Other than the time spent sleeping, the time spent working takes up more of the day for most people than any other activity. What we do, where we do it, who in a family is working, and for how long each day directly impacts the products and services needed in order to manage daily lives. As work hours lengthen and as work increasingly comes home, the time allotted for shopping, cooking and cleaning, and for other activities, will become tighter and tighter. Marketers who can make the lives of busy workers easier and more productive, while continuing to supply variety and value, will be favored.

Change is the only constant
How do you know what you don’t know? The problem with trying to understand how work will change in the near future is that many of these jobs don’t even exist yet. The skills needed by the workforce of tomorrow—and the training required to acquire those skills—are not even on the radar screen. If the recent past is any indicator of the future, then the only thing certain is that the U.S. labor market will be in a constant state of flux. The series of upheavals endured by the Information Technology industry over the past several decades serves as the perfect model.

Between the mid 1970s and 1982, the number of jobs in the IT industry grew by 80%. New technologies and new applications drove growth in companies that built and sold “big iron”, the large, expensive mainframe computers that revolutionized data processing. However, beginning with the introduction of the personal computer, first by Apple, and then by IBM in 1982, the industry went into freefall. Companies that sold mainframes and mini-computers like Wang, Honeywell, and Digital Equipment Corporation either left the industry or radically downsized and repositioned.

Employment in the computer industry started to fall as intense competition between PC makers lowered margins and drove manufacturing jobs off-shore to less expensive labor markets. The number of jobs in the industry fell, down 26% between 1983 and 1994, with a further 25% drop to come over the next ten years. There was, however, tremendous job growth on the retail side of the industry as consumers flocked to local computer stores, and then to new retail chains to buy the newest hardware. Since then, the biggest growth area in the U.S. has been in software development jobs, particularly today for use on the Internet, which now makes up the bulk of U.S. employment in the industry.

As more and more of the coding jobs move offshore, leaving the design jobs on U.S. soil, the industry is changing again. Is the technology sector still important to the economy? Absolutely. Is there much comparability between the kinds of jobs done now (and where they’re done) and the jobs done in the industry less than 20 years ago? Certainly not. Would an industry worker of today, magically transported ten years into the future, be able to remain in the industry without substantial retraining? Highly doubtful.

Crystal balls don’t exist
Even with perfect knowledge of the future, it would have been impossible to counsel a young person in college in the 1970s about what to study to prepare for a long career in the computer industry. The training for the skills they would need even a decade later simply didn’t exist. The best advice would have been to prepare to change jobs much more often than their parents did, and most importantly, prepare to learn new skills as needed.

Even the way occupations are talked about today would be unrecognizable to a demographer of 1980. Back then, jobs were grouped into “Professional”, “Managerial”, “Other White Collar” and “Blue Collar”, and everything else got tossed into a somewhat new category called “Service”. Today, these designations are antiques and thoroughly unhelpful in describing the current labor market. What used to be “Blue Collar” and make up 35% of employed workers in 1980 now includes a whole series of job titles that have been created since then, and accounts for less than one in five workers. What was called “Service” barely even exists as a useful occupation category because of the diversity of occupations that fall within it.

Predictable trends do exist
Beyond the basics of occupations today, there are other more predictable trends that have had similarly large impacts on the workforce. Probably the most important and impactful of these to the market for consumer products has been the increase in the number of women in the workforce and their changing jobs. The aging of the Baby Boom will also have tremendous impact on the U.S. labor force. The struggle to replace aging workers and the challenges of new and rapidly growing occupational categories will strain both the educational system and the economy. Likewise, rapidly growing Hispanic and Asian populations in the U.S. are quickly changing the face of the work in many occupations.

Working women
The rate at which women participate in the labor force in the U.S. has increased steadily from 1970, when 43% of women (16+) were in the labor force, to a peak of 60% in 1999. Participation rates have fallen slightly since then to 59% in 2006. Over the same period, the labor force participation rate for men (16+) has trended downward, from 80% in 1970 to 74% in 2006. At least part of the recent decreases can be attributed to the aging of the Baby Boom and their exit from the labor force. It is interesting to note that the smallest differences in rate between men and women are in the younger ages. Today, the labor force participation rate for 16-19 year old men and women is identical at 44% – suggesting that the gap between men and women may continue to close over time as equal or nearly equal numbers of men and women become part of the labor force.

Labor force participation rates for women vary based on family configuration and ethnicity. Women with children have the highest participation rates at 71% (versus 59.4% for all women aged sixteen and older). Women with younger children (under six) have slightly lower rates than all women with children. Still, six out of ten married women with young children work, and more than seven in ten single, separated, divorced, or widowed women with young children work. In less than 20% of all married couple families is the husband the sole provider.

Workin’ 9 to 5…or 6 or 7
Women make up the majority of employees in an increasing number of occupations, and not just those that have been traditionally female. In 2006, 51% of jobholders in management, professional, and financial operations occupations were women, with much higher shares in human resources, education, medical and health services managers, accountants, social workers, paralegals, and healthcare. Fifty-seven percent of workers in the service industries and 63% in sales and office occupations are female. Women account for very small shares of workers in construction, production, and transportation occupations.

Much of the shift in women’s occupations comes from increases in their level of educational attainment. Of 2006 high school graduates, there was no difference between the proportion of young men and young women who expected to be going to college the next year. As the number of educated women continues to increase, women will continue to increase their share of what have traditionally been male-dominated occupations. And their hours at work will likely increase as well – currently women’s weekly working hours lag men’s (41.8 hours per week for men versus 36.2 for women). More hours at work will mean fewer hours in the home and the need for more quick-prep meal solutions and less labor-intensive cleaning products. This trend will also reinforce the ongoing increase in the share of meals either eaten out or not prepared at home.

Working women facts:
About 25% of women work part time (less than 35 hours per week), compared to 10% of men. This share has only dropped by a small amount since 1970.

• About 15% of both men and women work from home at least once a week as part of their main job. Women working from home are less likely to be self employed than men. This suggests that women are taking more advantage of flexible hours / flexible location programs offered by more and more employers. It also suggests that employers that offer such programs may have an advantage in attracting and keeping employees, especially women.
• Women enrolled in high school or college are more likely to be in the labor force than male students (45% versus 41%). Among young persons not in school, men are more likely to be in the labor force than women (88% versus 75%).
• Foreign born women are a bit less likely to be in the labor force than native born women (55% versus 60%).
• Asian women are the best paid female group, earning about 15% more than all white women, 35% more than black women, and 59% more than Hispanic women. The gap between men’s and women’s wages, however, is smallest for black and Hispanic women.

Old and tired
Some occupations are older or younger simply because of the career stage in which workers tend to have the jobs. For example, waiters and waitresses tend to be younger and corporate CEOs tend to be older. These are normal stage differences that will likely hold true over time. However, some occupations are aging rapidly because younger people have not seen the jobs as attractive or have not been able or willing to acquire the specialized training necessary for them. Some of the oldest skewing occupations are listed below.

A median age over 45 years in an occupation means that upwards of half of all workers will retire and leave the profession over the next 10-20 years. School teachers of all types are aging rapidly and will be in very short supply in the coming decades. This gap will be offset in part by the slow growth rate of households with children. However, many health care worker occupations are also quite old today, and the demand for these jobs is expected to grow rapidly as the Baby Boom ages. Home health aides, medical assistants, physician assistants, and physical therapists are among the oldest occupations, as well as among those expected to grow rapidly in the near future, with growth rates from 2004 to 2014 projected to top 40%. As the Baby Boom ages, health care will rival technology as the U.S.’ most rapid growth industry.

Ethnic diversity
The U.S. has seen extraordinary growth in Hispanic and Asian populations over the past several decades. The places where these new workers have settled into the labor force are very skewed. For example, 94% of farm managers are non-Hispanic white, but nearly 60% of agricultural workers are not, and over half are Hispanic. And a higher share of Asian immigrants has come to the U.S. as students with a very different occupational profile than Hispanics.

The table below shows some of the most and least ethnic occupations in the U.S. in 2006.

Make it work
All of the major trends that impact U.S. society today – from explosive growth in Hispanic and Asian populations to the aging of the Baby Boom – also foster big changes in the labor market and how work is done. As traditional households with working husbands and stay-at-home wives continue to disappear, and working couples form the dominant family structure for households with children, products also need to change. As more women take advanced academic degrees and reach higher into professional and managerial occupations, time at home will become even more stretched.

From increased labor shortages as the Baby Boom retires to evolved roles for women in the workplace and in the home to the continued growth of ethnic diversity, marketers don’t need a crystal ball to see into the future. A keen understanding of consumer trends and their changing needs will lead to the development of products, services and industries that will sustain them – at least for the short-term.