Looking for some kind of engagement

I have spent the past week in 'training' for my new job. The training is really really tedious and boring, especially because I have had a smilar job in the not so recent past.

I have spent osme time therefore thinking about what I want in the future and what the job market looks like for people like me. This was further compounded by a discussion at work, about how a university degree is not enough as well as a recent article in the NY times about how a lot of older workers are unemployed and not working. (of course this points to a large problem about the accuracy of unemployment figures. In economic theory you have to be looking for a job to be considered unemployed. Only those who are actively looking are therefore counted in unemployment statistics.)

I finished reading Jeremy Rifkin's book The end of work a little while ago and it seems that the example from the NY times article seems to reinforce the immediacy of the problems that he identifies.

Now I don't want to get into a technical argument in this point, but I feel like there are few opportunities for young people these days to find decent work doing something engaging and actually getting paid a decent wage. Sure tons of NGOs hire people, but a lot of it is volunteer or low paying jobs.

I guess I shouldn't complain because I have a job, but I need to find something that engages me. I see a lot of people in my situation, they graduated from University and couldn't find anything in thier field and end up working a low-paid service industry job. I'm not knocking the service industry but it's starting to feel like a waste of my job. These are jobs that need to be done, but at the same time most of the jobs that are created nowadays are low paying, low skilled service jobs. Where have all the other jobs gone?

I think i'm a bit lucky because the boomers are strating to retire soon, so hopefully the shortage created by their loss will allow me to find something more meaningful. But i feel bad for many of the people 10 years ahead of me, they really seem to have been screwed by the boomers.

One thing I was also thinking about recently was how the move to 24 hour a day businesses, wether grocery stores, or shopping malls moving to later hours has provided a boom in service industry jobs. This can't continue forever, I wonder if anybody has done any research on anything like that.