Read To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others for Free Online Page A

with selling on top of her operational and managerial duties. “Every day,” she told me, “is a sales day.”
    Ed-Med
    Larry Ferlazzo and Jan Judson are a husband and wife who live in Sacramento, California. They don’t pickle cucumbers or parse code. But they, too, represent the future. Ferlazzo is a high school teacher, Judson a nurse-practitioner—which means that they inhabit the fastest-growing job sector of the United States and other advanced economies.
    One way to understand what’s going on in the world of work is to look at the jobs people hold. That’s what the U.S. Occupational Employment Statistics program, which I cited here , does. Twice a year, it provides an analysis of twenty-two major occupational groups and nearly eight hundred detailed occupations. But another way to understand the current state and future prospects of the workforce is to look at the industries where those jobs emerge. For that, we go to the Monthly Employment Report—and it shows a rather remarkable trend.
    The chart below depicts what has happened so far this century to employment in four sectors—manufacturing, retail trade, professional and business services (which includes law, accounting, consulting, and so on), and education and health services.

    While jobs in the manufacturing sector have been declining for forty years, as recently as the late 1990s the United States still employed more people in that sector than in professional and business services. About ten years ago, however, professional and business services took the lead. But their ascendance proved short-lived, because rising like a rocket was another sector, education and health services—or what I call Ed-Med. Ed-Med—which includes everyone from community college instructors to proprietors of test prep companies and from genetic counselors to registered nurses—is now, by far, the largest job sector in the U.S. economy, as well as a fast-growing sector in the rest of the world. In the United States, Ed-Med has generated significantly more new jobs in the last decade than all other sectors combined. And over the next decade, forecasters project, health care jobs alone will grow at double the rate of any other sector. 15
    At its core, Ed-Med has a singular mission. “As teachers, we want to move people,” Ferlazzo, who teaches English and social studies in Sacramento’s largest inner-city high school, told me. “Moving people is the majority of what we do in health care,” added his nurse-practitioner wife.
    Education and health care are realms we often associate with caring, helping, and other softer virtues, but they have more in common with the sharp-edged world of selling than we realize. To sell well is to convince someone else to part with resources—not to deprive that person, but to leave him better off in the end. That is also what, say, a good algebra teacher does. At the beginning of a term, students don’t know much about the subject. But the teacher works to convince his class to part with resources—time, attention, effort—and if they do, they will be better off when the term ends than they were when it began. “I never thought of myself as a salesman, but I have come to the realization that we all are,” says Holly Witt Payton, a sixth-grade science teacher in Louisiana. “I’m selling my students that the science lesson I’m teaching them is the most interesting thing ever,” which is something Payton firmly believes. The same is true in health care. For instance, a physical therapist helping someone recover from injury needs that person to hand over resources—again, time, attention, and effort—because doing so, painful though it can be, will leave the patient healthier than if he’d kept the resources to himself. “Medicine involves a lot of salesmanship,” says one internist who prefers not to be named. “I have to talk people into doing some fairly unpleasant things.” 16
    Of course, teaching and healing aren’t