McCareer or Your Career?
McCareer or Your Career?
One of the most fascinating career topics for any careers expert today is the future of careers and the demise of the predictable, linear career path - the McCareer or the ‘KFC’ or Kentucky Fried Career!
The job for life with its planned career structure and company training scheme no longer exists.
Gone too is the clear functional identity and the progressive rise in income and security. Instead there is a world of customers and clients, adding value, lifelong learning, portfolio careers, self development, and an overwhelming need to stay employable - bring it on!
Well actually the game is on and some industries are leading the way in offering members a 21st Century Career here and now. About time too, we are almost a decade into the 21sct Century!
Charles Handy coined the term “portfolio lives, he commented
"In the twenty-first century, we will see more and more people adopting a ‘portfolio’ approach to their lives and to their work. What I mean by this is that life will be a collection of different activities, almost like a share portfolio. A part of the portfolio will be the core activities for providing the essentials for living, whereas the rest will be other things that we think of as personal fulfilment, as responsibilities towards other people or even just as fun.
"Instead of having a career in the traditional sense, you will, for part of life, have a ‘portfolio career’, where part of your time will be spent earning wages or fees, and the rest will be for community work or study or whatever. A lot of it will be work of some form, even if much of it is unpaid, and it will all go to make up a portfolio of activities which will increasingly define you.
"We have to remember that the very definition of work is changing. Work used to mean having a job with an employer. But today, it increasingly means working for yourself and even by yourself. In the near future, half of the workforce of the developed world will be working ‘outside’ the organization. Traditional organizations now employ only 55 percent of the workforce on a full-time basis. The rest are temporary, part-time or contractual workers. Our portfolios will increasingly be collections of different work for different clients.
"But being outside the organization is going to make life very confusing at times. Those that choose to ‘go portfolio’, or are forced to by corporate downsizing, will have to learn to cope with their newly found independence. They will have to carve out different chunks in their lives for doing certain things, and not let one chunk take over the other. They will have to learn to sell their services or to find an agent to do it for them, to plan their futures rather than take them as they come, to update and upskill themselves continually and, most crucially of all, to work out what their goal in life should be, now that they and no one else are in charge of that life...
"We’re not talking here about contractual security within an organization, such as a contract of employment and so on. The new form of security will be very psychological and personal. It will be a belief that if this doesn’t work out, you could do something else. You are your own security."
Charles Handy (1998): 21-23 “Finding sense in uncertainty”
So what does the changing world of work look like? You can be identified today’s way of working by looking for the following characteristics:
• New technologies: growing use of information and communication technology
• Growth in the service sector
• New forms of work
• Integration – shared success
• Globalisation
• Ageing workforce
• Changing management structures
• Increasing participation of women in the workforce
• Growing number of SME’s
• Increasing work pace and work load.
Call centres are great places to see 21st century careers in action. UCMS in Melbourne is one of the biggest call centres in Australia. Their staff population, the professional contact centre team leaders and customer representatives are artists, musos and photographers – all early adopters of the portfolio career choice.
The IT industry is another front runner in the championing of 21st Century careers. You can be an IT Specialist who has negotiated a 4 day week and spends the 5th day working in a book shop while studying public relations and communications by distance learning.
These are just some examples. If you’re motivated by constant change and variety and think that a portfolio career could be a satisfying and rewarding one, start making a list of the types of work you would like to do, after all, where is it written that we can only have one job or even career at a time?
Handy, Charles. "Finding sense in uncertainty". in: Gibson, Rowan, ed. Rethinking the future: rethinking business, principles, competition, control & complexity, leadership, markets and the world. rev ed. London: Nicholas Brealey; 1998: 17-33.
