there’s a big mismatch at the moment between the jobs available and what workers want.

Economies of nations do not stand still, they don’t stay the same. This means education needs to change along with the economy if students/ young adults are going to find jobs/ careers/ employment. And as all the workforce development entities will tell us, this mandate applies to older adult learners as well. Perhaps never more so than in this pandemic-ized economy, as this article below explores.

It’s not just a matter of unemployment because of ongoing short-term adjustments mandated by a public health emergency.

It’s that, PLUS a concomitant array of other factors whose change components have been rushed ahead much faster than anyone planned for, or could have planned for. If we can harken back to a seminal book called “Future Shock” by Alvin Toffler (1970), our challenge is not just adjusting to the “amount of change”. We must also adjust to the pace, the speed, the rate of change, which can overwhelm the speed of human adjustments.

Or so Mr. Toffler wrote. Others have said humans have an amazing ability to just “turn on a dime” and go with the flow of new circumstances. That might well be so, but surely there is a limit to how many “turns on a dime” we can accomplish per unit of time. Such is our current predicament.