We were perusing BLS website and came across Projected Opening in Occupations That Require A College Degree and were intrigued by the projections but one key thing left us confused. We took all of the tables in the link and added them up to see how many total new job openings there would be over the next 8 years. We came up with a total of 2,337,100 and that number seems ridiculously low because currently the JOLTS report shows there are 10.6 million job openings today.
There are 60 million boomers retiring between 2022 and 2030 yet somehow there will only be 2.3 million new jobs over the next 8 years? The numbers make no sense to us and perhaps we misread or misinterpreted something in those lists but if this is what the BLS and US Government are making projections on then they will be in for a horrific awakening in 2030.
Of course, these are only college degree jobs but even with that the numbers seem very low. At a minimum that number likely needs to be 23 million not 2.3 million but if we assume that the number are in the millions then we’re talking about 234 million new jobs and that working population doesn’t exist in the United States.
The numbers for health care workers too seem very low considering the aging demographic in the United States. The total number of “new” jobs expected in health care according to Table 4 is 361,500. How are 361,500 new health care workers supposed to take care of 71 million boomers and elderly?
Something is terribly wrong with this data and the projections but it doesn’t matter anyway because anyone that has been thinking this through knows there is a huge problem coming and very tough choices will need to be made in society about where labor will be allocated because there won’t be enough labor.