Jobs in IT Aren't the Only Ones That Are Hot:
Packaging, Customer Service Among Surprises

by Todd W. Carter

Thinking outside the box can prove fruitful during a job hunt. But so can thinking about the box.

A booming economy, e-commerce and an explosion in consumer goods are creating a surge in demand for packaging professionals. Demand is high, but supply is limited--a recipe for a hot job.

It doesn't hurt, either, that the position flies under the radar of most college students. Or that packaging science graduates are earning between $40,000 and $48,000 annually. But the field often is overlooked by technically minded college students, who instead may migrate to purely Internet-related positions.

"I think it is sexy. It's hard for people to find out they can have a career in it--like it's a big secret," says Shauna Newcomb, a packaging science program coordinator in the Rochester, N.Y.-based Rochester Institute of Technology's Office of Co-op and Career Services (http://www.rit.edu/~964www/). RIT has about 160 packaging majors.

"It's something that people take for granted every day of their lives. It's overlooked. Everything has to be put in something. And I don't see that declining."

Certainly during at least the next several years, according to experts, information technology (IT) professionals will continue their sacred standing among employers. E-commerce requires a nearly unlimited number of people who can build, operate and maintain the computers that make Web sites possible.

But Internet commerce, time-strapped people, and baby boomers are expected to produce an insatiable demand for customer service, marketing, personal assistance and health-care workers.

The dot.com startups that once concentrated their hiring efforts almost exclusively on IT professionals are now looking for full-time business development and human resource experts. They're needed to accelerate market share through alliances and ensure there are enough people on board to handle the resulting growth.

And all of this growth is creating a demand for people who can snag and retain workers. The recruiters are recruiting the recruiters.

"What you are finding is. . .organizations are growing (so) rapidly that that also opens the door for a whole plethora of additional positions--like marketing professionals, human resource professionals, recruiting professionals, finance professionals," says Sean Huurman, national director of recruiting for KPMG Consulting LLC (http://www.kpmgconsulting.com/).

Still, despite spurts in very specialized positions--such as engineers who can produce lasers for eye surgery--the big driver behind hot jobs really isn't a surprise. E-commerce is king.

Those RIT packaging majors, for instance, will almost certainly have Internet commerce at least partly to thank for their demand. While books, for instance, once were shipped almost exclusively in bulk to stores, they now often are sent to consumers--one box at a time.

Still, the need for laser engineers exemplifies the growth in what J. Michael Farr, author of Best Jobs for the 21st Century (Jist Works, 1999), calls "micro occupations" and the need for job seekers to discover their existence.

"There's probably a very small number of people who do that (laser engineering), and they're probably in enormous demand." he notes. "But you're not going to find that job listed anywhere."

The good news for job seekers who aren't enamored with living in California: Internet-related jobs are expanding beyond the Silicon Valley, as high rents and low unemployment are making it more difficult to do business there.

"There's just not the supply in places like Northern California and Southern California and the other obvious parts of the country that are hot," says Daniel Solomons, chief executive officer of Los Angeles-based Hunter Recruitment Advisors (http://www.hunteradvisors.com/), which acts as an outsourced recruitment department for early-stage and middle-market companies with high-volume staffing requirements.

"The supply is just dwindling to the point where there's going to be a need to reach out to people in other parts of the country."

Boston is hot, as is New York City, Dallas, Chicago, Denver, and some other large and midsize U.S. cities. The demand for health-care workers will rise in warmer climates, as baby boomers retire in places like Florida and Arizona.

Internationally, India, Ireland, and former Soviet bloc countries are among the places that will become known as high-tech meccas. Yet geographic location is slowly losing its importance, as companies find that employees can telecommute from anywhere in the world that has Internet access.

"As long as individuals are willing to travel to a certain extent and the (client) organization is virtual enough to allow for that type of structure, then we'll hire people in a whole variety of locations," says KPMG Consulting's Huurman.

He's seeing a big demand for technology workers, especially those skilled in telecommunications, in places like Mexico, where the telecom infrastructure has been neglected for years--but now needs updating to compete in the Internet economy.

Workers skilled in designing the front ends of websites can't be found fast enough.

"The whole website programming design side is just on fire at the moment," Solomons says. "And I can't see it going anywhere but up. This is something that is not a secret at the moment. (But) the alarming thing is... there're just no people anymore for these positions. Everyone is looking for the same three people.

"This problem is so acute that companies aren't able to hire the people that they need, and they're having to go to outside companies to do their web development."

One area that Solomons sees getting "hotter and hotter" is customer service. E-tailers are "finding that if they can't provide a more dynamic experience to people on the site, if they can't bring the site alive (and) provide real kinds of assistance to people when they have questions, then they may lose people."

While a career in customer service hasn't generally been viewed as something for college graduates, Solomons sees that changing.

"Customer service is kind of graduating from being a needed, yet sort of elementary function, to something that is critical to making sales happen and keeping people happy and interested," he argues.

"Which means that the kinds of people that need to do those jobs need to be brighter."

The same Internet companies also will be looking for more business development professionals, who are needed to boost market share in short order.

"We are looking at companies right now that are looking at hiring 30 of these people at one time when they're starting up," Solomons says, "because their focus is `we've got to go out and form as many partnerships as we can as quickly as we can.'"

Transportation, telecommunications, health care and education are among the industries that Caela Farren, president of Annandale, Va.-based MasteryWorks Inc. (http://www.masteryworks.com), expects to see grow during the next several years. MasteryWorks helps corporations attract, retain, and develop employees for the future.

As employees spend more time working, the need for consultants who can "help people manage their work and life better and get rid of more stress" will increase, Farren says. And as the Internet offers more self-service, "I think we're going to see the need for even more financial planners, now that everybody can be their own broker," she adds.

"You can only be good in so many things. As people become more affluent, there's still going to be people available" to handle things like searching on the Internet for the best travel deals, Farren argues.

With companies focusing on employee teams and working more with consultants and alliance partners, the demand for project managers will grow. "People are looking all over the planet for good project managers," she says. "There are not enough."

And skilled professionals are needed to efficiently find the staple of a knowledge economy: information.

"We're going to need a new kind of librarian," she says, "who can run and do searches" both online and from printed publications.

"People with people skills, people who can think on their feet, people who can problem solve are already in huge demand--we can't fill the jobs we have," Farren says.

It's clear that in-demand jobs go beyond the computer field. And that there's something for nearly everyone.
Still, too many people, author Farr says, think that "they have to pursue the top 10 fastest growing jobs."

But, he adds, "What's hot is what you really want to do. That's what's hot. There is a demand for people who are passionate and driven and particularly good at all kinds of things. And so the hot jobs, the right hot job, is the one that you really want to do."

(C)1998-2008, Todd W. Carter