Skilled Labor

Teachers, doctors, construction project management. None of these are jobs you can just hop into on a whim. They require skilled labor.

Skilled labor is the part of the workforce that has mad skills. Those mad skills were gotten somehow...doesn’t really matter how. Maybe they went to college, had on-the-job training, or both. Maybe they had to get certified, sell their soul, or both.

The flip-side to skilled labor is unskilled labor. Unskilled labor is the part of the workforce on the lower end of the economically viable skill set scale. An unskilled labor job would be one that requires lower education and/or experience...maybe not even a high school diploma. Repetitive, factory-line type tasks are typically considered unskilled labor.

Skilled labor is worth more in the economy. The more skilled labor there is, the more potential for economic growth for a country...to a point. As economies mature, this can lead to an oversupply of skilled labor. There are a lot of PhDs, but not as many PhD-required jobs. Same for Master’s degrees, and now even Bachelor’s degrees.

This oversupply of skilled labor compared to available skilled job openings was particularly a problem with China’s one-child policy. In China, young'uns are supposed to take care of their parents and grandparents. With China’s one-child policy, now families had only one child to support them, and not a bunch.

Cue: hypercompetition among kids in school to be the best of the best. The pressure is on to get one of the few, coveted skilled labor jobs to support the whole fam.