Big Data: The Next Career Field?

Yesterday I completed the manuscript for the next edition of Best Jobs for the 21st Century. The book actually focuses on the next ten years, but I often wonder about longer-term prospects for career growth in the United States. Where will tomorrow’s jobs come from? Here’s one possibility.

Early in the 20th century, geologists discovered a huge pool of oil beneath the ground near Beaumont, Texas. Other petroleum deposits soon were identified in California and Oklahoma, and these natural resources led to thousands of jobs and billions of dollars of revenue. Our economy has exploited many other natural resources, such as timber, fish, and fresh water, sometimes creating shortages when demand exceeds supply. But perhaps the next huge resource that will be exploited is not a natural resource, not even something tangible, but rather massive quantities of data. This is what a recent report (PDF) from McKinsey Global Institute argues, and the report makes a good case.

It’s estimated that the volume of business data doubles roughly every 1.2 years. Every time you order something online, you’re generating data about your purchasing and payment behavior. The logistics process of getting the product to you generates additional data. Postings on Facebook, geotagged photos on Flickr, items on eBay or Craig’s List, media that stream on YouTube or Internet radio, all these and countless other quantities of data are generated every minute of the day, and the way (including the location from which) people respond to each of these items creates more data.

This pool of data, like a pool of oil, can be exploited for economic value, but it has the additional benefit of never running dry. Not only is new data constantly being generated, but consumption of data doesn’t use it up. It can be analyzed and reanalyzed. Any number of users can exploit it simultaneously.

The most successful current users of big data are Google, Bing, Yahoo, and other search providers. They use it two ways: (1) They create an index of Web content that is ranked according to how many links exist to the content, and (2) when you use this index, they sell information about your clicking behavior to advertisers. But these search providers only scratch the surface of all the data that’s out there.

The authors of the report (try as you may, you just can’t avoid calling a bulletin from McKinsey a “McKinsey report”) emphasize that what makes big data a new resource, different from past uses of business data, is its size: We already have business tools that exploit various databases, but the potential for innovative work lies in finding ways to analyze data at larger scales than have ever been attempted before. In fact, the authors make a point of defining “big data” as a kind of moving target rather than as a fixed number of terabytes, because as the volume of data doubles and redoubles, the scale of the analytical task will continuously create new challenges. Success in this field is not a matter of being able to analyze data, but rather being able to analyze bigger data sets than ever before.

Another dimension of the analytical challenge that defines this new resource (and the occupations that it will spawn) is the speed with which the big-data analysis can be done. We’re already gotten used to being able to track the delivery route of a package within a few hours of real time or the actual arrival time of an airline flight within a few minutes. Wall Street has developed ways to react within milliseconds to fluctuations in the value of securities. Some of the innovations that will be developed for use of big data will be methods of accomplishing instant analysis and response--and doing so in ways that have controls to prevent snowballing events such as the “flash crash” of 2010, in which the Dow Jones plunged about 9 percent within minutes, only to rebound just as quickly.

It’s obvious that marketers will have uses for the outputs of this work. So will governments, which can improve services by better segmenting the population. Law enforcement and defense are already reaping the benefits of using large-scale, real-time monitoring of events to trigger and coordinate a rapid response.

This kind of work will be done by teams that are highly creative and have outstanding technical and communications skills. In other words, it is the kind of work that America has always been good at. The major hurdle that needs to be overcome is the projected shortage of skilled workers. As the report notes, we face “a shortage of 140,000 to 190,000 people with analytical expertise and 1.5 million managers and analysts with the skills to understand and make decisions based on the analysis of big data.” So here is another reason why we need to improve STEM education and career development, make higher education more meritocratic, and (if Americans fail to step up to the plate) facilitate immigration of skilled foreigners.

Do You Mind If I Get Graphic?

This week I was alerted to a skill that I had not thought about or heard about before. I was actually starting to think about this skill when I discovered that someone had already given it a name.

A journalist asked me to respond to some questions about what’s involved in career changes. In the response I composed, I wanted to call attention to my recent book The Sequel, so I emphasized the importance of accumulated knowledge. One of my purposes in that book is to balance the conventional emphasis on skills with this emphasis on knowledge, which is particularly relevant to career changers (as opposed to young people just starting out).

But the journalist specifically asked about important transferable skills, so I included a discussion that began by identifying communication skills as a key to employability. I mentioned that nonverbal skills are a significant part of these skills. When I first wrote that, I was thinking in terms of body language: being able to interpret the physical cues given off by people in conversation (or even when they’re not speaking) and being careful to project the right cues.

However, as I reread this discussion a day later I started thinking about other forms of nonverbal communication--specifically, graphics. If you follow my Twitter feed (LaurenceShatkin), you know that I’m very fond of Web postings with graphs and maps that communicate information about jobs and the state of the economy. A good example is a webpage at the Bureau of Labor Statistics that uses several kinds of colorful graphs--bar, line, pie, and scatter plot--to convey the latest statistics about women in the workforce. Because I use graphics in conference presentations and occasionally in my books, I appreciate that deciding on the most effective use of graphics is not as easy as it appears to those who haven’t tried it. Interpreting graphs also is not as easy as it sometimes appears. Interpretation obviously is a challenge if a graph is poorly composed, but even a well-organized graph can be challenging when it is based on complex concepts, such as the bar chart I found on Paul Krugman’s webpage this week, comparing the projected health-care spending of 65-year-olds under three scenarios, one of which is the budget proposed by Representative Paul Ryan. (The graphic is taken from a report by the Congressional Budget Office—PDF.)

In addition to data-based graphics, pictorial graphics can be very useful in communication. If you’ve ever played the game Pictionary, you know that levels of skill with this kind of graphic can vary widely. People who want to use this type of graphic have access to several styles, from highly realistic portraits to stylized cartoons to symbolic glyphs.

Even as I was thinking about these other nonverbal forms of communication, by pure chance I received a tweet from a friend, Nancy Millichap, about a skill called “graphicacy,” which was exactly the skill I had in mind. Think of graphicacy as analogous to literacy or numeracy. Nancy’s tweet linked to a blog entry by a geographer, Diana Stuart Sinton, which in turn referenced an article written in 2000 by two British psychologists, Frances Aldrich and Linda Sheppard: “Graphicacy”: the Fourth “R”? (PDF). The two psychologists make the case for teaching graphicacy to all schoolchildren to “equip them with a communication skill that will be useful throughout their lives.”

Obviously, some occupations require a high level of graphicacy than others. The need is greatest in occupations that involve the graphic arts or lots of data. But, like reading and writing, this is a fundamental communication skill that is needed at one level or another in all kinds of work. You will not find this among the skills in the O*NET database, but there is a case to be made for adding it.

Why College Drags on So Long

In Anton Chekhov’s play The Cherry Orchard, one of the memorable characters is Trofimov, a student who is crowding thirty but seems to have no pressing desire or need to leave the university (although he preaches the need for Russians to work). The student who graduates and then moves back to his parents’ home is the more familiar stereotype, but the perpetual student remains a well-known image. In fact, there is evidence that college students are taking increasing amounts of time to complete their bachelor’s degrees. This behavior runs counter to the expectation that students would seek faster completion because of the steadily increasing value of a college degree. Having recently written a book about college majors, Panicked Student's Guide to Choosing a College Major, I wondered whether there is a connection between lengthy college stays and indecisiveness about choice of college majors.

Elongation of college attendance in Saudi Arabia actually brought me some work about 10 years ago. College students there pay no tuition and even earn a stipend while they are enrolled, so these students lack some of the pressures toward degree completion that most American students feel. In the wake of the first Gulf War, which the kingdom had largely financed, and as the result of a period of low oil prices, the Saudi government was facing financial difficulties and wanted to reduce the expenses of supporting the large number of slow degree completers. A Saudi university asked me to develop a computer-based program, which eventually took shape as Career Oasis, to help college students decide on a career and a major. I don’t know whether or not Career Oasis actually resulted in speedier degree completion, and I have reason to be skeptical, because indecisiveness seems not to have been the major reason Saudi students were tarrying on campus.

Recent research suggests that indecisiveness also is not the major reason for delayed degree completion in the United States. Ironically, the situation here seem to be opposite of what I found in Saudi Arabia. The problem here is not the generosity of the university and the financial security that students feel; rather, it’s the paucity of university resources and the lack of student financing.

In “Increasing Time to Baccalaureate Degree in the United States” (PDF), three researchers (John Bound, Michael F. Lovenheim, and Sarah Turner) looked at longitudinal data about American college students and their rate of degree completion. The researchers found that most of the slow-down in the rate of completion can be attributed to students “who begin their postsecondary education at public colleges outside the most selective universities,” especially low-income students. The reason was not that these students are more poorly prepared to complete college.

One important reason the researchers found is the crowding that occurs when the student-to-faculty ratio climbs at financially strapped universities. Students find that they cannot enroll in the next course they need to take for their major, either because it is not being offered or because they are at the rear of the queue.

The other major reason for delayed graduation is the financial pressures on students to work to pay for the ever-increasing costs of college. Every hour spent working is an hour not spent on completing degree requirements.

Even if indecisiveness is not the main cause of delayed degree completion, I know that it is a factor for some students, so I expect that my Panicked Student’s Guide will help shorten some undergraduate stays. Perhaps more important, the book can motivate students by steering them towards more satisfying majors, and it can make their time in college--however long that is--turn out to be a better investment by leading to a more satisfying career.

Arts Grads Find Fulfilling Careers

Young people considering a career in the arts can take some encouragement from a survey (PDF) that was released this week, showing that arts degrees can lead to satisfying careers. The Strategic National Arts Alumni Project (SNAAP), which conducted the survey, is a research project of the Indiana University Center for Postsecondary Research, in collaboration with the Vanderbilt University Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy.

The researchers surveyed 13,581 alumni of 154 arts high schools, arts colleges and conservatories, and arts schools and departments within universities. The disciplines included all of the arts: fine arts, theater, dance, music, creative writing, media arts, film, design, and architecture.

The respondents felt good about their education, with 90% reporting that their overall experience at their institution was either good or excellent and 76% saying they would attend the same institution again.

Perhaps the single most heartening finding was that 92% of those who wish to work currently are employed, and most found employment soon after graduating. Two-thirds said their first job was a close match for the kind of work they wanted. And almost three-quarters (74%) of those who intended to work as a professional artist had done so at some point since graduating.

However, professional artists don’t work under the same arrangements as most accountants or insurance agents. More than six in ten of them were self-employed at some point, and more than half of those currently working as professional artists hold at least two jobs. (Contrary to the stereotype, only 3% of them are working in food service.)

Job security is a problem, with only one-third of the professional artists reporting satisfaction with that aspect of their work. On the other hand, many said they were very satisfied with the opportunities their job offered them to do work that reflected their personality, interests and values: 80% of fine artists, 71% of photographers, 68% of dancers or choreographers, 68% of actors, and 61% of musicians. By contrast, only one-third of art directors, graphic designers, and Web designers reported the same sense of satisfaction. Apparently working against deadlines for clients is not as fulfilling, although it can offer more employment opportunities.

Although many of the alumni are not working in the arts industry as such, 54% of these said their arts training is relevant to the job in which they spend the majority of their time. Their main reason for not working as artists was lack of employment. Another important factor was debt, including student loans. Of those who had worked as professional artists but later changed course, more than half said they did so because of higher pay or more job security outside the arts. It’s significant that 71% of those not currently working as professional artists nevertheless continue to make or publicly perform their art.

Arts alumni also transmit their skills and knowledge to others. Slightly more than half have taught in the arts at some time in their careers. Thirty-seven percent of them have volunteered at an arts organization, compared to 2% of the general population.

I admit a personal interest in this survey because my daughter is an art school graduate who decided to make her career in a completely different field, teaching English as a second language (ESL). It’s significant that in the classes she taught as a teaching assistant in her master’s program, she incorporated some of the concepts she learned in art school, showing her students examples of artistic rhetoric as well as verbal rhetoric. She has applied for a job teaching ESL at an art institute, and even if she doesn’t get that job (although it’s hard to think how anyone could be more qualified--okay, I’m not objective about this!), I’m sure her work and leisure activities will benefit from her skills and interest in art.

If you are the parent of a child who is planning to study the arts, I hope this survey reduces some of your parental anxieties. Your son or daughter is not necessarily fated to starve in a garret.

Career Decision Making and Career Planning Are Not the Same Thing

People sometimes use the terms “career decision making” and “career planning” almost interchangeably. One reason may be that both the decisions and the plans are supposed to be based on predictions. The decision is based on foreseeing what career choice will be satisfying and will offer opportunities. The planning is based on foreseeing the best pathway for reaching the career goal. However, as Niels Bohr once remarked, prediction is very difficult, especially about the future. Many people who are happy and successful in a career can say truthfully that their choice makes sense only in hindsight and would have been difficult or impossible to predict or plan for.

I offer my own career as a case in point. I showed an early flair for writing and was intrigued with the idea of writing books ever since the children’s author Beman Lord spoke to my fourth-grade class. However, I was even more obsessed with collecting. I started with a rock collection and later branched out to seashells and, to a lesser extent, stamps. I learned all the minutiae of the things that I collected and devised new ways to organize and display them. My parents sometimes speculated that I had a future career as a museum curator.

With adolescence, however, my interest shifted toward collecting odd facts. I remember that after I mentioned some obscure bit of trivia, my eighth-grade wood shop teacher declared me the Official Keeper of Useless Information. In the perfect vision of hindsight, it now appears inevitable that I would find satisfaction and success in writing books that draw heavily on databases of information. What is a database, after all, if not an organized collection of facts?

But it’s important to realize that the word “database” was known to only a few hundred computer scientists and programmers in the early 1960s. In those days, most people didn’t know any databases other than the phone book and the daily stocks-and-bonds listings. Hardly anyone at that time expected that databases would become easy and inexpensive to access and use.

In my first job at Educational Testing Service, I started writing career information for a database, and within a few years I learned how to create and manipulate new databases. My managers recognized my interest and ability with these tasks and encouraged me. Although I learned some programming skills to accomplish my tasks, the programming never interested me as much as finding ways to make the databases helpful to users. Later, JIST Publishing gave me the opportunity to build books around databases of career information.

It was not inevitable that the particular subject matter I would focus on would be careers. (One database I helped design and assemble at ETS was about books for young people.) But one appeal of career information is that it touches on almost every aspect of life and therefore appeals to my broad range of interests.

The main lesson to draw from this account is a recognition of the limitations of career planning. To the extent that planning can be successful, it depends on prediction, and predictions are very unreliable. Occupational specializations that we can’t foresee will emerge in the coming years, and each one will prove to be a good choice for the right kind of person. Like generals planning to fight the previous war, most young people are planning for yesterday’s careers, not knowing what new opportunities will be available. So learn to accept the reality that career decision making and career planning are not the same thing. A lot of career decisions that get made are unplanned, and there’s nothing wrong with that, as John Krumboltz argues.

This does not mean that career strategizing is impossible. The best strategy for facing uncertainty is to be (a) prepared for many contingencies and (b) alert to emerging opportunities. With regard to careers, being prepared for a range of outcomes means getting a broad-based education that equips you with skills for communicating, problem-solving, critical thinking, calculating, and (above all) learning. Being alert to career possibilities means keeping abreast of trends in demographics, technology, popular culture, and business practices and (above all) having a network of contacts in many walks of life. I can’t think of a better way to summarize this two-pronged strategy than the words of the second century sage Simon ben Zoma: “Who is wise? The person who learns from all people.”

College Loans: The Next Bubble?

Last year, for the first time, the level of student debt ran higher than the level of credit card debt. This happened partly because credit card use has been on a downward slope ever since late 2008 and partly because the upward slope of college tuition loans shows no sign of leveling off. The two trends are, of course, related. The recession has caused consumers to use credit cards less and has also caused more people to seek higher education to compete for scarce job openings (or to take a leave of absence from the discouraging job market), taking out loans because they and their families are less able to pay their own way.

This trend worries me for several reasons. One is the big-picture worry that we’re seeing the growth of a bubble. Like the housing bubble, this one involves people taking on lots of debt to acquire a commodity that they desire because it keeps increasing in value.

The present situation differs from the housing bubble, however, in some important ways. The value of houses kept increasing because of constant demand from home buyers and then crashed when the market became glutted with houses that were foreclosed on. The value of a college degree, however, keeps increasing because of the demands of employers. Even for positions where bachelor’s-level skills are not needed, employers tend to prefer job applicants with a degree, and it seems unlikely that this behavior will change. Unlike a house, a college degree is something the banks can’t repossess and throw on the market, so it’s hard to foresee a scenario in which bachelor’s or associate degree suddenly loses its value. Yes, there are a lot of people with college degrees who are unemployed right now, but the recession has hit those without degrees much harder.

The way this bubble might pop would be if massive numbers of college loan holders defaulted on their loans, like the homeowners who walked away from their houses after the value of the houses sank below the value of the outstanding mortgage. Many tuition borrowers have technically gone into default. Last year, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported that one-fifth of the loans that went into repayment in 1995 were in default. With college loans, however, precisely because there is no real estate that can be repossessed, lenders can continue to extract repayment from borrowers who have fallen behind in their scheduled payments. Bankruptcy does not generally free tuition borrowers from their repayment obligations. Lenders can garnish wagers; for federal loans, the government can also garnish tax refunds and even disability checks and Social Security payments. The danger is that in a future wave of college loan defaults, even these methods of extracting payments would not be sufficient to save lending institutions from a crash similar to what happened when the housing market collapsed.

Although there is reason to worry about what might happen at the macro level, I’m more concerned about what’s already happening at the micro level. Tuition borrowers who fall behind in their payments take a severe blow to their credit ratings and may be unable to borrow to buy a house or car. Even those who are able to keep up may find that the burden of loan repayments cuts into their disposable income for many years. Young people sometimes talk about the problem of when to tell a potential mate about your college loan. Second date? Third date? With rueful humor, they sometimes compare it to having a herpes infection or a family history of insanity.

From my perspective as a writer about career development, I’m particularly concerned about the effect of college debt on career choice. I fear that the burden of college debt sways too many students to elect majors that are potentially lucrative but ill-suited to them. An article on the Yahoo! site mentioned a student who graduated from Northeastern University with $200,000 in debt. She probably could have managed her college planning better (for example, starting at a community college and not taking a semester abroad), but it’s interesting to note how many people who commented on the story assailed her for majoring in sociology. For example, one person wrote, “I would pick a major with a higher ROI if I knew I was gonna rack up that much debt.” I would hate to see the day come when only students from well-off families can major in the liberal arts or social sciences.

Workers Who Make House Calls

I think I may be perceiving a new trend in business: house calls. I don’t have any statistics to back up my conjecture, but I believe that we will see an increasing number of businesses that come to your house to perform various kinds of service. Businesses that adopt this practice will have a competitive edge over the services that require you to come to their shop or office. This business arrangement may also provide unique job satisfactions for the workers making the house calls.

I became conscious of this trend a couple of weeks ago, when a van pulled up in front of my next-door neighbor’s house. A man from the van wheeled my neighbor’s lawn tractor out of her garage, upended it, and proceeded to give it the kinds of service that are needed now that the grass is starting to sprout: changing the oil, spark plug, air filter, oil filter, and fuel filter, sharpening the blades, and lubricating where needed. Last year, she arranged for a shop to pick up the lawn tractor on a trailer and service it in their shop. It took this shop a whole month to return the tractor, and that business charged more than the man who made the house call this year. I was so impressed with my neighbor’s experience that I had the man with the van come back two days ago and to service my lawn tractor.

Several other industries are finding house calls a useful business model. You may have seen Geek Squad cars in your community or may know of a similar service that comes to people’s homes to fix computer problems. You may have seen a van-based worker replacing a cracked windshield. (They can also do that at the parking lot of the business where you work.) I know of a pet groomer who parks her van in your driveway so Fido can get a wash and a trim just a few steps from the front door. Some physicians are reviving a practice that was common in my childhood, the doctor’s house call.

House calls have always been standard for service technicians who work with appliances that are not portable, such as your furnace or washing machine, but several economic factors are converging to encourage more occupations to adopt this business model. One is the increasing number of retirees (like my neighbor) and people who work at home (like me). We appreciate the convenience of not having to leave home and have considerable flexibility about the times when the house call can happen. Computer technology, perhaps combined with a geographical database, is making it easier to schedule house calls and route the van to your door with maximum efficiency. Cell phones and wireless network capability allow the business to change the service professional’s appointments in mid-day, perhaps in response to emergencies, whether this is coordinated from some central office or from inside the van itself. Smart phones allow the service professional to consult online manuals, order parts, or consult records of past service (such as your medical records) from your driveway or bedside. Miniaturization is allowing increasingly complex tools to be taken on the road. Did you know that a doctor can now do a skin biopsy in your driveway?

Admittedly, this business model may remain uncommon in many service occupations that are capable of using it. But, besides giving a competitive edge to some businesses, it can offer workers some job satisfactions they would not get in a shop- or office-based setting. It provides a constant change of scene, a form of workday variety that many people enjoy. It allows the worker to interact with clients in a more casual and emotionally warm environment. It gives the worker greater autonomy. While traveling between calls, the worker may need to deal with the annoyances of traffic jams and adverse weather conditions, but this interval may also provide a chance for the worker to decompress between appointments.