The problem lies in the way we are educating our young people today, and for the matter, older generations as well, who are constantly being retrained by going back to educational institutions or via general workplace training. Our schools in their methodology were designed in the 19th century, when we were firmly in the Industrial Age. Very little has changed in the 21st century, except the tools we have at our disposal to teach. The general goal of our school system is to prepare students for a specific job, which they are supposed to hold for 40+ years, at which point they will be ale to retire. The first issue is that in a bygone era it was the responsibility of the organisation you worked for all those years and the government to look after you in retirement. Now of course it is the responsibility of the individual. The second issue is that words like downsizing, redundancies and lay-offs were not in the vocabulary of society in generations past. Also people go through a lot more career changes both within industries and to other industries than in the past. The final major issue is that our life expectancy has increased and thus our post-working life based on traditional retirement ages is a lot longer. So even people who do follow some sort of traditional plan of working 40+ years at an average decent salary and retiring at 65 will probably still run out money. Basically both the content of what we are teaching our youth and methodology we are using in terms of what we value as important are severely out dated. In fact a leading global economist recently remarked that he thinks Adult Education will be the single biggest industry in the 21st Century. Go to http://www.jiveskool.com for a guide to Aussie schools