March 20
Career Pathing and the New World of Work
Topics: The nature of the new world of work. Why job security is dead. Taking personal responsibility. Career pathing in the new millennium. Why everyone is now self-employed. Historical models of the workplace.
Here are some of the ways the world of work has changed since 1978 (a mere quarter-century ago):
Are these changes temporary or permanent?
Theory junkies like me like to speculate on the question, "Are the changes we see part of a straight-line linear trend from which there is no returning, or do they represent only one half of a recurrent cycle that will ultimately lead us back to a world very similar to that we once knew and have seemingly left behind?" This is a very old question (most good questions are; no dummies, your ancestors) but a difficult one to resolve.
Some thinkers (like William Bridges) plunk themselves down firmly on the linear-trend side of the fence: a whole new world is emerging, and the economic and social landscape will never again be the same. (Hence, Bridges confidently predicts that by the year 2050, no one in the world will have a "job" in the sense in which most of us still think of that term today. Job titles, job descriptions, payroll departments, the human resource function, all will be gone, banished that now classic phrase to the dustbin of history.)
Others (like William Strauss and Neil Howe) are just as stubbornly on the cyclic-pattern side of the fence: history repeats itself, like the systolic and diastolic phases of the human heartbeat, and what seems brand new has actually happened again and again throughout history and will presumably continue to do so. Generational cycles repeat themselves endlessly; what we're seeing now is what has always been true when so-called Nomadic or Reactive generations (most recently, Gen X) are rising adults, and the trends start swinging back into balance as soon as the next Crisis or saecular Winter (of which Osama bin Laden and his ilk may be an early forerunner?) hits the culture. (The last saecular Winter was the Great Depression and World War II era.)
This isn't just a dry-as-dust academic matter, for it may govern how you prepare for your own vocational future. If the linearists are right, for instance, organizational loyalty is a fossil; from now and until the end of time, successful workers will think primarily in terms of loyalty to their profession, not to their employer. But if the cylicists are right, while loyalty has been on the wane for some time (in 1953, no one wanted to be self-employed; in 1993, everyone wanted to), the cycle should soon begin to turn, if it hasn't already, and loyalty will again become popular (even trendy), and eventually an essential part of a successful person's work mindset. (Workforce magazine recently ran an article titled "Loyalty May Become Cool Again" -- obviously written from the cyclicist point of view.)
Approaches to career pathing
In a world like the one described above, it's no longer the case that "one size fits all" -- one single, universal approach to career self-management cannot possibly work for everyone. Career expert Betsy Jaffe outlines four different "career shapes" that exist in today's world of work. Which of them best fits you? Why? (Each has its own unique pattern of assets and liabilities.) Conveniently, the name of each career shape begins with the same letter, or as they used to say on Sesame Street, "Today's program is brought to you by the letter C."
Career shape #1: The classic career
The first career shape is called "classic" because everyone who was employed 50 years ago -- in 1953 -- had a career that looked pretty much like this one, or at least aspired to it. (If Strauss and Howe are right, this is the career shape that predominates during the Spring season of every cultural saeculum; and, conversely, it is the one that falls most out of favor during every Autumn.) One might define this career as "climbing the ladder of success"; deciding early on a career, beginning with an entry-level position in that field, and rising predictably and steadily through the ranks (ideally, with a single company) until you finally reached the top of the ladder, where you remained until you were old enough to be retired with a fat pension and a gold watch. (You would then spend your declining years winding that watch.)
Of course, contemporary (Autumnal) market pressures have put significant stresses on the classic career, as many classic careerists found to their dismay in the late 80's and early 90's when the word "downsizing" first became part of everyday parlance. Today, the "new classic" version of this career shape still emphasizes linearity, vertical career growth, and upward career mobility, but not necessarily within the same company or the same industry.
Note that inherent in the classic career is the notion that advancement and promotion means moving increasingly away from specialist roles and into more generalist (managerial) roles. This is one of the reasons why the classic career never really worked for everyone (although, in the 1950's, everyone had to pay lip service to it, or act as though it did work): because it is geared more to people who are "hard-wired" in the direction of generalist, versus specialist, roles (it rewards managers more than individual contributors). As a matter of personal career self-management, it is extremely important for you to decide early on in your career (or belatedly if you have never thought about it before) whether you are more of a specialist or more of a generalist, because this may largely dictate your choice of career shapes. Specialists focus on (and mostly enjoy) depth -- become expert in a specific content area or branch of knowledge. Generalists focus on (and mostly enjoy) breadth -- wearing a bunch of different hats. Which are you? Of course, whatever the answer, you need to maintain an appropriate balance between the two extremes, lest you become lopsided. (Readers of Dilbert can easily relate to the stereotypes of the excessive generalist, like the manager who can't tell the difference between a laptop and an Etch-a-Sketch, and the excessive specialist, who is incapable of carrying on a conversation about anything other than asynchronous mode transfer protocols.)
A problem with the classic career is that it implies (and works best within) a traditionally constituted -- that is, pyramidal -- organization. And, of course, pyramids, by definition, narrow at the top: at each successive level, there is room for fewer and fewer individuals. The result? Most people working within the classic career shape can expect, at some time in their lives (the highest time of risk being in midlife or mid-career) to be plateaued. Knowing how to deal productively with career plateauing -- so that one can do something more useful than simply "coast until retirement" -- is a mission-critical survival skill for classic careerists in any age.
Career shape #2: The concentric career
Specialists, from academics to engineers to neurosurgeons to attorneys -- the world's true "knowledge workers" -- never fit in well within the classic career (and, in fact, the best and brightest of them were exempted from its demands even in the 1950's, but not always without a price). Why? Because their hard-wired motives run in a direction opposite to that of the traditional general manager, who seeks an increasing scope (breadth) of responsibilities that necessarily involve leaving in-depth technical information behind early in his or her career. A true specialist type likes nothing better than becoming expert about the 80% of knowledge that few others in his or her organization care about or have the time to be bothered with. For such a person, being promoted to a managerial position may feel like a death sentence: first, because it takes him or her away from the specialist roles and knowledge that s/he loves; second, because it calls on a different set of skills that may be weak suits; third, because one can never "back down" the organizational pyramid (in companies that buy heavily into the classic career model, anyway) without being seen or labeled as a "failure". (Thus, in the 1950's, savvy specialists had to find ways to avoid undesirable promotions -- what Laurence J. Peter called, with tongue firmly in cheek, "the strategy of creative incompetence".)
Where the classic career focuses on vertical growth, the concentric career emphasizes lateral growth (becoming better and better at one's area of chosen expertise). Hence while generalists often compare themselves to others within the same organization, specialists often compare themselves to their "knowledge peers" across organizations and tend to identify much more strongly with their profession than with their employer. (In a day and age in which organizations can no longer make lifelong promises to employees, this may be more adaptive than maladaptive, but like most other things in life can sometimes be carried too far, in which case the specialist gets labeled as "not a team player".)
A core danger for concentric careerists is that of overspecializing or becoming too narrow -- "learning more and more about less and less until finally you know everything about nothing", at which point, if you are an academic, you are granted tenure. (That's a joke -- probably mostly gallows humor since I am not tenured myself. Please don't be like the character Rex Tangle in Dilbert, who argued, "If I were meant to have a sense of humor, the company would have issued me one.") A person who is overspecialized may lose his or her ability to communicate effectively across departmental lines (with those who do not share his or her domain-specific knowledge), and can easily lose marketability and employability if s/he does not maintain sufficient second-tier, fallback skills. (The label "overqualified" is usually applied to such people when they are on the job market. My usual response in job interviews, although not all employers respond favorably, is, "Tell me how stupid you want me to be, and I'll do that.")
Career shape #3: The concurrent career
The first two career shapes share in common a single, focused goal, whether that goal is to increase in breadth of responsibility and authority (the classic career) or to increase in depth of knowledge and domain-specific expertise (the concentric career). In contrast, the remaining two career shapes are more divergent (multiple goals) than convergent (a single goal). That's why, in the traditionalism of Spring (circa 1955), those who pursued them would have been seen as abject failures... but in the explorative, individualistic season of Autumn (circa 1995), people who pursued these paths (like the dot-com millionaires) were seen as cutting-edge successes. And so it goes... which is why you shouldn't hitch your wagon too strongly to today's star, because tomorrow it may become a supernova. Sic transit gloria mundi -- and Tuesday, as Rex Stout once said, is often even worse. (Another joke, which only Latin scholars will appreciate.)
The concurrent careerist is a person who has taken seriously Martin Yate's advice to have three careers going at once: a core career (that pays the lion's share of the bills today), an entrepreneurial career (which often, though not always, involves literal entrepreneurship in the form of launching a self-contained small business, though it can sometimes mean simply "moonlighting" in a field completely unrelated to the core career; either way, this not only supplements present income, but provides a fallback position and holds potential for paying the lion's share of the bills tomorrow), and a dream career (often a hobby or avocational passion that may not pay anything at all -- yet -- but which keeps a person's dreams alive, especially if the first two careers provide more in the way of financial than of psychological rewards). In this person's life, there is not a single center of vocational gravity; there are three (or more) of them.
The big danger for concurrent careerists? Burnout! After all, keeping three different careers going at once is exhausting, especially if one also has (or wants to have) a personal life. I am often reminded (older readers, meaning those my age, will be able to relate to this analogy, anyway) of the man, a periodic guest on the Ed Sullivan Show, who would balance spinning dinner plates on top of bamboo poles, and would keep them spinning by running frantically from one to the next. One pole too many, and all the plates came crashing down at once: don't let this happen to you if you opt for the concurrent career path. (How you avoid it is by knowing your limits and by learning how to say no. Be honest about your limits, please: denial is not just a river in Egypt.)
Career shape #4: The crazy quilt career
This last career shape is one that linear, achievement-minded types (die-hard classic careerists, especially) probably look down upon -- but may, in their heart of hearts, secretly envy from time to time. The crazy quilter is a person who (to a greater or lesser extent, through some combination of desire and necessity) has opted out of the "traditional" career pathways, and has chosen to chart his or her own course, find his or her own road (as the Saab manufacturers tell us all to do), march to the beat of a different drummer (or kazooist or flugelhornist).
What is a crazy quilt career? It is an "anything goes with anything" work/life: an ever-changing kaleidoscope of mix-and-match life roles, full- and part-time, conventional and entrepreneurial, "permanent" (to the extent any job can be permanent these days, which in Autumn is never) and explicitly temporary, paying and unpaying. To this person, work is a part of life, but it can never take center stage in life. It is a component of the good life, but never more than that; and a job that interferes too strongly with important nonwork priorities will probably be scrapped, regardless of the effect this may have on one's resume. (Note the connections to the "life balance" theme of Schein's model, discussed earlier. In fact, you should be able to see parallels between his model and all of Jaffe's career shapes... can you?)
The big danger for crazy quilters is that their chosen life may be largely uninterpretable to others. They may see an underlying thread of logic (or, more likely, of core values) that run through all their different life choices, but others -- notably, human resource directors and others who are employment gatekeepers -- may not. Their resumes may offer a fascinating stream of short-term jobs that seem completely unrelated to one another (food server to balloon pilot to alligator wrestler to water ski instructor to tax preparer to steeplejack). A person who overdoes the crazy quilt approach can seem flighty -- hence, in the extreme, unemployable -- to others. (Note, Strauss and Howe fans, that this style peaks in popularity during a cultural Summer, when everybody is "doing their own thing, man" and rebellion against "the Establishment" is a badge of honor; and it is driven almost completely underground, unless required as a matter of economic survivalism, during the harsh years of Winter, when collective security is at stake and there is no time for the culture to tolerate deviants or to treat them kindly. Aging hippies always become the conformity police in the end: yesterday the Summer of Love, tomorrow the "Grey Champions.")