Documented: There Is a White-Collar Recession

 "Hiring in professional services, finance and technology is running at one-third the rate of the overall labor market." - Bloomberg, April 25, 2024

The jokes and the fantasy reflections about having become a plumber or welder instead of going the white-collar route are over. It's now in earnest that white-collar clients for my coaching practice tell me either 1) They are appropriately jittery about losing their jobs or 2) The job is gone but nothing comparable has come up to replace it. Postings and comments on professional anonymous networks such as Blind, Reddit, Fishbowl and Glassdoor chronicle that extreme angst. 

A few have already retrained for blue-collar careers such as long-distance driving. The rest wonder if they should wait it out in anticipation that the labor market for their skills will bounce back or do some serious research on how else to earn a good living. Those options include self-employment.

In the meantime the universal advice is this: Keep bringing in income. That, of course, can come from gigs. No, those are no longer a resume-destroyer. Actually, doing those gigs can achieve a psychic restructuring which breaks open people to thinking beyond the white-collar. 

Back post-9/11 my industry collapsed. With it, my business. I grabbed a security-guard gig in a big box. Soon enough my confidence returned. The "they" offered me a full-time position and a promotion to supervisor. For once in a long time I  was able to think out of the box. Eventually I set up a boutique in digital communications.  

Since, in addition to being a coach I am a Tarot card reader, often folks ask me to predict what will happen in the white-collar niches. I turn dark. 



The intersection of cost-efficiency and generative AI will keep downsizing the slots for white-collar functions. This development is analogous to the purging of middle management in Corporate America during the mid-1980s and onward. Those jobs never came back. Many former middle managers, then middle-aged, became The Generation of Accidental Entrepreneurs.

Limiting beliefs? Self-defeating? Stuck? Complimentary consultation with Coach Jane Genova (text/phone 203-468-8579, janegenova374@gmail.com) 


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