Confession of a Career Coach

 I have always loved the work I do. The idea of helping people find their way in the work world has always been my jam since 1994. However, in 2021, I'm beginning to wonder about what I'm actually helping people toward. We have told people to follow their bliss and do what they love. And you know what, many of those who have a degree of privilege have taken us up on that offer. But today, while we watch the decay of our planet, health systems in crisis, and frankly a lot of people still doing fairly meaningless work, I have to say perhaps we were a little shortsighted in our prescription of career well-being. 

It seems that the world of today is calling for altruistic people to step into the breach to attend to the really pressing matters at hand. It doesn't mean we all need to be scientists or health professionals, but we need to support the mechanisms that allow them and engineers to do their work. Sadly, this flies in the face of a capitalistic world where people's motivations can be more easily driven by financial gain over the health of people or the planet. 

I am certainly aware that most people I help are not looking for a philosophical approach to the issue of career choice and I will say I keep my philosophy mostly to myself. But, on this page, I allow myself to say what I'm thinking. Not because I have an answer for what to do about it, but because it needs to be said. Careers for tomorrow need to be better aligned to the problems that are out in front of us. We simply don't have armies big enough to do this for us. Though, if we did have a 2-year commitment to the public well-being, it would likely help a lot. We did some masterful things when we were in the height of the Depression in 1929 through the end of the Second World War by creating the WPA and the CCC.

During this time of a global pandemic, we have used our national treasury to prop up individuals and companies during the worst of it. I wonder if we had given people the choice of working toward improvements to our electric grid through renewable energy development or replacing gas-powered cars with electric ones, if now, as we are watching a war that has caused gasoline to spike around the world--could we have saved ourselves some misery?

Work is a powerful thing. It can literally change the world. We must somehow find the courage to labor toward a brighter future than to become a bloated society that crashes and burns. 

What Did We Learn From the Pandemic?

 Greetings. I started this blog back in the good old days, 2018 to be precise. A lot has happened since then. I'll jump ahead and say that we are now at the tail end (kind of) of a global pandemic that really showed how much of the work we do is "essential" and the rest of it. We learned that essential workers are often those who have jobs that will put their health at risk and allow the rest of us to stay mostly out of harm's way. We learned that there are high-skill people like doctors who were at-risk but had many precautions put into place, but also food industry workers and nursing home aides who were at higher risk who did not. We learned that doctors and nurses and allied workers were called heroes and meat processing workers and delivery drivers were expendable. 

It also dramatically showed us how many can and can't work from home. It gave a company called Zoom a huge boost in users and also revealed the weaknesses of the internet globally. We learned that working from home did not make us that much less productive, but wreaked havoc on a lot of folk's mental health and relationships with family and friends. We also learned that when vaccines were made available, there were many early adopters and a large number of never adopters making going back to work on-location a sort of a crapshoot. 

We learned that education for many people changed in a dizzying way at all levels and pretty much everybody was homeschooling, for better or worse. College and high school students missed out on important rites of passage as many graduation ceremonies were virtual and not particularly ceremonious. Young people earned degrees and then struggled to search for jobs or even have the desire to start a career.

More recently, people have dropped out of the workforce while employers struggle to find workers to fulfill their job openings. The why of it seems, on the surface, apparent. People are stressed out because of the uncertainty of a future where this could easily happen again and, also a recognition that we can do things differently where work is concerned that might actually make work better (or different) for more people. Out of necessity, the future of work will also have to value workers differently and lead to substantially better working conditions for more people including better pay, benefits, and recognition.

All Work is Temp Work

With very few exceptions, no person living today is guaranteed a job for life. In fact, it is probably more likely that most people living today will be career mercenaries, gig seekers, and/or job hoppers. As humans have been restructured/reduced to "resources," we work to serve the needs of our employers and their customers/clients, even if we are our own employer.

So, there are two things we can do with this information:
1) We can rage against the machine.
2) We can embrace the life of a temp worker.

And what of the temp worker? Didn't we always feel sorry for those people? Clearly, if they were any good at what they did, they'd have a full-time job like the rest of us, right? In the old paradigm, we could say this kind of thing and feel right to say it. But, not so much anymore. You see, the temp worker figured out something that the rest of us didn't, how to take advantage of the temp lifestyle.

When you are a temp, you are essentially lining up your next gig or two while you are working at the current job. As there is no loyalty to you, you treat the workplace as a non-human resource. You do your work, you get out. You seek out opportunities that have the longest timelines, but you also know that the the timeline is a best guess and you operate with the knowledge that a three week job may be a one week and done job.Hence you are always hungry and hunting. You rely on your fellow temp workers for lead and recommendation and reciprocate when you hear something.

When you are a temp, you are also looking at the mechanisms that may help you to find a good slot in an organization that you'd like to be a part. Temps are good at reading the room, knowing when to keep their heads down and when to stand out. These attributes can payoff for anybody.

Why Do We Worry About Career Ladders?

Career ladders are a relatively new thing for people to factor into their search for meaning in life. To help you see this, imagine yourself in the time of early humankind. Got the picture...

Now imagine the job postings back then: "Wanted: persons skilled at archery/spearing capable of downing a deer to feed a tribe. No English majors need apply." I imagine the career ladder for a caveperson was more like a step stool:
1) Learn how to sharpen sticks
2) Hunt, and
3) Die in a hunting accident.
I'm pretty sure the move toward an agrarian society was predicated on early man saying things like, "Have you seen , Og? Last time I saw him, he was going on a hunting trip."

Many a career has been spent on a stunted career ladder. Thus we have figured out that having more than one ladder to climb might be a good idea. As such, we have a lot more ladders, but also a lot more uncertainty about how to climb them or whether they are worth climbing.

I think it is time to do away with the ladder altogether. The catapult is a better metaphor for how modern careers tend to go. The catapult relies on preparing people to go far and fast which means that they must be prepared to do that through education, experiences, and rapid improvement.

With all the talk of increased AI and robotics to do things, this is likely lead to a type of career truncation where people retire sooner or, at the least, are doing jobs that are not good enough for robots. It makes sense to also consider whether career "chutes and ladders" is a possible future trend. Climb a little, slide a little, rinse, repeat.

The one thing that is likely to be true, the career ladder is dead, long live the career.

What Does Career Even Mean?

What does "career" even mean? I have been a career coach for awhile and even I have a problem with defining this. One definition: "an occupation undertaken for a significant period of a person's life and with opportunities for progress." A career in some cases is defined as a series of jobs that add up to the mystical something called a career. By that definition, as long as everything you do for a job is intentional, you pretty much have a career. But let's face it, how many of us really had a career in mind when we got started? In my case, I wanted to be an advertising copywriter, but because I had to pay bills, I became a retail store manager, comedian, furniture salesman, radio account executive, personal skills advisor, career counselor, research associate, and finally director of career coaching. Not a bad career in sum, but not at all intentional either. My career path and I suspect many others is a path of discovery; some good, some not so good.

Depending on who you ask, people generally change jobs between 7 to 10 times in their adult life. Career changes can vary between 1 to three on average. With the "new economy" all bets are off. In certain fields where "gigs" or contract work is common, you might have literally a hundred jobs in a career lifetime. With the advances in AI (artificial intelligence), it is possible that you may actually change career fields several times. The future is that uncertain. The thing that is not uncertain is that work will need to be done and your co-worker may be a Bot or a co-worker from half a world away.

So how about a new definition of a career? A career is a series of projects and/or jobs that allow you to use and build your skills in ways that are satisfying and sustaining to your life.  Or, if you want to really jazz it up: A career is a series of fun things that you get to do and people actually are excited to pay you for accomplishing on their behalf and makes you happy to perform which contributes to a rewarding life. 

Must your career consist of dream jobs? Can you take a vow of poverty and have a career? If you suffer daily in your work, is that still a good career?  I'll leave that to the philosophy majors of the world to sort out--like the one to which I'm married.