What the recession of 2008 - 2009 has demonstrated most clearly is that many of the jobs and careers won't work any longer. Fact of the matter, if you check out the 3,000 or so tomes for sale on career you're going to find very little substantial help. Although they offer advice on everything from resume writing to the color of your career parachute, they're all built on a single 75 year-old notion of what a career should look like. If you're older than 30 you probably know what I'm talking about--a step-by-step climb up the corporate ladder. Since the 1970s the corporate ladder has been going the way of the Dodo bird--killed by technology, global competition and flatter and flatter organizational structures.
Charles Handy, the British sage of business, first redefined career a little over a dozen years. Since a number of his educated guesses have panned out in striking fashion, I'll go with his understanding of career: The pursuit of meaning in one's role at work. He says that meaning comes to those who develop a personal sense of direction, continuity and connection to their work. Direction is pursuit of a cause. Continuity comes from choosing work that will have a future long after you stop (Boy, that's an important issue for those who've seen jobs and careers disappear.) Connection comes from the selection of a community (a work family) that you can identify with and help build.
By paying close attention to what's happening globally, the impact of technology and the future of different organizations, I suggest that there are no more than four career models.
Let's deal with the most familiar one first: the traditional career. There are still opportunities for those who want to stick with a firm and climb the ladder to the executive suite. Even if the traditionalist has staying power, some organizations don't. They disappear readily, get heavily flattened and the number of rungs in the ladder limits your potential. Although most professionals think this is the most secure career, the recession has shown that it's dicey at best.
The second career is for the entrepreneurial and risk-taking souls in our midst. Plenty of those have a great deal of success, but whatever the business you create, the statistics are not very encouraging. I've been in my own business for more than 25 years, but literally hundreds have failed in my community over that time period.
The third career model is that of the expert. This is a professional with little interest in general management. His task is to accumulate a focused knowledge-base with a lot of depth and terrific expertise. Tom Peters raves about this one--and you can check out his input via google. It does demand you never stop learning--not a bad thing--and that you select an expertise that won't go away. One of my neighbors is a SAP expert. He moves from company to company selling his expertise. He tends to stay at a firm until project needs are exhausted and that may mean from three to five years. He's had no difficulty in this recession in contrast to some who've struggled.
The best career model for the typical professional is the one I alluded to in yesterday's post: the portfolio model, what an IBM director calls the T-shaped career. This is a career focused on a depth knowledge of one or two technologies (a technology is any business function) topped off with a wide portfolio of skills. Like the expert model, it's going to require continuous learning. You just have to take-charge of your learning. In later blogs I'll discuss the skills of necessity, because they won't be changing significantly over the next 25 years or so.