Economy VS Job Market

Have you been a victim of the economy's ups and downs over the years? Even with having family and everything in balance in our cultures, some type of money coming in to support either yourself and/or your families.

After I had left high school I had a full time job working as a line leader of an assembly line and they started having huge lay offs.  Later this company was sold off years later. As I turned 20 years old they looked at pulling down my line and combining the workers that they had felt were worth keeping.  I was only part-time in school and my job was really taking it's toll on my school work.  I requested that I will voluntarily be laid off instead of one of the workers that was on my line that had 2 kids and still had to keep up the bills with her house.  After this I had decided to go to school full time and now I'm working on a second degree.

For this company the economic productivity was no longer required for the products being made at that facility.  A lot of blue collar job have been declining due to the advancement of technology such as robotics. Who would pay a experienced welder that can make a mistake when a robot can be programmed to make perfect welds every single time?  You could have 4 robots running with only one person watching over them, but this person must be experienced enough to reprogram or change a program which turns this job into a white collar job. Another instance was there was a guy working in the tooling department and he was working on his journeyman certificate.  He was laid off because his job was taken over by a machine that would assign and scan out tools almost like a vending machine for tooling parts for these CNC machines. Now if he would have already had his journeyman, not only would he have not been laid off because he would be building fixtures rather than just signing them out, he could have transferred to a different department.  The company would have seen him more of an important asset to the company. This brings me back to the fact that if you have a degree before you enter the job market it is easier to maintain a job, even if the job market slows down. I think if somebody has experience to back them up that's not directly related however that can also work in their favor, because somebody that comes right out of school that has zero experience might have trouble with the responsibilities of their new job. This is the reason that internships are very important to college students over the summer.  So I would have to say that all this new technology that surrounds us creates some jobs, but mostly requires most successful people to get a degree or specialty training if you want to make a living.

http://www.inc.com/magazine/201210/david-h-freedman/the-rise-of-the-robotic-workforce.html

http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/story/2012-03-26/college-degrees-adults/53793160/1?siteID=a1LgFw09t88-byZy2SVZNOm7csJAmwdS_Q