When we think about our audiences as speakers, we think about their demographics, or the industry they are in, or their functional roles in their organizations, or their positions in the hierarchy.  So, for example, we might be talking to millennials in health care, working in HR, and heads of the talent division with a few people reporting to them.

Then, we’ll conduct a pre-speech interview with the meeting planners and maybe a representative sample of the audience and ask them, not in so many words, but in an open-ended way, what their points of pain are.  We’ll learn that they are burned out, with too many conflicting desiderata and demands, facing a talent shortage in their region, and a de-layered org chart that means they are doing the work that 3 people previously did.

Job done, right?  We are ready to keynote.  We know that audience.

And yet, if we stop there, we are missing a fundamental reason as to why they might be unhappy in their work.  A recent study asked a different set of questions of a huge database of US workers – over a million – to find out how they feel about their careers.

If you ask people what kind of job they would like to do, the most common answer is that people would like to do something ‘artistic’.  And how many jobs are there filling that category?  Not many.  About 2% of the available jobs are rated artistic.

So right away that means we have something around 35 million people who are doing something that doesn’t suit them.  It’s not just the struggling actor who takes a waiter’s job to make ends meet – it’s 35 million people.  And to make matters worse, the study found that we become more enamored of artistic pursuits as we get older.  OK, boomer – good luck to you!

To make matters worse yet again, the jobs that are most available are ‘detail-oriented’ and ‘systematic’ – think coders and data scientists.  Some 30 percent of jobs going begging right now are in that category.

I wish I’d done better in math in high school.

Continuing with the numbers, then, some 26 million people are working in jobs of a systematic nature that wish they were painting watercolors. That’s a lot of unhappy workers.

Further, more jobs like plumbing, and building, and engineering are available than there are people who want to do them.  These are called ‘realistic’ jobs in the study, and they have lower barriers to entry than those artistic jobs – but still not enough people want to do them.

In contrast, there are fewer scientific and research-oriented jobs available than people who want to fill them.  Go, STEM!

Will AI fix these imbalances and make for a happier workforce?  The projection are not rosy.  Apparently, we’ll need more of the systematic jobs to run all that AI.  And AI will take over some of the relatively few artistic jobs. And AI can’t do plumbing.  So overall, AI will make matters worse in this matter of balancing workers and work.

Is there any good news here?  Only that you can find job satisfaction in other ways.  Get paid a lot, have a great boss, and a wonderful team of champions to work with, and you’ll be pretty happy, even if you are doing math.

But I digress.  The takeaway here is that in order to understand your audiences, speakers, you need to think about them in a variety of ways beyond the usual ones.  So that when you stride confidently to center stage with a big smile plastered on your face, take a deep breath, and begin speaking, you will do so with a keen understanding of who is sitting in front of you.