Making Bets on Careers

You takes your chances in some careers

The Phantom's father spent his career thinking about labor, jobs, careers. It started when he was in his 20's, during the Great Depression. He had a job in an employment office and he saw what happened to people as they pursued jobs, lost them, looked again.
He was first generation in America, and he was trying to figure out how this country worked, and in the 1930's the sources of information came down to talking with your friends, who were often as confused as you, and reading.
He read a lot.
He concluded being a doctor was a good bet. Doctors did better than most during the Depression, as far as he could see. Lawyers sometimes, sometimes not.  Government work was good:  Local government was excellent: School teachers, policemen seemed secure, and security was more important during the 1930's than the prospect of hitting it big, striking it rich.
He was still advising his sons to go to medical schoolin the 1960's because medicine had been good for thirty years and as far as he could see, would be good for another 30.
And you only work 30 or 40 years, for the most part.
But he could not have anticipated the computer age, with its jobs which were not even imagined in the 1970's.  People who bet on computer jobs did better, for the most part.
Now, the golden rewards of medicine are fading--most doctors are employees, often well paid, but not always, not even the majority; that star is burning out now.
Lawyers aren't even employed in law, for the most part, and jobs for lawyers diminishing.
Teachers can still get some secure jobs, but even tenured professors don't know whether their jobs are safe. They won't be fired, individually, but entire departments are closed down in restructuring.
Tradesmen are still trying to make the right bet: Sheet metal workers have been displaced by computer driven machines and have shifted to other lines of skilled labor.
How does an individual make a bet now, about investing in training which may prove obsolete or poorly paid in just a few years? Every day, every year of training is a bet, a leap of faith. Student loans are more and more often a bad bet.
If individuals have trouble making these bets, how do governments set policies based on bets about which industries will provide jobs and which will dry up? Every day there is a story about some young person who took out big student loans to study cosmetology or fashion design or radio and broadcasting and you think: Well, that was a stupid bet. Some school took that poor sucker for a ride.

Each generation thinks its problems are unique, but those problems are usually just different versions of the same old problems.  People in the 1930's were confused about which training to pursue, which career paths to take because industrialization was changing the workplace--but for 20 or 30 years huge numbers of industrial workers made the right bet. They made cars in Detroit, got good wages and good pensions. Now that same bet is no longer a safe one. Would you encourage your son or daughter to go work for Boeing, making airplanes?

Now, people are flowing toward computers and information related fields rather than production of stuff you can hold.

Who can see whether or not that bet is a good one?

There were times when the government made projections about where the jobs would be, in general--in service sectors, industrial sectors, health or manufacturing.  Are there any reliable projections now?