Make life more stable with more frequent job changes
- From: Marco <andymarcos635@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 05 Oct 2007 05:07:47 -0000
The flexibility message is generally useful, but this career coach/
cheerleader/whore absolves companies of any negative effects of career
instability. Instead, it's "cheer up, instability is a growth
experience, it's good for you, it's healthy, be pro-active in it !!
RahRahRah"
Marco
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Make life more stable with more frequent job changes
from Penelope Trunk's Brazen Careerist
February, 2007
It used to be that finding a good paying career was the path to adult-
life stability. Those days are over. What we think of as stability has
to change, and how we get to that stability has to change.
Here's a summary of the new employee of today's workplace: Most will
change jobs every two years. Most will start their adult life by
moving back in with their parents. Most say that money is not their
number one concern in evaluating a job.
You think it's a recipe for instability, right? But what else is there
to do? Work at IBM until you get a gold watch? There are no more jobs
like that - companies are under too much pressure to be lean and
flexible (read: layoffs, downsizing, reorgs), so workers have to be,
too (read: constantly on the alert for new job possibilities).
In fact, stability is a big goal for new workers today, precisely
because the old paths to stability don't necessarily work.
For example, staying in one job forever is today's recipe for career
suicide. At the beginning of one's career, it is nearly impossible to
find something right without trying a bunch of options. After that,
you will experience more personal growth from changing jobs frequently
than staying in one job for extended periods of time. And if you
change jobs frequently you build an adaptable skill set and a wide
network which are the keys to being able to find a job whenever you
need to.
Another example of the fact that common paths to stability no longer
work: Professional degrees used to be viewed as a safe path, but now
they box you into uncomfortable spots. PhD's are having lots of
trouble finding work due to the documented glut of qualified
candidates, and the MBA is not a huge help to your career unless you
go to a top-ten school. Doctors are having a hard time working a
schedule that accommodates kids and pay back school loans, which is
creating a surge in interest in the field of opthalmology - probably
not what your parents had in mind when they were encouraging medical
school.
The lack of stability is affecting people across the board: "All well-
educated workers, even those at the top, are at much greater risk of
economic reversals than they used to be," wrote Jacob Hacker,
professor of political science at Yale.
Finally, tried-and-true paths to financial stability are no longer
reliable either. This is the first generation that will not do better
financially than their parents. Anya Kamenetz describes in her book,
Generation Debt, that young people today are in a much worse financial
situation than their parents were, so the expectations for stability
have to change. This financial situation is due to increasing college
costs and decreasing parental ability to foot the bill. And real
salaries are decreasing for entry level jobs. So new workers start
life with more debt and less ability to pay it than their parents'
generation.
So it's not surprising that the new vision of stability is not a
house, two kids and pension. Most young people are priced out of
housing markets in the cities they want to live in, like Boston. San
Francisco and New York are seeing an increase in one-child families
because people can't afford two, and there are no more pensions.
Period. The goals are more fluid - and they do not focus on old tropes
of financial success like a house and a 401K.
Key values today are time and relationships. Stability means knowing
you can get yourself work that is fun and accommodates those values.
The stable people are those who can manage to consistently get work
they enjoy that pays their bills.
It used to be that you worked really hard and paid your dues so you
could retire rich and do what you love. But we know now that most
people don't really retire, so paying dues in order to get that is
nonsense. Stability is knowing you have a life where you can do what
you love, during your whole life, not just at the end.
The new way to find a good job - one that creates this stability - is
to change jobs. A lot. And to keep an open mind about what a job
really is, because what it is not is a lifelong commitment to one
company.
Here are ways to use frequent job changes to create stability in your
life:
1. Build up a strong skill set quickly.
Go to a job to work on a great project, and leave when your learning
curve flattens out. The faster you build up your skills to create an
expertise, the faster you will be able to set yourself apart from
everyone else, and find good jobs quickly.
2. Get good at making transitions.
There are moments in a person's life that typically throw everything
out of whack because you can't continue working in your job. Sickness,
relocation, unexpected wrenches in one's plan. When you are used to
changing jobs, and you have taught yourself to deal with work
transitions, then when your personal life requires huge transition,
your work can accommodate that instead of get in the way. Changing
jobs will be easy.
3. Make the most of the in-between-jobs time.
You can use job changes to make transition less risky. It's very hard
to know if you'll like something until you try it. If you have been in
corporate marketing for ten years and you want to try
entrepreneurship, that feels like a big risk. But if you think you
might like to start your own business but you're not sure, taking a
pause in between jobs to try this new business isn't such a risky move
at all.
4. Get out of paying your dues.
The idea of paying dues worked fine when there was actually payoff
(think: Retirement communities in Florida funded by pensions.) But
today paying dues doesn't have nearly the payoff it used to, and in
fact, creates instability by creating unreasonable expectations for a
job you become overly invested in. So get out of paying dues by
changing jobs frequently. Laura Vanderkam, workplace reporter for USA
Today, wrote a book called Grindhopping about how to hop from job to
job as a way to avoid paying your dues.
5. Keep your finances in order.
As long as you keep your overhead down, so that you don't need a
salary that requires 100-hour work weeks, then job hopping is actually
a way to ensure financial stability. You know you are not going to
stay at a job forever, and you don't know when it will end. But you
will always able to get work when your needs or your company's needs
change if you are good at changing jobs. This won't be true, however,
if you are a financial mess and have enormous overhead.
The best financial security today is to have great job hunting skills
that never stop. Go to the best job, do it until you find another best
job. This is the kind of person who will always be able to get money
when they need it.
And don't let people tell you that job hoppers will get penalized in
the marketplace. Generation Y is job hopping every other year, and
they are in incredible demand throughout the workplace. Demographics
are shifting, and forcing hiring practices to shift as well. Take
advantage of this. Create a stable life by getting good at changing
jobs.
.
- Follow-Ups:
- Re: Make life more stable with more frequent job changes
- From: Straydog
- Re: Make life more stable with more frequent job changes
- From: Old Pif
- Re: Make life more stable with more frequent job changes
- Prev by Date: Re: the space age and big research
- Next by Date: Re: Make life more stable with more frequent job changes
- Previous by thread: the space age and big research
- Next by thread: Re: Make life more stable with more frequent job changes
- Index(es):
Relevant Pages
|
