The Working World in 10 Years

Reading Friedman's book has made me seriously consider what the world will be like once I graduate from college and enter the real world, as a real adult, looking for a real job. At this point in my life and in my schooling, I am still not 100% sure what I want to do with my life, but I am currently thinking about going to Physical Therapy School. I have heard that in this tough economic time for our country, graduate school is the best option for college graduates. My mother has said this countless times, and she was overjoyed when I began thinking about going to graduate school instead of going out and trying to get a job as soon as I graduate. I know so many people who just graduated this past year and still cannot find a job. Many of them are trying to get back into school just so they will have something to do, and to try to add more to their list of skills to make them more marketable. If the world is like this right now, with so many people unable to get jobs, it seems as though it will only get worse in the future. Graduates, like me, who graduate with a liberal arts degree, seem like they have more to worry about than enineers, teachers, or others in the same types of fields who will never be short of job offerings.
Once I kind of decided on Physical Therapy school, I kind of thought that I would be safe as far as having a job. It seems like a job that will never become obsolete, and I would always have a job, probably anywhere I wanted. But as I am reading more of Friedman's book, I am realizing that so many of the jobs that we never think of as being in danger of being replaced by things such as outsourcing will actually be able to be outsourced soon in the future, if not now. According to Friedman, the only jobs that will be safe are the ones that cannot be outsourced in any way. And while a majority of the role of Physical Therapist is one that must be physically present with a patient much of the time, there are many ways in which parts of this role can be outsourced. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, employment for Physical Therapists is actually expected to increase in the coming years. However, each individual practice is likely to become more specialized in one area. Individual hospitals and practices are likely to become so specialized that they may treat only one problem, so if a patient comes into a general hospital with something wrong, they will be sent to another hospital that specializes particularly in what they are having problems with. Because of this, therapists will have to be trained more extensively in just one area, and be expected to be more knowledgable about one particular thing. Already, it is impossible to be able to practice Physical Therapy without a Doctorate degree. It is already becoming a field that is extremely specialized and advanced, and it will only continue becoming this way more and more in the years to come. It may be more difficult for me to get a job as a Physical Therapist because of the competition coming out of graduate school, since that seems to be what most people are doing now.
It seems as though most jobs will become more and more difficult to attain in the years to come. With more people going to graduate schools straight out of college, it seems as though there will be less people looking for jobs when they finish their undergraduate degree. However, once everyone begins to finish graduate schools, there will be just as many people looking for jobs, hoping that having a graduate degree will make them more desirable to hiring companies.