There is an INTENSE need for people who can think and have experience + a work ethic, goal driven. I’m a subset of one out of 300 million+ so I can’t exactly extrapolate but—
Like photog, I’m an engineer but at 76.8 years old, a supposedly retired one. To keep myself in touch and engaged, I have a part time consulting business out of my house. I do design and in addition, construction contract and managing, budgeting and walk dogs on occasion.
I have people coming out of the woodwork begging me to work for them. They tell me that the current system isn’t generating people like me at the needed replacement rate.
I have all the clients I want (2), I work all the hours a week that I want (15) and I have no intention of getting back in harness. I like the commute from my bedroom to my home office but I have problems keeping the cats off my plan table.
Before retirement, we spent a couple of years trying to hire and train my replacement. A number of recent grads but there seemed to be at least something wrong with every one. No motivation, no work ethic, can’t get out of bed, not interested, HUGE holes in their knowledge base, scatter brained. One of them could not generate a simple logical excel based budget to save his life.
I can’t do the typical retired thing, traveling, visiting grandkids, etc. My wife is well into Alzheimer’s but not quite yet a nursing home candidate. So I’m tied here. But if I’m not working on something interesting, I’m pretty sure I would rapidly dry up and blow away.
That post wasn’t supposed to be about me, I went off course.
The point was supposed to be that there is an intense and well paid need for people to work but the work requires sets of character traits that used to be much more common among the general population. And a well developed sense of entitlement coupled with a lack of work ethic is anathema.
Well, both things are true. The older workers are more disciplined and capable and the younger ones are unmotivated and terribly unprepared. We’re in for a drop in competence for sure. Where this could get very ugly involves maintaining infrastructure. Travelling over bridges could become an act of faith.