25 Dying Professions: Part Two

Thinking of a career change? Just starting out?

Me neither.

Still, I found the list of 25 Dying Professions that was published on Work and Money quite interesting. Yesterday, I meandered through the first 8 professions on the list. Here’s the next tranche.

9. Financial planners – One more job being replaced by software and – gulp – robo advisors. Are these robo advisors like the virtual economist clone that UBS developed to brief their clients, a story that caught my eye last month and that I posted about in Will The Real Daniel Kalt Please Stand Up? I’m guessing that they’re not as slick as robotic Herr Kalt. Probably just some weird voice-response app. Mostly, of course, those with wealth will get to meet with actual humans if they want, while everyone else – in an era where full time employment is chancier, retirement plans are non-existent, and “they” are taking potshots at Social Security – will be working with software and robo advisors. In other words, those most in need of the human element won’t have any access to it. Time to add financial literacy to the high school curriculum.

10. Floral designer – I know that every grocery store pretty much sells flowers these days. And, in truth, most of the times I buy flowers, it’s a bunch from Roche Brothers, where I shop. Sometimes it’s a pre-fab mixed bouquet. Sometimes it’s a bunch of tulips or sunflowers or daffodils. Sometimes I do some kind of a mix-and-match. And I know that a lot of flowers are ordered online. (Side note: I’ve had very mixed results when going this route, including pricey dead flowers in something that looked like an ash urn, delivered to my cousin the day after her brother died.) But, oh boo-hoo that floral designer as a profession is tumbling arse over teakettle into oblivion. On a more positive note, floral design skills are transferable to merchandise display and interior design. Mostly, though, oh boo-hoo.

11. Postal worker -  People are getting e-bills. People are sending e-cards and e-invitations. People are writing e-mails. What they aren’t doing is putting a stamp on anything. So there’s a lot less mail being delivered. Thus, we don’t need all those postal workers. Personally while I’m still a hold out when it comes to greeting cards, I’ve converted most of my correspondence to the e-version. On one hand, that’s too bad. Who doesn’t like getting a real piece of mail? A thank you note. A wedding invitation. A birthday card. On the other hand, I’m more apt to send someone I don’t see that often a chatty email than I ever would be to send them a letter-letter. I do make up for it to some degree by sending a ton of greeting cards: Christmas cards, St. Patrick’s Day cards, cards-for-every-holiday to my nieces, birthday cards to everyone I know, sympathy cards (at this age, I keep a few on hand). But I’ll very much feel bad if they cut back on mail delivery, if they close my little local PO, if there are no more mail men (and women) pounding the pavement. I won’t go postal, but I’ll feel bad.

12. Photo processor – Remember dropping off rolls of films at the drug store? Remember those kiosks in the parking lot of the malls? They weren’t dodo-birded by Polaroid cameras. Those suckers really didn’t produce very high quality instant pictures. If people wanted nice pictures, they used their Kodak Brownie or their high end Leica and had their little bright yellow rolls of film to drop off. You’d get back an envelope that contained your pictures and your wonderful negatives that you’d hang onto for when you wanted reprints. And then all of a sudden everyone had a reasonably good camera right there in their pocket. And everyone became their own photographer. Or did they? Well, with digital photography, the photo processor profession is bidding us adieu. But over the next 10 years, they’re predicting that demand for professional photographers to take portraits or do commercial shoots will increase by over 150,000. Guess all those amateur photographers are taking a second look at the kabillion pics they’ve shot with their iPhone and are realizing that they actually do want a decent picture of their kids and dogs.

13. Data entry clerk – Sounds like the person who sat at the roll-top desk next to Bartleby the Scrivener. Every piece of information imaginable is out there/in there in digital form, but a good heap of it is data we enter ourselves, filling in online forms, etc. Sorry if you had your heart set on being a data entry clerk.

14. Telephone Switchboard Operators – Hello, Central! Sure, thanks to technology, it’s in steep decline as a profession. But who knew there were any of them left? I’m trying to think of the last time I called a company and actually had a human pick up the phone.

15. Farmers and Ranchers – Once again, automation is replacing workers. We’ll still be eating. It’s just that there won’t be that many Old MacDonalds growing our corn and strawberries; there won’t be that many Marlboro Men riding the range looking for dogies to brand. It’s easy to get a little sentimental, a little weepy, about the demise of such elemental professions. But in real life, I’m a city girl. How many farmers and ranchers have I actually known in my life? My mother’s parents were farmers in the Old World, and they had some friends or cousins or something who had a farm in Wisconsin that we visited once when we were kids. What I remember about that excursion was that it was blazing hot and they were tarring the road that took us there. That the farmhouse was peculiarly divided, so that to get from the living room to the kitchen, you had to walk outside. (Must have been nice in the winter. Good thing it doesn’t get cold in Wisconsin.) And they served us some really nasty lemonade, nasty thanks to the well water that they had they had an extremely strong mineral taste of some sort. My husband’s aunt and uncle were tobacco farmers who converted their farm to a golf course before I met Jim. But they still had friends and relatives who still farmed tobacco, so I got to meet a few of them over the years. But have I ever really known any farmers or ranchers? Errrr, no.

16. Fast Food Cook – These jobs going away is not good news for those with less than a high school education. But going away they are. “Fast food is increasingly becoming an automated industry. The chains have found it cheaper to prepare food off site and simply have employees reheat it in their stores. Tat was unthinkable in most fast food businesses even a decade ago, but food technology has advanced to the point where the microwaved version doesn’t lack the flavor of the cooked-on-site version.” Maybe so, but pre-fab burger reheated in a microwave doesn’t sound nearly as appealing as a burger flipped on a grill.

17. Newspaper Reporter – Okay. This is the the only job on the list of 25 that I actually wouldn’t have minded having. Make that “the career I most likely would have pursued if I had it to do over, and if, when I had it to do over, I was gutsier than when I had it to do the first time around.”

Tomorrow we’ll cover the remainder of the soon-to-be-defunct professions out there.