(2017-07-31) Switching Careers Doesnt Have To Be Hard Charting Jobs That Are Similar To Yours

Switching Careers Doesn’t Have to Be Hard: Charting Jobs That Are Similar to Yours

“The U.S. faces a serious Skills Gap,” R. Alexander Acosta, the secretary of labor, said last month

But many of the skills needed to do fading jobs are applicable to growing jobs. A big part of the problem is the Labor Market does a poor job of matching employers with employees — in hiring, and in educating and retraining them to meet employers’ needs.

A New York Times review of the activities and skills that jobs entail, based on the Labor Department’s ONet database, shows how much overlap there is between many seemingly dissimilar occupations. Service industry jobs, for example, require social skills and experience working with customers — which also apply to sales and office jobs*

Meanwhile, employers hire based on Credentials that job applicants can’t change — a College Degree or previous job title — rather than assessing the skills an applicant has developed

Laurel Yoder’s career is an example of how jobs can overlap in unexpected ways. She was a paralegal for six years, until she attended a friend’s childbirth and decided to become a doula, helping women in labor. She eventually went back to school to get degrees in nursing and midwifery

The two jobs have more skills in common than it might seem, she said, like “knowing how to be concise and thorough and document clearly so your colleague can follow your thought process.”

Several new job boards, including Opportunity@Work and Skillful, use this approach to match workers with employers, job coaches and training programs based on skills instead of credentials.

Workers would have an easier time reapplying their skills if the government gave every displaced worker several types of assistance, said Mark Muro, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. These could include job counseling; cash grants for taking time off to take classes; wage insurance to make up the difference for taking a lower-paying job; and relocation grants to move to areas of the country with more jobs.