Some Experience Required

Spring-boarding off a post by Catherine Rampell, Andrew Samwick has some thoughts on job retraining: 

Even if the employment gains in this recovery will have to come from new jobs, it is not necessarily the workers whose entire occupations are disappearing that will have to fill the new jobs in emerging fields.  There is far more substitutability among workers than that.  These displaced workers may keep their current skill set and put downward pressure on the wages of all workers with those skill sets in all industries -- not just the ones that are shrinking.  That downward pressure on wages will in turn cause the workers for whom retraining presents the smallest obstacles or the largest potential benefits to seek the new skill sets.

(Image via PZ Myers)