It's the term for what I was expressing. It's fine if you haven't seen it before. At some point, I hadn't either. That's normal. It means you have to pay more

It's the term for what I was expressing. It's fine if you haven't seen it before. At some point, I hadn't either. That's normal. It means you have to pay more to keep getting the same amount & quality of labor regardless of the financial situation in your own industry, because alternative careers available to the same pool of upcoming workers can pay a lot more than they used to (typically thanks to productivity improvements or technology introducing entirely new types of jobs) while productivity of your own workers hasn't increased much, if any. One expects especially to see it in jobs that can't effectively "scale" labor, despite improvements in technology. It is, of course, also possible to let quality slip instead of increasing pay. For fields with fairly inelastic demand, like healthcare, you might even get away with it. This is what I expect to see happen in these two fields. I don't think we'll increase pay & improve working conditions enough to maintain a similar level of quality (in the case of education, at least, I think it's already been heading that way for years). We've kinda tried to fix this, with things like MOOCs (in education), but results haven't been great even under ideal conditions, and some parts of the field (early childhood education) seem especially naturally-resistant to solutions involving technology. Nurses and such are in a similar position—computers and all that jazz have helped some, but not all that much, while productivity and pay for (say) office workers with a decent head on their shoulders have shot up, often alongside less-demanding work, making those more appealing alternatives for young adults choosing a career, or mid-career folks in these fields who finally get fed up and start looking at their options.