Wharton management professor Peter Cappelli discusses the impact of the recession on employment and the outlook for the job market.

This thought-provoking video is part of a "Knowledge at Wharton" interview with professor Peter Cappelli, One Ambivalent Economy + Many Cautious Employers = One Difficult Job Market.

Here's a statistic from the article, (published February 3, 2010), that might shock you: "For job seekers, it won't be easy to figure out where to go next. In its 10-year employment outlook, The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that 96% of job growth between now and 2018 will come from service-providing industries, the top sectors being professional and business services and health care and social assistance. Cappelli says such long-term projections aren't worth much to job seekers, however, because people adapt to them the same way investors react to a stock tip -- by flooding the market. "Everyone says there are jobs in health care, but nursing schools have been at capacity for quite a while," Cappelli notes. Likewise, the financial and construction industries are in the doldrums now, but when they recover, they might roar back. "Things flip around as quickly [in the job market] as in the investment industry, but individuals can't flip their careers around so quickly," he adds.

The article quotes Phillip Gardner, director of the Collegiate Employment Research Institute at Michigan State University. "The most buoyant part, the most consistently positive part of college hiring has been small employers." According to the Institute's latest Recruiting Trends survey, large companies (those with more than 4,000 employees) plan to decrease hiring by 3% in 2010, and mid-sized companies (those with 500 to 4,000 employees) expect to decrease hiring by 11%. However, small companies (with 100 to 499 employees) expect to increase hiring by 15%, and fast-growth companies (from 9 to 100 people) by 26%.

The article is a realistic look at the future of global employment over the next ten years. Highly recommend.