Digital Age: Knowledge Work: E-Commerce

E-Commerce

• Overview:  As we enter a new century, the nation's economy is in the early stages of a shift from an old corporate mass production economy to a new, entrepreneurial economy. While this New Economy is global and more competitive and entrepreneurial, it is also becoming a digital or electronic economy, and much more importantly for shaping employment patterns, the digital economy will lead to a new wave of automation -- dramatically reducing jobs in certain industries and occupations.
  
  Clearly, the most visible aspect of the new labor market is the dramatic rise in the number of jobs involving information technology. While there were fewer than 5,000 computer programmers in America in 1960, there are over 1.3 million today.
  In fact, the IT industry has grown so fast that the industry faces widespread shortages of skilled IT professionals.
  
  Historically, productivity has grown at differential rates, both between industries and between functions within industries.
  At the broadest level, the fact that manufacturing and agricultural productivity has grown about 3 to 4 times faster than productivity in the services sector over the last 3 decades has meant that even though we produce more food and manufacturing goods than ever before, we do it with fewer farmers or manufacturing workers.
  
  In spite of the automation of some of the more routine managerial and professional functions, the biggest impact will be on routine jobs that currently require little training. As more of the economy consists of knowledge jobs, expanding the number of Americans going to and finishing college will be a key policy challenge. Expanding financial aid, as President Clinton and Vice President Gore have done and proposed even more, will be important.
  
  But it is not enough to just get more Americans to go through a college education if much of that system is mediocre. Companies who now employ workers in low skill work environments need to find ways to enrich these jobs in ways that rely on workers' own knowledge and skills. Finally, there is the need to ensure that we have the kinds of public and private sector efforts to help dislocated Americans make the transition to new jobs and new work.
  

More...............................  Digital Automation and the New Workforce