Reflections on Career Transition (1/8) DEJOBBING

Reflections on CAREER TRANSITION is a set of eight articles delving into the changes we are facing during these volatile times in the job market of 2020’s. My stance is more contemplative than advisory, the benefits gained from the articles are not quick-fix, one size fits all –solutions, but at best an invitation to think in a broader, deeper, and more transformative way about careers. In order to cope with the recurring abrupt changes in working life we need to understand the underlying paradigmatic shifts. The context of jobs and employment has drastically changed, and consequently so the rules for success, too. To help you to navigate through the career storms we will start with DEJOBBING.

The writing has been on the wall before the term dejobbing was launched. Alvin Toffler predicted the huge spread of part-time work in The third wave (1981). Jeremy Rifkin noted in The End of Work (1994) that in the early 1990's some 35% of the workforce was either temporarily employed or underemployed (working less than full-time). Dejobbing was then launched by William Bridges in Jobshift (1994), revealing the fundamental shift from occupying a position (a job or a post) to contingent, temporary, or fixed-term contracts.

The trend toward dejobbing arose from two major factors. First, organizations looked for greater flexibility in staffing. Second, the context where organizations operated had changed, and using jobs as the focal point for employees’ productivity was neither effective nor relevant. The idea of a job with clear boundaries as to what the employee does and does not do, was no longer functional.

One of the fastest-growing forms of contingent employment is reliance on temporary help firms (e.g., Manpower, Adecco) as a vehicle for short-term staffing needs. Until today, temporary help firms have been associated with the short-term placement of clerical support staff and unskilled laborers, but the trend seems to be towards supplying not only highly skilled laborers (like top-class welders) but all kind of professionals, too.

This means that people expecting to stay with one organization over the long term put themselves at great financial and psychological risk. On the other side they now have both the freedom and responsibility to choose work that (1)  satisfies their individuality, and (2)  creates results for their organization.

The first question here is: how prepared you are to take responsibility of your career within this context? And furthermore: have you given any thought of the necessary skills, capabilities, and resources this shift requires? Personnel policies, training programs, and communication structures – as well as the practice of recruitment – will change unprecedentedly. Post-job workers will be hired for a project, and thus work, vacation, and retirement are no more part of organizational policy but individual matters you are supposed to deal with yourself.

Dejobbing means also emergence of multiple careers; it is estimated that we work in average of 10-12 jobs and within 3-5 careers over a working lifetime. Of course, this means that the careers must be redefined, too. Today we speak e.g. about customized, kaleidoscopic, postindustrial, boundaryless, portfolio, and protean careers. However you name the new career, it seems that in comparison to traditional, organizationally bounded career, there are three major issues to consider:

(1)  Change from organizational loyalty to professional loyalty; loyalty will be based on professional relationships rather than organizational membership.

(2)  Change from focus on extrinsic to intrinsic rewards; the employment contract is not with the organization, but with one’s self, values, and preferences.

(3)  Change from company reliance to self-reliance; professionals will seek opportunities for their own training and development, to build up their own signature expertise.

In order to manage your career transitions – and your career in general – some questions will arise here to ponder.

First: how do you establish, refine, and invigorate your professional network? And how to you cross-breed this network to create unique, value-adding constellations for generating novel ideas and cultivating new competences and aptitudes?

Second: Life-span, life-space theory by Donald Super broadens our attention from work role to a constellation of all life roles. As the life in the information age cannot be grounded in occupational roles, what roles you want to build your existence upon? And what kind of a life structure would fulfill our personal values? How is the work role in relation to other roles? What kind of rewards each role is supposed to present?

Third: When there is a change from career maturity to career adaptability, what does this mean to your career framework? In which ways the objectives will change, and how do you see the evolution of your signature expertise? How do you define where you perform best? Where do you seek for training – and how do you know it’s world-class? What are the meta-competences that carry you forward throughout your career?

Until here I have dealt the issue solely from individual perspective. But if the most essential ingredients of competitive advantage are the 3C's - competence, coordination, and commitment - how is the organization to secure the commitment? As organizations are no longer the place of employees’ economic security, organizations need to build the commitment in some other way. Individuals need to sense the purpose of their work, need to understand how they relate to others, and need to understand the perceptions that others carry of them in the value-creation process. How is your organization addressing this issue? Is leadership moving away from the command and control towards roles of facilitators and coaches, for example?

Next week I will approach career transition from the angle of DESKILLING.