Tag Archives: jobs

Average full-time work week is 47 hours; median is around 40 hours

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A number of headlines have screamed about a recent Gallup finding that the average American full-time worker works 47 hours a week. Yet, the median appears to conform to the typical 40-hour work week:

Adults employed full time in the U.S. report working an average of 47 hours per week, almost a full workday longer than what a standard five-day, 9-to-5 schedule entails. In fact, half of all full-time workers indicate they typically work more than 40 hours, and nearly four in 10 say they work at least 50 hours.

Average Hours Worked by Full-Time U.S. Workers, Aged 18+

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The 40-hour workweek is widely regarded as the standard for full-time employment, and many federal employment laws — including the Affordable Care Act, or “Obamacare” — use this threshold to define what a full-time employee is. However, barely four in 10 full-time workers in the U.S. indicate they work precisely this much. The hefty proportion who tell Gallup they typically log more than 40 hours each week push the average number of hours worked up to 47. Only 8% of full-time employees claim to work less than 40 hours.

These findings are based on data from Gallup’s annual Work and Education Survey. The combined sample for 2013 and 2014 includes 1,271 adults, aged 18 and older, who are employed full time.

Is the average the best measure here? This is a classic case where the median and mean give you different conclusions. The median tells you that not much has changed from the standard: half of full-time workers work 40 hours or less. The average, on the other hand, is pulled up by those people working 50+ hours. As the Gallup analysis goes on, it notes that there is a difference between salaried and hourly employees with salaried workers working more of those 40+ hour weeks. These salaried workers are likely white-collar and professional workers, people who may be working more but likely have more credentials, are getting paid more, and have higher-status jobs.

So, perhaps the headlines might be more accurate by saying “Salaried full-time workers have higher [47? 50?] hour work week.”

Mismatches in sociology grad student interests, job openings – 2013 edition

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The ASA reports more job openings in sociology in recent years but the interests of sociology PhD graduates and the specializations of the new jobs don’t always line up. Here is part of the full table from the report (page six):

 

ASAJobAreas2013

There is some overlap here with most categories represented on both sides. However, other areas have some bigger differences:

1. Methodology – research methodology with 50 jobs and quantitative methods with 47 jobs and only 5 students with an interest in quantitative methodology. 23 jobs with statistics and 5 students. The figures for jobs in qualitative methods or ethnography better match the number of jobs available.

2. Another area of difference is criminology or criminal justice: 89 jobs in crime/delinquency and 70 in criminal justice with 66 students in criminology.

3. Sex and gender is particularly popular among students (108 interests) while only 31 jobs. (Granted, certain topics – like race, class, and gender – can easily cut across other subfields.)

4. Education has 83 students and 9 jobs.

This isn’t a complete analysis and these are the areas that struck me. Looking at methodology, it is a reminder that being interested in methods goes a long way on the job market as departments need people who can teach these skills and work with students in these areas.

Report on Chicago manufacturing: “punching below its weight”

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Chicago’s rise was aided by manufacturing but a new report says manufacturing in the region is lagging:

While the 14-county tri-state area was the fourth-largest exporter among the 100 top metro areas nationwide in 2012, it fell to the middle of the pack on gross domestic product growth, export growth and exports as a share of economic activity, according to “Revival in the Heartland: Manufacturing and Trade in Chicago,” a report to be released Wednesday by HSBC Bank and the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.

“Manufacturing in Chicago is an old heavyweight slugger, punching below its weight,” the study stated, noting that it remains the second-largest economic driver in the region after government and social services…

Study authors and individual manufacturers cite a range of historical factors that have contributed to the weak performance:

•A lack of civic and government attention to the sector because of a perception that it was dying.

•An absence of intraregional cooperation on economic issues.

•Freight rail gridlock.

•Lingering wariness about expanding business within the state, given its fiscal problems.

The article notes the ongoing loss of manufacturing jobs in recent decades, even on top of the decline of such jobs in the 1960s and 1970s. The initial drop significantly impacted social conditions, as noted by William Julius Wilson in his writings. Even as Chicago has avoided the decline narrative associated with numerous other Rust Belt cities (Detroit as a common example but also including places like Cleveland, Buffalo, Youngstown, and numerous other cities), a steady decrease in manufacturing continues to present challenges.

Ikea is raising pay to help workers but many who need jobs can’t easily make it to their suburban locations

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Jamelle Bouie points out that Ikea is doing a good thing in raising wages but their jobs aren’t easily accessible to many who need them:

With that said, it’s worth noting that there’s less than meets the eye to Ikea’s promise to hew to local and municipal minimum wage hikes. Most Ikea stores are located in suburbs, as opposed to urban centers. The Ikea near Charlotte, North Carolina, for instance, is located on the outskirts of the area, as is the Ikea near Seattle (in Renton) and the one in Dallas (near Frisco). By virtue of geography, these stores will avoid city-mandated wage hikes.

What’s more, for as much as Ikea and similar stores might be good for workers, their overwhelmingly suburban locations make them isolated from large numbers of potential workers who lack employment opportunities in their own areas and neighborhoods…

The result is that, for both groups—but low-income blacks in particular—there is a “spatial mismatch” between neighborhoods and employment opportunities.

Put simply, the greater the sprawl of jobs in an area, the less likely it is that black residents will have easy and reliable access to them. Or, as UCLA professor Michael Stoll writes in a 2005 paper for the Brookings Institution, “Blacks are more geographically isolated from jobs in high job-sprawl areas regardless of region, metropolitan area size, and their share of metropolitan population.” And this isn’t an accident: “Metropolitan areas characterized by higher job sprawl also exhibit more severe racial segregation between blacks and whites,” he writes.

All of this is exacerbated by our shoddy, car-centric transportation policy. To get to any job in a place like Virginia Beach, Virginia—where 10- to 15-mile drives are a fact of life—you need a car. Yes, there is a public transportation system, but it’s irregular (the agency had a rate of 18 missed trips per day in March), limited in scope, and unreliable for most workers who need to be on time. But cars are expensive, and black and Latino households are much less likely to own cars than their white counterparts. What comes next is predictable: Plenty of low-income people can’t find or keep jobs because they are isolated from opportunities.

All correct though the increasing number of lower-income suburban residents may be closer to some of these Ikea stores. At the same time, most suburban residents will still need cars to get to the store, vehicles that are relatively expensive parts of household budgets.

Additionally, this helps highlight some of the contradictory nature of Ikea. On one hand, it is a quirky store in the American landscape, exposing Americans to interesting designs and promoting a more DIY mentality. On the other hand, it is just another big box store with locations near major highways, big parking lots, and lots of square footage.

Staging a home can now include “live-in manager”

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Staging a home – even the Photoshop way – is important these days so perhaps it is little surprise staging can now include having a live-in manager:

At the Little Gables house, a home manager moved in late in April and plans to stay in the home until it sells.

The manager, David Hein, is from Ohio and living temporarily in South Florida so his son, David Hein, can train in a sailing campaign for the 2016 Olympics. The Little Gables stint marks his fourth house.

In exchange for managing the home, Hein gets to live there at a reduced rent — about one-third the market rate, Salas said…

The home manager’s responsibilities include keeping the home safe, clean and secure so that it is shipshape whenever prospective buyers take a tour…

The manager has to strike a balance: to make the home feel alive, with food in the pantry and refrigerator, but with everything as well organized as a Container Store display.

This would be an interesting kind of job/life: you get to live in a home that is probably in decent shape for cheaper but your home life is also a kind of performance intended to help sell the move and move yourself out. If is like house sitting but with the added burden of being a salesperson. If you are good at your job, you actually have to move around more.

It would be interesting to see the cost breakdown for the homeowner who is employing the live-in manager. Does a live-in manager add enough value to a home’s price to make it worthwhile?

Attempting to decrease the average age of American real estate agents

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Efforts are underway to attract younger Americans to become real estate agents:

The National Association of Realtors says the median age of its members has inched up to 57, its highest level in 15 years. Agents 40 and younger were just 11 percent of its membership in 2013, down from 20 percent in 2003.

With this in mind, Warren Buffett’s real estate franchise unit, Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices, recently formed a task force called the REthink Council to explore the topic. Ten agents who are 35 and younger from its offices around the country will gather this month to brainstorm and come up with ways to make the profession more attractive to a younger demographic.

One member of the task force briefly explains what he thinks is happening:

At the time, though, it seemed pretty obvious to me why there weren’t more people my age who were doing this: It takes a lot to get started in real estate (before income starts to flow). There’s a lot of fear and apprehension — what if I don’t make it, what if it takes a while to make money, how am I going to pay my bills?

It was obvious to me then and it’s obvious to me now that there’s a major lack of businesspeople jumping in to real estate. We’re going to have one generation getting out and the next generation is not filling the hole that’s going to be there.

All of this could be very interesting given the projected trends that younger Americans still generally want their own spaces as adults but are more frequently living alone and often want to live in denser areas that offer more cultural and entertainment amenities. If a majority of real estate agents are older, can they still connect with younger buyers who want different things?

Also, this younger agent makes a real estate job sound quite entrepreneurial: you have to take risks, trust your selling abilities, and work hard to drum up business. I’m just speculating but I wonder if this is indicative of declining interest in individual entrepreneurialism. It is one thing to want to go into business with a firm but another to strike out more on one’s own as an agent.

Finally, what are the figures for how much a new real estate agent could expect to make within 1, 5, 10 years? With the glut of articles these days about the income different jobs can expect, how many new real estate agents succeed? Here is some recent info:

Only 2% of Realtors, a trademarked term used by the National Association of Realtors to which the majority of real-estate agents belong, earn more than $250,000 a year. The median annual income nationwide was $43,500 in 2012, up from $34,900 in 2011. The average commission rate for 2013 is projected to be 5.2% of total sale price, according to Real Trends, a Castle Pines, Colo.-based research firm…

Most hopeful agents need to save up before they begin. Studying for the broker’s license exam, which covers both national and state laws and regulation, can take weeks, says Bopa Touch, administrator at the Rockwell Institute, a real-estate training school in Bellevue, Wash. In 2013, the company almost doubled the number of students taking its three-week, $489 broker’s license course, compared with 2012, says Ms. Touch. Between registration fees and desk fees—an amount paid to the brokerage firm to cover operating expenses—most new agents spend $2,000 or more to get started, which doesn’t include months of living expenses necessary before commission checks start coming in. “They don’t realize how much money they need to start,” Ms. Touch says.

The median is not very lucrative…

Who can predict job growth by sector in the next 10 years if the BLS can’t?

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Derek Thompson points out that 2002 predictions by the Bureau of Labor Statistics about job growth by sector for the next ten years turned out to be quite wrong:

What did BLS get right? At least two things: the unstoppable growth in health-care jobs (which it expects to continue) and the steady growth in leisure and hospitality.

What did it miss? Everything else, in particular (a) the boom in mining, led by the natural-gas revolution, (b) the utter collapse of the publishing industry, and (c) the Great Recession, which wiped out half-a-decade of economic growth. BLS thought we’d create 20 million non-farm jobs last decade. We created about six million. That’s a 13-million-job gap. 

Essentially, the BLS failed to anticipate the real-world surprises, which is another way of saying it is not psychic. It extrapolated the recent past (health care was expanding, housing was booming, the economy was recovering from a mild recession), baked in global and demographic trends, and voila, put out a plausible projection of the next ten years. This is a perfectly sensible way to predict the future. But then the real world intervened.

This isn’t supposed to be a post about how the BLS forecasting models are bad. It’s supposed to be a post about how predicting the future is impossible, even though predictions play a starring role in discussions about finance and government.

I think Thompson draws the right conclusions here: it isn’t necessarily about jobs but more about the difficulties governments and other organizations have in predicting even ten years into the future. The world is a complex place and this should push us to think about what we can know moving forward. This would be a great point to inject the writings of Nassim Taleb who has argued in several books that this is a huge problem: there are plenty of people, like on Wall Street or in Washington, who think the future is clear enough to risk a lot. Granted, the BLS isn’t going to lose much if their predictions are wrong but it could have a big effect on others. One example: students looking at what majors to select. In recent years, there are more and more articles that talk about the job fields expected to grow in the future. The argument is that students need to make sure they study for employable careers, particularly with rising college costs. But, they may pick a college or a major based on predictions that aren’t necessarily correct. Perhaps this lack of predictive ability is a good argument for liberal arts schools.

Knowing the difficulties of making long-term predictions, what can the average citizen do? Taleb would suggest hedging our bets, perhaps risking some when the negative effects won’t be that bad. (Taleb lays out this investing strategy in Antifragile: put a good amount of money in safe investments and then risk some in places where the payoff could be huge but you aren’t going to lose much if it doesn’t pan out.)

Results from tracking hundreds of CUNY sociology PhDs since 1971

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Here is a look at what has happened to 471 sociology PhDs who graduated from CUNY since 1971:

Where the 1993 graduates are working post-Ph.D. isn’t a mystery, thanks to the diligence of a longtime professor of sociology at Queens College, also part of the CUNY system. During a particularly tough academic job market in the early 1990s, Dean B. Savage started the work of tracking down every student who had earned a Ph.D. in sociology from the Graduate Center to find out where they went on to work. With the help of graduate students, he has created an ever-growing database of 471 people that dates back to graduates from 1971…

The data he has collected document the bleak reality that many people already know about the academic market: A full-time job as a professor isn’t a given for those who want one. In fact, since 1980, fewer than half of the sociology graduates hold full-time tenured or tenure-track jobs. But the data, which were most recently updated last year, also reveal some good news: The program’s record of placing students in full-time jobs inside and outside academe has shown improvement over the years…

Mr. Savage’s data set, which spans more than 40 years, is unusual because of its depth. A quick glance at his list shows many Ph.D.’s who became professors, deans, lecturers, and academic researchers. Among the many nonacademic jobs that the Graduate Center program’s alumni hold are crisis counselor, behavioral scientist, social worker, children’s-book author, art-gallery curator, and health-care consultant. Some people have retired. When Mr. Savage updated the data last year, he found at least seven people who earned Ph.D.’s in 2012 who were trying to gain some traction on the academic ladder, working in non-tenure-track positions. Graduates of the sociology program work at four-year colleges, two-year institutions, regional colleges, and flagships. Workplaces in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut are heavily represented.

Collecting placement data like Mr. Savage’s can be complicated, as his experience shows. It is a little easier now than when he first started, since he can search for people through Google and on sites like LinkedIn. Mr. Savage started his efforts with a list of the program’s graduates from the CUNY registrar. Before the Internet, he said, “we would get in touch with their thesis adviser or someone we knew they were friends with or even members of their dissertation committee.”

But even with the advent of online aids, there are still gaps in the information that Mr. Savage has collected. He has found some students, only to lose track of them in subsequent updates. More than 112 students have never been found. Older alumni are less likely to appear on sites like LinkedIn, and some people who do show up list vague or inflated titles or may have profiles that are out of date.

The rest of the article goes on to ask broader questions about why more PhD programs don’t go to the efforts Savage has (and there are still issues with the missing cases) to track down this information. Graduate schools tend to trumpet the cases of students who do well but don’t say much about those who don’t or don’t complete the program. We could also ask questions about colleges who will likely will be asked more and more in the future to provide evidence from alumni that college led to learning as well as positive career outcomes.

So if the CUNY data is decent enough, how representative is it? As described here, the data suggests some cycles (forces within the academy as well as larger American economic issues), lots of attrition, and a variety of careers.

Jobs available for those who can analyze big data

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Now that there is plenty of big data available, companies are looking for employees to analyze the data:

By 2018, the United States might face a shortfall of about 35 percent in the number of people with advanced training in statistics and other disciplines who can help companies realize the potential of digital information generated from their own operations as well as from suppliers and customers, according to McKinsey & Co…

Workers in big data are hard to come by in the short term. A recent survey by CareerBuilder, an affiliate of Tribune Co., which also owns the Chicago Tribune, found that “jobs tied to managing and interpreting big data” were among the “hot areas for hiring” in the second half of 2013…

Dhingra pointed out that the McKinsey report, in addition to citing a shortage of 140,000 to 190,000 qualified data scientists in coming years, also said there will be a need for 1.5 million executives and support staff who understand data.

Mu Sigma’s entry-level trainee professionals go through “an intense recruitment program” that includes aptitude tests to determine who has a “quantitative bent of mind”; group discussion, to spot individuals who can present and back their views and listen to feedback; and a “synthesis” test in which a candidate is shown a video and then asked to identify the key message. If they make it through those rounds, they undergo several personal interviews, a process that includes “props and interesting puzzles and case studies.”

Once a decision scientist trainee is recruited, they go through Mu Sigma University, where they learn such skills as the basics of consulting, the “art of problem solving” and the “art of insight generation.” They also take advanced statistics and are taught about machine learning, natural language processing and visualization, along with behavioral sciences and such big data technologies as Hadoop, Mahout and Cassandra.

The numbers don’t just interpret themselves. It is amazing how much data is available these days but people are still needed to figure out what it all means. Being able to do the conceptual and software work that goes into analyzing data can go a long ways these days…