Comments on: Qualities of Recession Proof Jobs

By: Jim

Jim — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 03:35:28 +0000

Your husband is commendable, it’s not easy to change careers and even harder when you’ve been doing a career for decades.

By: kim

kim — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 01:45:08 +0000

The list is not useless. My husband has been layed off 5 months now. He has been studying computer books and videos. He has gone down to the local college and passed the computer technician certifications tests and now he is about to take the first microsoft engineer test. Through networking he has found a job in computers as soon as he passes this next test. He is 48 years old. Bye..Bye..commercial construction… No more rain days,job slowdowns,unpredictable weekly pay checks,union dues etc…etc……

By: bailey

bailey — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 15:41:21 +0000

Boston Globe reports today that there are not nearly enough job openings for nursing students graduating this year.

By: Andrew

Andrew — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 15:19:54 +0000

Construction can stop because there is a large inventory of empty houses for sale. Also, new household creation (people moving out of their parents’ homes, getting married, starting families, etc.) is at a historically low rate in the US. It’s simple supply and demand. Not _everybody_ needs a place to live. Some of us already have one.

By: jeff

jeff — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 01:46:00 +0000

I am in the construction field. I specalize in new construction plumbing. is plumbing not an industry that everyone is reliant upon? I build new homes and just don’t understand how everyone has stopped building. Everyone needs a place to live. I do understand that there is still a lot of older homes and apartments that people can move into, but how can construction just stop?

By: Laurence

Laurence — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 19:13:05 +0000

I’m the author of the book and want to comment on the question of whether the three tech jobs are easily offshored. As part of my research, I consulted a list of easily offshored occupations that the U.S. Department of Labor included in a publication called Occupational Projections and Training Data, 2006-07 edition. Although several computer-related occupations were included on that list (and therefore were excluded from my book), these three were not listed there.

By: Scott

Scott — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 15:11:45 +0000

I disagree with 2 & 3. Our company did some small layoffs in January and the IT department was the hardest hit, a.k.a. first to go. In a software company like ours, the network administrators are typically niche performers that are more easily replaced because they deal more with generic systems that several other more-well-rounded employees also understand (or can learn quickly). The people doing the real work will find a way to get their job done with or without IT help if they’re worth anything.

By: Henry

Henry — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 02:35:14 +0000

Ha ha, 3 out of 10 are IT-related jobs. Looks like I have been working in the right field.

By: Greg / Wise Bread

Greg / Wise Bread — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 00:53:58 +0000

Sadly, even teachers aren’t immune to the recession. I know of at least 1 “tenured” teacher who was told her contract would not be renewed next year. And this was for a suburban school district (presumably “richer” than the urban school districts).

As for whether or not a tech job is outsourceable…. I think the greater fear for sysadmins is not offshore Indian sysadmins. You want your sysadmin to be as physically close to your servers as possible. But the trend is to not manage your own server, and outsource that to cloud computing providers like Amazon Web Services. So a sysadmin may not have to fear his Indian counterpart, but he does have to fear Amazon’s staff of sysadmins.

By: thomas

thomas — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 19:56:36 +0000

Very specialized list indeed. Of course, the salaries also vary greatly on that list. I guess if you are a teacher you are used to being on the low end of the scale.

By: katy

katy — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 19:48:27 +0000

How about paralegals? I’m thinking of training in that and getting a certificate.

By: mapgirl

mapgirl — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 19:07:52 +0000

@Andrew – *Some* of those jobs can be off-shored, but why would a small company based in the US off-shore their IT work? I have a friend who works for an intensely local company in the construction industry and his job would never move off-shore. There’s no value in it for them because they want their sysadmin onsite where their server is. His job may not pay as well as working for a top-notch consulting firm, but it’s pretty darned secure.

If you work in government consulting, many of the IT jobs in that area will also never be off-shored either. As a relative in the software industry once told me, “There will always be DBAs in the US.”

Using the same argument about off-shoring, you could say medicine will also move out of the US as medical malpractice insurance rates go up. It already drives OB-GYNs out of Maryland. After all, medical tourism is increasing in popularity.

@Jim – I totally agree with you that the point of the list is to set up a career with advanced education/training to get into these fields.

By: Andrew

Andrew — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 18:47:07 +0000

I never said it would be easy or painless, or even cost-effective, but managers “know” that you can offshore these types of jobs, so offshore they go.

By: Patrick

Patrick — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 18:33:47 +0000

That’s not always true Andrew. Try coordinating with somebody in another country when you have computer systems in America. Only so much can be done by somebody overseas without needing actual people in America to do the remainder of the work.

By: Andrew

Andrew — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 18:19:58 +0000

The first three could easily be offshored.