How to Find Work in the 21st Century

A Guide to Finding Employment in Today’s Workplace

By Ron McGowan

Wimbledon Publishing Company

Copyright © 2013 Ron McGowan
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-85728-096-1

Contents

Acknowledgements, xiii,
Notice to Readers, xv,
Preface, xvii,
Introduction, xxiii,
1 How the Workplace Has Changed, 1,
2 What Exactly Do You Have to Offer?, 21,
3 How to Market Yourself, 47,
4 The Role of the Internet, 85,
5 Guidelines for Post-secondary Students, 95,
6 Create Your Own Job, 113,
7 Getting Started, 123,
8 Managing Your Career, 129,
Conclusion, 143,
Appendix, 147,

CHAPTER 1

How the Workplace Has Changed

A ship in port is safe, but that’s not what ships are built for.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Looking for Work Instead of a Job

Is that all there is?

We have lived with the modern concept of a job for so long that we tend to think it has been around forever. In fact, it was introduced to the world about 150 to 200 years ago as nations began to industrialize. Before that, people earned a living by performing a variety of tasks, mostly in agriculture, in areas that were affected by the seasons, the weather, and the time of day. When the concept of a job was introduced to society back then, it caused just as much angst among our ancestors as it is causing now that it is in decline.

We also tend to assume, because it is the way the majority of people have earned their living for generations, that a job is the only way to earn a living. In fact, a significant percentage of the workforce doesn’t earn their living from traditional jobs. Take the construction industry, for example. For people employed there, their job is tied directly to the project that they’re currently building, and when it is finished, so is their job and they have to look for another project. The same could be said for people employed in the arts. If, for example, you’re an actor in a movie or a stage show, once the movie or show is over, so is your job and you move on to the next project. This is also true for musicians and other people employed in the arts.

So the idea of your job being tied to the project that you’re currently working on is far from new. What’s new is that more people who have always had a traditional job are finding that their livelihood is now going to be earned this way. What is disconcerting is that most of us come from a background where our parents and grandparents made their living from a traditional job, which, for the most part, meant that their careers were stable and they had some security. Most of us still long for that security, but it’s getting harder to come by.

The rise of the temporary or contingent worker

The twentieth century was the century of mass production and large corporations, and the workplace was dominated by industrial giants like General Motors. At the end of the century, the biggest employer in the United States was Manpower, a company that specializes in temporary and contingent workers.

In the manufacturing sector, one of the improvements that companies have made to make their process more efficient and economic is to employ a just-in-time approach to the inventory of parts that they carry. Instead of having large quantities of these parts sitting in inventory for long periods before they get used up, they access those parts from their suppliers at the time that they are needed in the manufacturing process and have thus eliminated the need for costly inventories.

The same type of thing is happening in the workplace as companies increasingly view the work to be done in terms of projects and think of their staffing needs in terms of what they need for current and upcoming projects. The idea of a temp, or temporary worker, has been around for decades, but it tended to be restricted to clerical and office staff like receptionists and data entry clerks. Now companies are hiring temporary workers at all levels within the organization.

This is particularly true in the Information Technology or IT sector. That industry is very project oriented, and IT companies regularly hire people for projects with no expectation that their employment will become long-term. Even in Japan, the last bastion of the idea of lifetime employment, many companies where employees have traditionally expected to spend their entire careers with that company are now moving towards hiring temporary workers.

A January 5, 2008 article in the Economist titled “Sayonara, salaryman” points out that almost 40 percent of the workforce in Japan are part-time, contingent, and contract workers and that this category is growing while those with permanent jobs is decreasing. It also points out that today’s young workers are not interested in accepting the corporate paternalism of their parents’ generation where work was the center of their lives and even led in some cases to karoshi or “death by overwork.”

Outsourcing

A January 24, 2012 article in the New York Times cites the quantum advances in both globalization and the information technology revolution as key factors in the loss of middle-class incomes in the US. It points out that in the 10 years ending in 2009, US factories shed workers so fast that they erased almost all of the gains in the previous 70 years; roughly one out of every three manufacturing jobs – about 6 million in total – disappeared.

It talked about advances in technology that were threatening the need for waiters and waitresses. A new device, described as a “souped-up iPad” has been created that lets customers place their orders and pay for them right at their table. These devices can be rented by restaurants for about $100 per month, which works out to 42 cents per hour per table.

Dan Pink, in his excellent book A Whole New Mind, says that “outsourcing is overhyped in the short term. But it’s underhyped in the long term.” That opinion is supported by experts’ predictions of the number of jobs that will move overseas from western countries to countries like India and China in the next few years and beyond. So far manufacturing and the IT sector have lost the most jobs, and those losses are expected to continue. But these job losses may be the canary in the coal mine. Most experts are predicting that the next wave of jobs moving overseas will be in the insurance, financial services, customer support, and engineering sectors.

The World Bank projects that in the ten-year period from 2006 to 2016, developing nations’ share of world gross domestic product is expected to grow from one-fifth to one-third. When Ron Hira, considered to be a leading US expert on outsourcing, was asked in a July 3,2006 interview in the New York Times “How can this trend be stopped?” his answer was, “There’s nothing that can be done to stop it. The question is, how do we adapt to it and deal with the negative effects?” Dan Pink points out that the conventional view thirty years ago was that an economy couldn’t be based on services – manufacturing had to be the foundation. When asked how the US can survive outsourcing, he suggested, “We massively underestimate human ingenuity and resilience.”

The future, he says, will bring “industries we can’t imagine and jobs which we lack the vocabulary to describe.”

Our future, in other words, lies in our imagination – to create products and services that the world doesn’t know it is missing. Dan makes a valid point but unless we pay more attention to the impact outsourcing is having on our workforce and find ways to deal with its negative effects, as Ron Hira suggests, we’re in danger of becoming nations of Wal-Mart and Starbucks employees.

An article in the August 30, 2012 issue of the New York Times covers a report from the National Employment Law Project that pointed out that, while a majority of jobs lost during the downturn were in the middle range of wages, a majority of those added during the recovery have been low paying. It states that “the overarching message here is that we don’t just have a jobs deficit; we have a ‘good jobs’ deficit.”

Reshoring

Reshoring is a growing trend by companies who have moved work overseas in the past to bring that work back to their home country. It is topical enough for the Economist magazine to cover it extensively in a January 2013 issue. The decision to move work overseas ten, twenty years ago was a lot simpler than it is today. Wages in China and other countries are rising, as are transportation costs. Some work that originally went to China and India is being moved to the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, and other lower-cost countries. Some companies are expanding their overseas operations while at the same time, bringing some work back home. Others are rethinking their whole outsourcing strategy, thinking that they went too far in the past. With the current high unemployment in western countries, shipping jobs overseas can be very risky in terms of the political price to be paid. So this whole area is fluid and could look very different in a few years. The big winners in the outsourcing movement in the past – China and India – could be the big losers if the reshoring phenomenon gains traction. It is unclear at this point how significant the repatriation of jobs from overseas locations back to their home countries will be.

A new relationship

An employee with a company in yesterday’s workplace could safely assume that included with their job were a variety of benefits and services that the employer would supply. Benefits ranged from dental plans to pension plans, and you could often expect the employer to assume the responsibility for such things as mapping out a career plan for you.

Even your employability and expectation of being with the company on a long-term basis was a given once you had gone through the hiring process and had landed a full-time job. Today, having a full-time job is no guarantee that your future with the company is assured. Your security is tied to the value that the company perceives you to bring to their operation at any given time.

More companies are looking at employees as commodities, i.e., we will pay you for the set of skills that you bring to us but benefit packages, career planning, continuing education, upgrading of skills, and those types of issues are viewed as costly overhead, and the onus to provide for them has shifted from the company to the employee.

The consensus among the experts on the workplace is that, today, everybody is a temporary worker and the only security you can expect is in having a set of current, marketable skills that are in demand.

The shift to smaller companies

The workplace of the twentieth century, up until about the 1970s, was dominated by large companies. This changed in the ’80s and ’90s to the point where, for years now, the vast majority of jobs and work opportunities are created by small businesses. Small today could mean a single operator who has expanded to the point where he or she needs an extra body on a full-time or part-time basis.

A September 11, 2012 news release from the UK Federation of Small Businesses reported that since the onset of the recession in 2008, 88 percent of unemployed people who found work in the private sector did so in a small business, which is similar to what is happening in other western countries.

This shift has many repercussions for today’s workers, especially those who have lost their jobs with a medium to large, well-established company. Whether the shift is positive or negative is all over the map depending on how informed the individual is about the workplace and how well they’ve positioned themselves to survive in it.

Many of today’s small business owners were formerly full-time employees in large companies who decided that self-employment made more sense for them than looking for another full-time job. Also, more young people coming out of college or university are starting their own businesses than at any other time in the past. A CIBC study reported in the September 25, 2012 Globe and Mail showed that 15 percent of Canada’s labour force was self-employed, and the growth in self-employment will be faster in the next decade than any other decade.

In the US, according to a New York Times article on May 1, 2008, over 2,000 colleges and universities are now offering courses in entrepreneurship, up from 253 institutions offering these courses in 1985. The article also pointed out that many colleges have turned to active or retired business owners rather than academics to teach these courses. It also pointed out that some people see a strong liberal arts education as a foundation for success in these courses and that entrepreneurship in business schools is often too narrowly focused.

A new set of expectations

While there are no hard and fast rules that define how small and large businesses operate, there are some things that you generally can count on to be different between them. If you lost a job with a large company, you’ve lived In a world where you could expect that your job included a decent benefit package, paid overtime, a nice office, and other perks that you probably took for granted. If you expect to find all or most of these things when you join a small company, you’re probably going to be disappointed. You may also be disappointed if you expect to earn the same salary as you did in the past.

The president or owner or the principals of the company, who often risk everything they have to establish it, may not have many of the things that you may feel you’re entitled to, like security, benefits packages, and so on, so it’s unrealistic for you to expect to have them.

You’ll probably wear more hats in your job than you have in the past, and you could be much more involved in the important decision-making processes affecting where the company is going.

You may have opportunities to advance your career – a thing that may never have happened with a large company. Your contributions could have much more influence over the success or failure of the company. You may be expected to provide leadership in guiding the company in new directions, and that could be a new role for you.

You may join the millions of workers worldwide who are earning their living as freelancers through an intermediary that connects employers and freelancers. In a December 28, 2012 report in the Globe and Mail, Gary Swart, the CEO of oDesk, the largest online platform designed to connect employers with freelancers, said, “By 2020, we think one in three people in North America will be working online.”

No more entitlements

If you’re over 40 or have been strongly influenced by your parents’ experience in the workplace, you may need to make some significant and fundamental changes in your thinking about your career and what to expect in your working life. In yesterday’s workplace, the relationship between the worker and the employer was much more paternalistic than it is today.

The reason why so many people are devastated by the loss of a full-time job often has more to do with other aspects than the financial one. What the individual also loses is a sense of belonging to a community, some dignity and self-respect, pride in what they do, and they often have a sense of betrayal if they feel that they gave the company all that they had to offer. These non-tangible things that come with a job in a large company may not necessarily come with a job in a small company.

How people react to the changes that arise from going from a large to a small company will vary according to how secure they are with themselves, how well they adapt to change, how informed they are about the workplace, and their ability to rise above the day-to-day challenges and view the transition that the workplace is going through from a broader, more philosophical point of view.

A need to take the broader view

As the workplace goes through its current transition, those who have lost their jobs are having a tough time dealing with the realities of the new workplace. In many cases their kids are also looking at them and wondering what they should do to position themselves to earn a decent living. The range of emotions goes from those who feel liberated by the changes going on in the workplace – “good riddance to the traditional job” – to those at the other end of the scale, who may be devastated by the loss of their jobs. There’s no quick fix to any of this. We’ll just have to adjust to these changes, as our ancestors had to adjust to the changes that took place in their lifetimes.

There is work available, but if you’re looking for it to come in the shape of a traditional job with all of the benefits and security that we’ve become accustomed to, you’re probably going to be disappointed. Finding the work that’s available is also going to be a lot more challenging. For most of us it will require developing new skills, being much more informed about what is going on in society and in the workplace, and finally shedding some long-held attitudes about work, jobs, and expectations.

You’re going to have to become more adept at selling yourself and anticipating and understanding the needs of the employer that you want to work with. That’s a new role for most of us and it won’t come naturally. You’ll have to learn how to do it and how to do it in a way that is effective for you.

(Continues…)Excerpted from How to Find Work in the 21st Century by Ron McGowan. Copyright © 2013 Ron McGowan. Excerpted by permission of Wimbledon Publishing Company.
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