You’ve got skills.
Roy Miller (Tom Cruise) to June Havens (Cameron Diaz), Knight and Day
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James Surowiecki has one of his really good and important essays up at the New Yorker. This essay, No End in Sight, holds out little optimism for a quick lowering of the jobless rate. And he includes some real warnings regarding the ongoing effects of being jobless on the long-term unemployed (people who do not get back to work within six months after a job loss).
Here are some key excerpts:
Being unemployed is even more disastrous for individuals than you’d expect. Aside from the obvious harm—poverty, difficulty paying off debts—it seems to directly affect people’s health, particularly that of older workers…
And the effects of unemployment linger. Many studies have shown that the lifetime earnings of workers who become unemployed during a recession are permanently reduced, and von Wachter and Sullivan found that mortality rates among laid-off workers were much higher than average even twenty years afterward.
The longer people are unemployed, the harder it is for them to find a job (even after you control for skills, education, and so on). Being out of a job can erode people’s confidence and their sense of possibility; and employers, often unfairly, tend to take long-term unemployment as a signal that something is wrong. A more insidious factor is that long-term unemployment can start to erode job skills, making people less employable. One extraordinary study of Swedish workers, for instance, found that there was a strong correlation between time out of work and declining skills: workers who had been out of work for a year saw their relative ability to do something as simple as process and use printed information drop by five percentile points.
Here’s the most alarming line of this essay to me:
A more insidious factor is that long-term unemployment can start to erode job skills, making people less employable.
We live in a world in which all workers are expected to develop new layers of skills, adding to what they know and can do already. The increase for a wide array of skills just keeps rising. “The more you know, the more you know; the more you can do, the more you can do.” And a person who faces even a few months out of the work force can see other workers surpass this worker, even as the unemployed worker slips even further back.
And, maybe it’s not just the loss of skills, but also the failure to be in on the beginning of the next new demand, the introduction of new skills, processes, techniques…. Time off from work can be serious time off from development – development which keeps a worker competitive.
In other words, “use it, or lose it.” And if you “lose” it, you keep falling further behind.
I suspect that this is why so many experts strongly recommend volunteering, in a serious, “show up as though it is work” way, when a person is “in transition.” Because the challenge is the same for all: You’ve got to keep your skills sharp, and keep adding new ones.
This really is a challenging time.
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