Industries For Future Job Growth

Getting to know what jobs will be plentiful in the future is never easy to predict. In these difficult times it’s tougher.

Consultants hired to make predictions are often wrong; yet they prognosticate and get clients, despite only rarely winning accuracy sweepstakes.

We know that economic trends are hard to change overnight. The health care services industry appears destined to continue its growth. There will be some bumps, however, depending on legislation and unionization activity.

Also, some aspects that require delicate skills, doctors, for instance, may be adversely affected by past legislation or continued lack of tort reform by government.

How New Jobs Can Develop

Getting the unemployment rate down from where it hovers at the official 10% rate, to a more normal 5% and below, is not going to be easy. Not with meaningless gestures from the Obama administration.

The unemployment rate is actually over 17% when you consider the truly unemployed. Not only those who still haven’t given up seeking a worthwhile job or are on unemployment income while it lasts. The truth is, the official unemployment rate is misleading.

To get job creations going, the economy must improve. That means psychology must get rosier. More money has to get into households. That situation is not improving.

You simply have to get more funds into the hands of the consumer. What will do that? Lower income taxes, fast. And productive private industry jobs, fast.

To produce jobs you must get small business starts going by cutting their taxes. And you have to cut government debt. Servicing that debt makes it impossible to keep taxes low or to make a dent in their reduction.

It’s really simple. The White House says it is doing it. But saving 1% as it actually proposes multi-trillion dollar deficit budgets is impossible.

The Right Job Resume

Books and pamphlets tell you how to write a job resume. But above all, remember, the importance of the covering letter. It’s just as essential as the resume itself.

Place upfront on to the covering letter what is most important about your skills. Outline very quickly your professional assets. Tune the theme to what that skill is; technical, leadership, or academic.

The covering letter ought to quickly reprise what you are really selling about yourself. That will make it easier for a prospective employer to scan your’s from, perhaps, hundreds of other job requests.

The U.S. Does Not Provide the Freest Economic Government

According to the annual Index of Economic Freedom reports from the Heritage Foundation and the Wall Street Journal, the U. S. remains far behind countries such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Switzerland, Hong Kong and Singapore, in terms of economic freedom..

This means, in economic and bureaucratic terms, there is much improvement we can make to eliminate business red tape and restrictions. Unfortunately, in the past two years, we have been heading away even more from free economic principles.

This, at a time when we desperately need to formulate new private industry jobs.

The Franchise Route

Why bother to sell a franchise?

First question to ask yourself if you are thinking of franchising your business:

If you have a successful business, it’s easy to think it can be franchised. But why should someone pay for the company name and your expertise when they can probably duplicate the same entity at no additional franchising cost?

There are some questions you can ask yourself about the possibility and logic of franchising your business. You cannot successfully franchise your operation if:

1) It is easily duplicated or entered into by a competitor.

2) You don’t have a highly recognized brand name.

3) You don’t have special management expertise to offer.

4) It’s hard to service or manage operations, from your site.

You must realize, too, that the usual upfront fees and the royalty you take on sales, that cover whatever management training and materials you may offer, will probably represent about half a franchisee’s net earnings. That fact is bound to eventually infuriate him, assuming he becomes successful. There is no telling what the fury may be if he fails after investing in your advice.

So he may eventually cheat you or form groups with any other franchisees you may have, to sue you over contract terms.

Question: If you want to franchise your business, can you finance and constantly control the finances of your franchisees? That is most important, should you do decide to franchise. It is the most important binding link you can have to the prospective franchisee.

Government Fraud

We often hear about business fraud. Most often, however, there are checks and balances in business by boards of directors and independent audits. When an Enron occurs, the publicity and media extravaganzas, along with government finger-pointing and publicity, make up for smaller, relative numbers.

Government fraud is taken for granted but is far more prevalent where politicians and bureaucrats take it as a given because they are so “underpaid” on the job.

An example: There is a formula for how government grants are used. There always is a euphemistic allowance made for “waste.”

And there is always an understatement of projected cost. It’s a rare government project that ever meets its original cost estimates.

Then there is usually some figure allotted to account for missing funds. Or at least a few percentage points devoted for investigation of fraud.

That is because of the psychological nature of government jobs. You don’t have the same checks and balances than in private industry, despite the public image the media provides.

Government projects are always ramped up. Very few are ever terminated. Sunshine laws are passed from time to time but appear ineffectual. Once on the books, laws and agencies they breed have a life of their own.

Venture Capital Availability

Getting venture capital is not easy as it’s often a case of being lucky, or knowing the right people. However, you need basic planning to get into the game. To ask for funds, a game plan or budgeting proposal is essential.

Incubators were a fad for a time, for very early stage venture funding. They proved a flop in the past. Incubators required lots of hand-holding for entrepreneurs. The problem was, there were too many students and teachers often had no ability at the required levels. The eventual dot com bubble showed how futile that effort was.

Angel capital is now used for early-stage startups, Classic venture capital is for the level after you generally have some vestige of business operations.

Getting VC funds is usually a sort of lottery, should you have no connections. Those who get funds generally have those, or have gotten funds for earlier ventures.

There is a good reason why VC funding is so haphazard. The VC “experts” actually haven’t the foggiest idea of which entrepreneurs to select and fund. Those VCs who have made big money were often merely lucky; they also picked lots of losers.

The payoff for VCs is generally the ability to sell stock in the venture to others, even when there are no profits to be made.

Some deals have been referred to as legalized Ponzi schemes.