Image: Pexels.com
Guest post by Lucy Wyndham
For one reason or another, Americans are leaving the United States and becoming expatriates at increasing rates. As many as 6.8 million Americans live abroad according to some estimates, though the number is impossible to know for certain. There are plenty of driving forces here with reasons for moving to another country, but one of the most dominant reasons is for education and careers. But as we see technology revolutionize every facet of our lives, the job market is one of the places seeing the most effects.
Travel Made Easy
Technological innovation has taken the hassle of travel and made it simplistic. The smartphones that 77% of Americans carry every day do everything for you except get you there. App-based companies like Uber and Lyft have created a world where a press of a button takes you to and from an airport, or anywhere else. This is especially useful for short-term traveling positions like nursing, relief work, construction, and plenty of others.
Often times skilled workers will find positions that are temporary while also allowing them to travel to new places. This magnificent feature of globalization has taken the world and condensed it into a series of reachable destinations rather than a move abroad being a lifelong commitment as it was not so long ago. To use nursing as an example, travel nurses and missionary nurses will often be sent to aid in the wake of a natural disaster, when medical aid is in high demand. Once things have settled and the demand is lowered, the travel nurses easily move to the next place of employment.
Communication Made Easier
We’ve seen technological innovation completely change the way that people communicate. Many positions can be done from nearly anywhere, with 43% of employed Americans now gaining experience in remote positions. As technology continues to grow, so too do the remote positions, with the aforementioned 43% being a hefty improvement over the 39% of 2012. With jobs being done from virtually anywhere, technology has essentially nullified distance.
Goodbye Borders, Goodbye Distance
This level of globalization has effectively removed many borders along with the distance. Commonly freelance positions such as content/copy writing or editing can often be employed overseas, with citizens of the United Kingdom working with employees in Australia, North America, or quite literally anywhere else. Jobs such as accounting, nursing, and education positions seem as if they must be in person, but the reality is that there’s no loss of communication in an age of video chats and virtual reality.
Harming is Helping
While there are some job markets that might be seemingly harmed by this, such as automation replacing factory or fast food jobs, even this ultimately helps the job market. The coding and engineering needed to create these innovations become positions as well, changing the demand in the job market. This also pushes an emphasis on education and training, improving the quality of the workforce from unskilled and uneducated labor to a workforce of trained experts in their field.
Technology will continue to advance, and as it grows, our world shrinks. The emphasis on globalization that removing borders and barriers provides leads to a bolstered and accessible job market for any worker in any country. As technology continues to remove these barriers of entry, the job market will continue to soar upwards without ceiling.