Number of Workers in Tech Fields Declines for First Time Since 1950

It seems counterintuitive.

Apple is the most valuable corporation in the world, having surpassed Exxon. Yes, Exxon (Steve Jobs has to be having a chuckle about that one). Facebook is about to launch the largest IPO by dollar value in history. The apps revolution is generating new companies with unpronounceable names every day. Even Wall Street, with it penchant for ever more complex financial engineering instruments, is a contributor. So how could all of this activity not be generating new tech jobs?

The problem is that those Silicon Valley software and hardware engineering positions are just a fraction of the total in this category. Most of the tech jobs in America and the rest of the world reside in large and medium-sized corporations. Instead of inventing cool new products, they have traditionally testing, evaluating and, occasionally, experimenting with extensions of legacy systems. Exactly the sort of positions that financial managers like to eliminate to 'streamline' in order to 'enhance productivity.'

So the implication of this trend is emblematic of a larger truth. That, as an economy and a society, the US has been undermining its own future competitiveness in order to support an unsustainable system now. Cartoon character Popeye the Sailor had a sidekick named Wimpy who used to say, "I'll pay you back on Tuesday for a hamburger today." Welcome to his world. JL

Conor Dougherty and Rob Barry report in the Wall Street Journal:

The share of American workers in the science and engineering professions fell slightly in the past decade, ending what had been a steady upward trend in the proportion of workers in fields associated with technological innovation and economic growth.

Workers in technical fields ranging from architecture to software design accounted for 4.9% of the labor force in 2010, according to a new analysis of Census data being released on Friday, down from a peak of 5.3% in 2000. Before 2000, the share of these knowledge workers had increased in every 10-year Census since 1950
according to the Population Reference Bureau, a nonprofit demographic research group in Washington that conducted the study. While the total number of workers in these fields continued to grow in the 2000s, along with the rise in total population, they now account for a relatively smaller slice of the work force.

The drop could result from a number of factors, said Mark Mather, a demographer at the PRB, including a decline in manufacturing in the past decade. Factories often employ large numbers of engineers in their design and production processes.

There are only about five million to eight million U.S. workers in technical fields, depending on how broadly the group is defined. The PRB pegs it at 7.6 million, including everything from Ph.D.s to support workers whose jobs might not even require a bachelor's degree, such as laboratory technicians and computer support workers.

Other organizations, such as the National Science Foundation, tend to define knowledge jobs as those that require a bachelor's degree or higher.

Regardless of how the group is measured, it is considered crucial to an advanced economy—commanding higher pay than many other groups of workers and frequently associated with the creation of new companies and industries. The PRB report is likely to provide fodder to politicians and analysts who argue that the U.S. needs to expand the share of workers who have these advanced skills, as well as find ways to encourage investment in the industries that will employ them.

"If there's no demand for those workers, then accelerating growth in supply is not going to have any effect," said Michael Teitelbaum, a demographer and fellow at Harvard Law School.

At a time when eight-year-old Facebook Inc. is being pegged as a $100 billion company and Apple Inc. has edged out old-industry stalwart Exxon Mobil Corp. as the nation's most valuable company by market value, it might seem counterintuitive that technical jobs have become a smaller share of the labor force. But while there have been huge gains in jobs like software design and applied mathematics, technical workers in older-line industries have suffered.

For instance, there were fewer mechanical engineers in the labor force in 2010 versus a decade earlier, as manufacturing industries declined.

Workers in technical fields also are aging along with the rest of the American population. The number of scientists and engineers aged 55 or older increased 32% between 2005 and 2010, while those under 35 fell 1%, according to the PRB analysis.

Meantime, foreign-born workers have grown. In 2010, about one in five workers in the technical labor force was foreign-born, compared with one in six in 2000.

To be sure, with the economy beginning to show more signs of sustained growth, and technological advances touching every part of the economy, the number of workers with technical skills is expected to grow in the long term.

And those workers are still more likely to find jobs than workers in many other fields. According to the PRB data, from 2007 to 2010, the unemployment rate for science and engineering workers increased from 2.6% to 5.6%—a sharp upturn, but still below the above-9% national average that prevailed in 2010