Shift Happens – Will You be Ready?

Why is education so important to our nation — check this out:
(by the way, you don’t need to turn your sound on to get the message)

The picture this video paints is pretty frightening – essentially, it says that the world, and the world economy has shifted dramatically in the last few years and, well, the United States is on the verge of losing its leadership position.

These startling factoids by looking at what’s going on in China and India

There are more people in China and India with genius IQ’s than there are people in the United States.

China will soon have more people living there who speak English than any other country on earth

Now think about those two facts and consider that you could export every single job in the United States to China and they would still have an unemployment problem.

And how about this one: in the 6 minutes it takes to watch this video, 60 children will be born in the US, 244 in China, and 351 in India.

That’s pretty scary – but enough about China and India what about shifts in the US?

The net shift has to do with careers and this stuff is even more eye opening:

According to former Secretary of Education Richard Riley:

“The top 10 jobs in demand in 2010 didn’t even exist in 2004!

And the final shift deals with the exponential expansion of the world of information and technology – which is the key platform for innovation and industrialization.

Check this out:

• It’s estimated that the amount of information contained in just one week of the New York Times than a typical person might learn in their entire lifetime just 100 years ago.
• And now we’re generating 1.5 extabytes of new and unique information this year alone, by the way, that’s a big number – I think it’s a trillion, trillion, trillion – and that’s today.
• By 2010, this number will double every 72 hours – which means that half of what a college freshman learns in 2009 will be obsolete by their junior year.
• The US has now slipped to 20th in terms of the percentage of the population using the Internet.
• And finally – this is my favorite part: By 2013, the world should have the first supercomputer capable of modeling the human brain.
• And in 2023 – when today’s first graders will be starting their careers, that supercomputer capable of modeling a human brain will cost less than $1,000.
• And while it’s tough to look out beyond that, there are predictions that within 40 years, a $1000 computer will exceed the entire computational capabilities of the HUMAN RACE

This is a huge wake up call. And to make matters worse, our education system is stuck in the 1950’s, held hostage by government bureaucrats who take orders from the teachers unions – who refuse to change anything they do with first negotiating a raise.

We have two choices. We can sit back and watch our country slip into third world status, or demand that our elected officials have a national commitment to teaching math, science, and more importantly, stop taking money and marching orders from the teachers unions.Shift Happens – will you be ready?

This Week on The Career Mechanic – “The Back to School Special”
Click HERE to Listen

We’ll be talking about getting the most out of college. Our guests are Dr. Katharine Brooks, author of “You Majored in What,” Hayley St. Philips, who’s college internship turned into a killer career with Fox Entertainment, and Dr. Tina Seelig, the Executive Director for the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, and author of “What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20: A Crash Course on Making Your Place in the World.”