In the age of automation, what’s scarce are problem-solving skills.

Readers responded positively to my recent essay on the emerging economy and jobs: A Teachable Moment: to the Young Person Who Complained About Her Job/Pay at Yelp and Was Promptly Fired

Many young people are stuck in the purgatory of minimum wage and/or part-time jobs: that raises the question: how do you get out of minimum-wage purgatory?

The conventional answer is, “get another college degree.” Perhaps this once had some value, but this now yields rapidly diminishing returns due to supply and demand: everyone else seeking an escape from low-wage/part-time purgatory is pursuing the same strategy, so there is an oversupply of over-credentialed job seekers.

As I point out in my book on jobs and careers in the new economy, Get a Job, Build a Real Career and Defy a Bewildering Economy, issuing 500,000 MBAs does not automatically create jobs for all those graduates: credentials don’t create jobs.

What creates jobs are opportunities to earn high profits via developing profitable skills. Not all businesses are highly profitable; low-margin businesses don’t make enough profit to pay high wages.

Take a high-skill person and put them in a low-margin setting such as fast-food prep (very fast-paced and hard work), and their labor can only generate a limited value for the employer.

Value and profits flow to what’s scarce. Low-skill labor is not scarce–it’s abundant, hence the low wages paid for low-skill work. Workers with credentials are no longer scarce, with the exception of physicians and nurses and a few categories of advanced degrees such as computer science.

What’s scarce are opportunities to earn big profits. Those who have never started a business or operated a business always assume a busy restaurant (for example) is very profitable–but this is not necessarily true. A restaurant with high rent, high labor costs and high overhead expenses could be losing money even if it’s filled with customers every night.