Employee Obsolescence and Retraining: An Approach to Human Resource Restructuring

Futurists predict that technological advances, increased and expanded competition, and shortened product life cycles will significantly impact the U.S. economy in the late twentieth and early twenty‐first centuries. This impact will be at least as dramatic as the industrial revolution's effect on the nineteenth‐century economy. Peter Drucker states that in the next twenty years, manufacturing employment will drop from 21 percent of the work force to 10 percent, eliminating 10 to 15 million jobs. At least an equal number of service positions will become obsolete as banking, insurance, transportation, health care, communications, and other industries continue to utilize more advanced technologies.