When I talk about careers, I’m talking about the conventional way of looking at a “career”. Just to be clear, let’s explore this in a little detail. To many people, a career means choosing a path (either through luck, planning, default or other), that will last until that dim distant date called retirement. Remember retirement, that’s the thing we all set out to do when we’re 40! This career is likely to involve working for 3 - 5 companies during your working life, building your skills and experience steadily over time, probably becoming a specialist in an area and almost certainly managing others. Key though is the assumption that you’ll be doing similar things within a fairly narrowly defined area. In some countries this view of careers is particularly strong e.g. in Japan where even now, the idea of joining a company for life prevails.
If that’s what a career is, then careers are dead! OK, some professions (Doctors come to mind) will remain professions and although the pace of change in these professions will pick up, those of us starting out as Doctors are more likely to finish up as Doctors than other “careers”. I’ve spoken before about the research in the US showing that young adults entering the world of work now will have 14 different roles by the age of 38. Hard to believe? OK, in Europe we’re often behind the US (although we’ll hopefully never copy their eating habits), but let’s consider that hard to believe statement. Work from home is now common, companies are increasingly hiring on short term contracts. The nature of the relationship between individuals and companies is changing forever. Companies don’t pretend that they can guarantee a job for any length of time and individuals don’t pretend that they are going to be loyal for any length of time.
Most work in business in the future is going to be conducted on a project basis. Don’t expect companies to put these project teams together either. We’re all going to have to develop skills in project management and in working virtually with people from all over the world. My upcoming posts are going to explore project careers in more detail. Cheers!
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Tags: careers are dead, project careers
I taught a careers class in 1995 and came across a book by Jeremy Rifkin titled
“The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era” published by Putnam Publishing Group. 1995
The book describes how jobs will continue to disappear as machines replace more and more of the tasks that people used to do. Many of the ideas in the book have come to pass. The rise of self-check in grocery stores, the ATM machine for banks, the answering machine on the phone for customer service are all examples of machines taking over for humans. I for one am worried about the future. The only people who benefit in his opinion are a small group of elites with considerable education and ability to multi-task. For myself, I can see the the world’s population is in for a rough ride as work shifts into something new we can only see with a crystal ball.
As the legacy died so did the related jobs
I am a firm believer that it is never safe to look into the future with eyes of fear. There will be turmoil and there will be crisis, but there were turmoil and crisis in the past as well!
A project based career (whatever that means) has been a real option since the dawn of the web and as technology has improved, working a project based career has gotten easier and easier. And frankly, why not? Working a project based career means that you can keep learning new things (if that is your bag). Or, it means that you can specialize in an area you are amazingly passionate about. The opportunities are endless in a project based world.
Watch Linkedin for a little while and count how many people with regular jobs are also looking for consulting gigs. We’re all slowly becoming consultants…..