Good News on Hiring and the Economy

hiring and the economy, part-time employee, part timer, best part-time jobs of 2015When it comes to hiring and the economy, there’s good news and some, well, other news. From The Wall Street Journal’s article “Mid-Market Executives Move to Expand in Improving U.S. Economy” we learn the results of a Deloitte survey of over 500 mid-market executives from companies with annual revenues between $50 million and $1 billion. 

The Good News

  • Hiring is up and the unemployment rate is down. Things are looking better, although we all know that the unemployment rate doesn’t include the millions of people who have stopping even looking for work. Still, a positive trend is good news.
  • Companies are spending more on talent, equipment, and technology. “More than a quarter of those surveyed say their company increased its full-time domestic workforce by 5% to 10% over the past 12 months, and a sizable contingent report hiring at greater rates. In many cases, full-time jobs are replacing part-time positions.” This at least slows the growth of part-time jobs could signal a turn-around in the pattern of contract workers replacing full-time positions.
  • Executives are adopting technology that is being used to make workers more productive and enhance their jobs rather than replacing people with machines. One can only applaud this trend in regard to future economic growth because, as I have said before, robots buy nothing.
  • Work/life balance is regaining its importance as companies learn that “lean and mean” makes for unhappy employees who bolt for greener pastures as soon as they can. We can hope that employee happiness is regaining importance and it will help with recruiting good people and keeping them over time. If employees are moving up from disposable expenses to valuable assets, that’s really good news.

The Other News

  • Finding good, talented people to hire is a problem and it’s holding companies back, particularly with hard-to-fill jobs. I don’t understand this as well, probably because I live in a part of the country that’s awash in highly qualified, highly educated and highly professional people. If you’re looking to fill a specialized welding job, though, an MSEE isn’t going to help much.
  • Even this problem has a positive side as mid-size companies are trying to solve it creative and innovative ways, with in-house training at the top of the list. Unlike the Really Big Corporations that just want to whine about needing more H-1B Visas, they are making their own solutions that will help the economy by putting more higher-paid workers into the economy. Another solution was “relying on a virtual workforce.”

The Best Part-Time Jobs

This leads us to the next topic: which part-time jobs are the best? Which have the highest median hourly wage and the best outlook for being hired?The answers come to us from the latest CareerCast.com report on the Best Part-Time Jobs for 2015, which uses wage information and hiring outlook culled from Bureau of Labor Statistics figures.

The report includes traditional part-time jobs, seasonal jobs, freelance work, and consulting employment. These categories can mix and mingle, though, as “ . . .accountants are in high demand every spring before tax time, and delivery truck drivers have no problem finding work around the holidays. The suppliers sending out a surplus of products at the holidays also need material movers, so job seekers looking for extra money at that time of year often can find work in warehouses.” Makes sense.

Here are the part-time jobs with the highest media wage:

Hiring Outlook for Hourly Wage Jobs 2015 from CareerCast.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And here are the jobs with the best hiring outlook:

Hiring Outlook 2015

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cream of the Crop

The trick of course is to identify the best jobs in both categories. The top five are . . .

  • Management Analyst
  • Network and Computer Systems Administrator
  • Market Research Analyst
  • Computer Programmer
  • Accountant

The news for folks in my line of work, writing and editing, isn’t so good. But at least these jobs made the list. It’s difficult to offshore communications jobs unless you want the results to sound awkward because the writer doesn’t understand the American idiom or contemporary word usage. And if the hiring outlook isn’t so good, well, that means a lot of companies still don’t see the value in hiring a full-time writer. That’s no surprise.

So there we have it. You may not like the results or you may stand up and cheer but they are what we have to work with and the numbers are better than they have been for a long time. Let’s feel good about that and cheer on the economy so the numbers will improve even more over the next few years.