Smart Jobs Predicted to Lead US Economic Recovery

Wired Magazine and NPR’s Planet Money recently set forth to investigate the current state of employment as it begins to rebound from the recession in order to gain a glimpse into what the future US economy might look like.  By looking closely at data from both government and academic sources, the authors point to a gradual emergence of a new category of middle-class jobs that they categorize as “smart jobs.” 

Smart jobs tend to scramble the line between blue-collar and white-collar. Their titles tend toward the white (technician, specialist, analyst), but the underlying industries often tend toward the blue, toward the making of physical products. Smart jobs can involve factories and machines, plastics and chemicals, but operating those instruments and manipulating those materials demands far more brains than brawn. Even though some of these jobs are nominally in old-fashioned industries, visit the factories and shops and fields and one finds that these industries are in the process of being utterly transformed.

Currently leading the trend towards smart jobs are industries such as renewables and the environment, the Internet, online publishing and nanotechnology.  These smart jobs are innovative and high tech, but most of them are located far from Silicon Valley or New York. They’re specialized, but that doesn’t mean one needs a PhD, or even (in some cases) a college degree, to get them or to do them well—though they do require some serious training, whether on the job or in a vocational program.
These new, innovative middle-class jobs are cropping up all over the country, in regions and clusters where you might not expect to find them -- such as Dayton which is becoming well known as a center for radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology and Central Ohio with its Energy Manufacturing Solutions Hub.

For more details on the emergence of smart jobs, see the story from Wired.