When we looked at jobs that had disappeared over the past 170-plus years, we heard from Michael Cushman in D.C. He hinted, fairly enough, that he hadn’t been around in 1850 and would find it more useful if we focused on an analysis of “changes that have happened in people’s working lifetimes.”
You’re the boss, Michael! To help him out, we turned to our old friend, the Current Population Survey — that’s the Census Bureau’s long-running, world-leading effort to measure America (and its job market) every month. We focused on their March supplement, a supersize annual effort which gets us additional job-market minutiae going back to the late ’60s.
That gives us enough runway to look at the working lives of anyone who entered the workforce by 1969. To figure out the single jobs that best defined your time in the workforce, we’ll use a measure of change that accounts for the size of each job, the speed at which it grew (or didn’t) and how it performed relative to other jobs at the time.
But in between those two long tech booms, we saw the rise of customer service representatives — the fastest-growing job of many boomers’ careers. The middle of Gen X occupies an interesting place in that broader arc: their working years were defined by the construction worker. After all, they worked through both the housing boom of the 2000s and the industry’s long postcrash recovery.
The fastest-shrinking jobs surprised us with their sheer monotony. Regardless of when you entered the workforce, secretaries and administrative-assistants have been struggling.
The secretaries’ slump, beginning with the arrival of the personal computer in the early 1980s, has quietly been one of the defining labor-market trends of our lifetime. But it also points to the first weakness in our current approach: We’re looking at the entire economy, but you saw very different labor markets depending on your gender. After all, administrative assistants are, even today, 93 percent women. Before the turn of the millennium, it was closer to 100 percent.
When narrow your lens and only consider data for women, the fastest-shrinking job stays secretary. And for boomer women, the fastest-growing jobs look similar, dominated by customer service. But for many Gen-X and millennial women, the fastest-growing jobs was personal care aides.
The male labor market looked super different. For starters, computer-related careers crop up far more often on men’s side of the ledger. Even today, 78 percent of app developers are men. We see the same for construction and production careers — despite some recent shifts, 96 percent of construction workers are still male.
Older boomer men worked through the era when the fastest-shrinking job was still farmer — as we might expect given that once-dominant occupation’s long descent. But their successors, retail supervisors, were the fastest-shrinking job for many young boomer and Gen X men. For men, those mid-level retail jobs peaked around the turn of the millennium, and has fallen since — part of a broader hollowing out of lower-level management that we should probably look more carefully in a future column.
Again, though, we’re haunted by the feeling that we’ve missed a key dimension here. The workers who saw opportunity in construction might differ from the ones who found it in app development, right?
So, let’s slice and dice this one last time, this time by both gender and education. That should give us something approaching a definitive picture of the fastest-growing and fastest-evaporating jobs of your working life.
It feels right! Men with advanced degrees have shifted toward high-tech and education-related jobs and — relatively, at least — away from work as lawyers and physicians, as those traditional apex professions open up to a more diverse crowd.
Men with bachelor’s degrees have moved toward tech — and toward nursing, where their numbers remain relatively small, but have grown rapidly.
Men with some college but no four-year degree have borne the brunt of men’s loss of low-level management and supervisory jobs, and instead found work in construction or in lower-paid service-industry gigs.
Their peers who never attended college have also seen the most opportunity in construction, even as they’ve lost work as factory foremen and other lower-level managers.
Men without a high school education have been on the ground floor of our epochal shift. After all, they’re the workers who lost the most as we moved away from farms, and have instead mostly found opportunities in America’s vast and stubbornly labor-intensive building sector.
The most educated women, on the other hand, have shifted toward health care, management and finance jobs.
Those highly educated women, along with their peers with four-year degrees, appear to have left behind jobs teaching in K-12 education. But that’s largely a factor of their broadening horizons.
At the outset of our analysis, schools were offering some of the only jobs widely available to highly educated American women. But this dataset captures an era of upheaval, in which the number women with advanced degrees steadily increased, as did their available opportunities.
The loss of secretarial jobs, on the other hand, has primarily hit high school graduates who didn’t get four-year degrees.
Women in that group, whether or not they attended college at all, have shifted to jobs as customer-service workers or personal care aides.
The least-educated women, those who never graduated high school, never had a huge share of the secretarial jobs. Instead, their working lives were often defined by declining employment as factory seamstresses and child care workers, and an increase in work as cashiers or in food service.
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