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The digital commonplace book of Marcus Verrall
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The Commonplace Book of Marcus Verrall

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How Did We Get Here?

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How Did We Get Here?

Globalization and the tech revolution have undone traditional career assumptions. Technology automates jobs that used to require hard-earned knowledge and skills, including well-paid white-collar jobs such as paralegals and radiologists, to name just two examples. This erasure of certain positions will only continue with the Al revolution that is already sweeping across industries. Of course, technology also creates new jobs, but job creation tends to lag behind job displacement, and the new jobs usually require different, higher-level skills than the ones they replaced. If technology doesn't eliminate or change the skills you need in many industries, it at least enables more people from around the world (often cheaper freelancers) to compete for your job by allowing companies to offshore work more easily, knocking down your salary in the process. Trade and technology did not appear overnight and are not going away anytime soon. The labor market in which we all work has been permanently altered.

The Startup of You (Revised and Updated)
p.6

When we published the first edition of this book [2012], that "career escalator," as the writer Ronald Brownstein dubbed it, was jammed at every level. It had been for a while. Many young people, even the most highly educated, were stuck at the bottom, underemployed, or jobless, or trapped in dead-end positions out of sync with their ambitions and talents. Meanwhile, men and women in their sixties and seventies, with empty pensions and a government safety net that looked like Swiss cheese, were staying in or rejoining the workforce in record numbers. At best, this formula keeps middle-aged workers stuck in pro-motionless limbo; at worst, it squeezes them out in order to make room for more-senior talent.

The Startup of You (Revised and Updated)
p.5

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