The New Middlers

With an increasingly global world, Friedman believes that many middle class jobs, that currently are available, will be less accessable or available to future middle class people in America.

Friedman offers several categories of available jobs that middle class individuals can keep in this ever-changing, ever-adapting global world. With this flattening, job opportunites will be taken over by other countries and even advanced technologies. These "New Middlers" can safely hold a job if they can adequately hold one of these categories:

Great Collaborators and Orchestrators: New Middlers will have to have great communication and collaboration skills within their own company, local businesses, and businesses worldwide. Then, these local businesses will bring these global networks to the local scale.

Friedman writes, "These new middle collaboration jobs will be in sales, marketing, maintenance, and management, but what they will demand is the ability to be a good horizontal collaborator, comfortable working for a global company [...] and translating its services for the local market, wherever it may be. It is about being able to operate in, mobilize, inspire, and manage a multidimensional and multicultural workforce" (283).

The Great Synthesizers: New Middlers need to be creative, putting two unusual things together to create hot-selling products and services that will be at a high-demand for users.

Friedman calls these products and services "breakthroughs" (283). Common breakthroughs we know are search engines and mash-ups.

The Great Explainers: New Middlers bring "disparate things together" who have great explaining skills. They "see complexity but explain it with simplicity" (284). These jobs include managers, teachers, writers, producers, and journalists. In order to explain well, this person must have vast knowledge, great communication skills, and skills that can simplify tough information for others to better understand it.

The Great Leveragers: New Middlers will have to keep up with the changing technology, constantly reintegrating the newest advancements with their own business.

Friedman explains it well: "It's all about combining the best of what computers can do with the best of what humans can do, and then constantly reintegrating the new best practices the humans and innovating back into the system to make the whole--the machines and the people--that much more productive" (289).

The Great Adapters: New Middlers become "versatilists," encompassing the definition of the word: they are able to adapt to change, are competant in many areas, and have a vast amount of knowledge. They are looking to improve, not sitting comfortably in a job that runs the exact same way it has for the past thirty years. They are improving, changing, adapting, instead of regurgitating the same old, same old business/curricula/product/etc.

Friedman describes versatilists as "apply[ing] depth of skill to a progressively widening scope of situations and experiences, gaining new competencies, building relationships, and summing new roles [...] They are constantly learning and growing" (289).

The Green People: New Middlers should be connected to the enviornment, as much attention is needed on it during this time. Since more countries now are industrializing, more environmental problems are arising from this increase. We must become "sustainable" and "renewable."

Friedman explains sustainable and renewable as "renewable energies and environmentally sustainable systems" (293).

The Passionate Personalizers: New Middlers must not become alienated and isolated, but they should become socially engaging professionals in order to keep their jobs alive, especially when connecting with other companies and within one's own company. They are happy to be at their job, and you can tell. They are passionate about what they do, and they interact positively with their customers.

"Human beings are social animals who enjoy human contact" (294).

Friedman, then, writes that, "in future decades, as personal services come to be more predominant, that trend [stated above] seems likely to reverse--possibly leading to less alienation and greater job satisfaction" (295).

The Great Localizers: New Middlers must recognize that the global world is constantly adapting, so local businesses must shift with this change. Local businesses should listen to these new changes, and then make them available at the local level.

Friedman states, "Those who are successful at this will understand the emerging global infrastructure, and then adapt all the new tools it offers to local needs and demands" (295).

Within the next few years, if the "new middlers" do not adapt to these new job roles, then their jobs will be taken over, redefined, or lost from growing technological and global changes.

So what do we do now?