The future of the work force

[CountDeMoney]

Interesting piece, cribbed from Psychology Today.  Thoughts from the Languish flash mob of Free Marketeers, Bolsheviks, Euroweenies, lawyers and HR people who say they're not in HR?

The End of Jobs As We Have Known Them
The rise of contingent and contract work will change the workplace

You can't pick up a newspaper these days, or watch a news media broadcast that is not mentioning the problem of unemployment and job loss in the economy. For most observers, the problem is often oversimplified as a result of the recession, and we only need policies to return those jobs. The reality is that we are witnessing the end of jobs as we have known them.

Mike Dorning, in his article in Bloomberg Businessweek cites U.S. employment data that is frightening. The portion of all men holding any kind of job in the U.S. is 63.5%, the lowest figure since 1948. Among prime working-age men between 25 and 54, 81% hold jobs. In comparison in 1969, 95% of men in the prime working years had a job. The temporary placement company in the U.S., Adecco, predicts that the rate of growth in contingent workers will be 3-4 times the growth rate of traditional jobs and will soon comprise at least 30% or more of the global workforce.

Sara Horowitz, founder and CEO of Freelancers Union, argues that the jobless future is already here. She points out that many people are already combining part-time work just to get by. In an article in Atlantic magazine, Horowitz says that as of 2005, a full 30% of the workforce has participated in this "freelance economy," and entrepreneurial activity has reached an all time high in 2010. Dana Shaw, former senior Vice-President for Staffing Industry Analysts, reported that in the Fortune 100 companies, contingent workers make up 20-30% of the workforce, but predicts it will soon be 50%. Statistics Canada reported that by 2009, 52% of all temporary jobs were contract jobs, 25% of them were professionals. The permanent full time jobs that were jettisoned during the recession are not likely to return. McKinsey &Co. reported that 65% of U.S. corporations have restructured their workforce and have no plans to return to pre-recession employment, but rather are opting for contingent and contract work when the need for expansion takes place.

Marshall Brain, writing in his informative blog, cites the explosive growth in the use of robotics–not on the assembly line but in ordinary retail businesses, including McDonalds, Home Depot, and others. Brain cites the principle of Moore's Law–that CPU power in microprocessor chips doubles every 18 to 24 months–to support his argument that a massive number of jobs will be replaced by technology and never return. He forecasts that almost all construction, manufacturing, transportation, wholesale, retail, and hotel and restaurant jobs will be lost to automation by the year 2050. This would create unemployment levels of up to 50%.

Besides the negative impact of increased unemployment, the expansion of temporary work has other downsides. One of the biggest hurdles that will have to be overcome for contingent work to be dominant is the predominant attitude in organizations that contract workers are less important or less competent, and less committed than "permanent" workers. Contingent work also is accompanied by a lack of benefits such as health, life and disability insurance. Some experts would argue that the growth of contingent and contract jobs contributes to the growing problem of income gap between the wealthy and the rest of society, as contract workers tend to be paid less and earn less than permanent workers. People who don't earn as much money or have less economic security tend to spend less as consumers, which has a general negative impact on the economy.  A second argument, which is reflected in an OECD report, is that contingent and part-time work produces more stress for these workers, who may be continually fearful of loss of employment. This in turn, has potential health cost implications for the organizations.

Many economists argue that the current economic problem is lack of consumer demand—the lack of money to spend on stuff. But with the increasing decline of the middle class who spends most of that money, the problem won't be solved any time soon. So while politicians and business leaders chant for more jobs, the real issue is economic inequality to support sustained growth. It's not likely that the 45 million people at the poverty level in the U.S. will drive its economy to new prosperity.

Is there an upside to the movement toward contingent and contract work?

Daniel Pink, author of Free Agent Nation, prepared us for this scenario in 2001. Pink described the emergence of "Supertemps,"—top managers and professionals, trained at the top schools, who have chosen to pursue contract work over regular employment.

While the recession and global economic conditions may be a reason for contingent workers, increasingly more people are choosing contract work for the following reasons:

    The desire for better life-work balance;
    The opportunity to create and manage their careers;
    The opportunity to learn and master new skills continually.

Derek Sankey, reporting for the Calgary Herald, cites a Strategic Council survey, which shows 62% of Baby Boomers making more than $80,000/yr. chose contract work versus 37% who chose full time regular employment. New types of talent brokers such as Your Encore, an online network of retired and veteran scientists and engineers, or Innocentive, which offers crowdsourcing services to companies with innovation challenges, connects free agents with project-based work in the virtual marketplace or Guru.com and Freelancer.com which provides opportunities to buy and sell professional contract work.

The growth of contingent and contract work is also related to how work is viewed conceptually. The fast-moving, technologically dynamic global economy has forced leaders to think about work in modular, every shifting ways. Organizations that can adapt, change and innovate quickly have an advantage today. Contingent and contract workers can facilitate this change.

Josh Bersin, President and CEO of Bersin & Associates, a talent management company, wrote a insightful article on the issue, arguing, "jobs are turning into roles, roles are becoming more specialized and the new currency of value is expertise, not simply experience." Our traditional vision of a job is history. It was a functional role defined by a set of skills, or competencies that carried out a specific function, and along with it came a title and career path that was clearly defined. Job descriptions were written and people were hired to them and the HR function was created to manage the process. Bersin has coined the term "the borderless workplace," which means workers work seamlessly inside and outside organizations, adapting to change in world conditions.

Penelope Trunk, writing in her popular blog on the workplace, contends that we will see the end of what we conceive of as "office life," within a short time and that employers will increasingly view all their employees as "consultants" to facilitate flexible hours and project based work; and we will see the end of the traditional career path and organizational hierarchies.

Douglas Rushkoff, author of Life Inc: How the World Became a Corporation and How To Take It Back, was interviewed by CNN.com. He proposed the notion that jobs are obsolete. He argues that it's not a bad thing that technology is replacing jobs. Part of the public discourse has focused on employment as the solution to economic growth, but countries have in fact focused on productivity through technology not human labor, Rushkoff contends. The U.S. and Canada is productive enough to provide everyone sufficient shelter, food, education and health care without increased employment. The problem is the proceeds of productivity–economic wealth–are not equitably distributed. The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization reports that there is enough food produced in the world to provide the entire world's population with 2,720 calories per day. Yet every 6 seconds a child dies from malnutrition.

So is the problem that we don't have enough "stuff" for everyone or that we don't have enough ways for people to work and prove they deserve the stuff?

Let's remember that the concept of jobs is a relatively new idea. People may have always worked, but until the advent of corporate business in the Renaissance, most people worked for themselves. The advent of the Industrial Age made most jobs as menial and unskilled as possible. As technology in factories was used to increase production and use less labor, so too has digital technology supplanted jobs. One of the biggest problems we face today is how to create full employment while pursuing technology that is intended to replace it.

Most work today is knowledge work, not making stuff. Knowledge work is a creative activity. Part of the issue of resolving the job-work issue is accepting basic human rights about essential stuff–food, shelter and health–and focusing work on the value we create that makes life meaningful, purposeful and fun.

One thing is for sure, the problem of unemployment and our view of work and jobs is undergoing a revolution, not just a minor hiccup or temporary recession.

And a follow-up piece on it, some overlap but has some other interesting tidbits--

The End of Careers As We Know Them
Lifelong and full time careers are disappearing
Published on July 11, 2013 by Ray Williams

Technology, for the most part, has not allowed us to retire to a life of leisure as predicted decades ago. In my Financial Post article, "In the Future, No One is Going To Pay You Just to Show Up," the current reality is that we may see many people resigned to an extensive period of unemployment or temporary work.

In my article in the Financial Post, I reference a report in Bloomberg Businessweek by Mike Dorning who cites U.S. employment data that is frightening. The portion of all men holding any kind of job in the United States is 63.5%, the lowest figure since 1948. And the lowest level of unemployment is among young men.

Middle-income jobs are disappearing for a wide range of jobs. For example, the number of financial counselors and loan officers ages 25 to 34 has dropped 40 percent since 2007, outpacing the 30 percent drop in total jobs for the profession, according to the Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. In the investment business we are seeing the replacement of financial analysts with quantitative analytic systems, and floor traders with trading algorithms. Mutual funds and traditional portfolio managers now compete against ETFs (exchange-traded funds), many of which offer completely automated strategies.

Even the professions are not spared by the impact of economic restructuring.

The number of hours logged by first-year and mid-level legal associates -- a productivity measure of young lawyers -- fell 12 percent from 2007 at some of New York's largest law firms, says Jeff Grossman, national managing director of Wells Fargo Private Bank's Legal Specialty.  Architecture graduates ages 25 to 29 had the highest unemployment of the 57 degree programs surveyed by the Education Department in 2009.

What about the medical profession? CABG rates are continuing to fall, says cardiologist Jack Tu, co-author of the ICES report and team leader of the Canadian Cardiovascular Outcomes Research Team (CCORT). "Anecdotally, a lot of surgeons are concerned they don't have the [procedure] volume to meet their targets for [government] funding [as a cardiac centre]," says Tu, a senior scientist at ICES and Canada Research Chair in Health Services Research. Volumes will definitely continue to fall, resulting, eventually, in a surplus of cardiac surgeons, says Tu. "We need to stop training so many. They're not going to have a lot of work."

Sara Horowitz, founder and CEO of Freelancers Union, argues that the jobless future is here. Many people are already combining part-time work just to get by, she notes. In an article in Atlantic magazine, Horowitz writes that as of 2005, 30% of the workforce has participated in this "freelance economy," and entrepreneurial activity has reached an all time high in 2010.

Some people—mostly Baby Boomers—still define a careers working in the same role/job or career field for their entire life or the majority of it. With the speed of technological change and the prospect of long-term economic problems, that's just not realistic anymore than thinking the knowledge and skills acquired in college have a long shelf life.

What will the future of careers look like? The reality is that life in general, and working lives in particular, are getting longer and not shorter. No one can rely on any organization, even governments, to provide secure work for you for 3 or 4 decades. In the near future, it will not be uncommon for people to work well into their 70's and 80's, and retirement will be a distant memory.

Some career experts offer some startling predictions and advice.

In my Psychology Today article, "The End of Jobs As We Have Known Them," I argue that the jobless future is already here.  Futurist Jeremy Rifkin contends we are entirely a new phase in history, once characterized by a steady and inevitable decline of jobs. He says the world of work is being polarized into 2 forces: One, an information elite that controls the global economy; and the other, a growing number of displaced workers.

Penelope Trunk, Co-Founder of Brazen Careerist, suggests the younger generation should skip college because it's a waste of time and resources, and no longer guarantees a long career, let alone employment. She also recommends internships, starting your own company and not presenting yourself in a linear way on a resume. Trunk argues "a fundamental shift is taking place, where the path to getting a job is massively circumventing college credentials. At the same time, the American public is fed up with the insane debts that colleges are expecting new grads to take on."

Organizational structural changes have altered the nature of careers and jobs . Organizations have become "flatter" with fewer management levels as more work has become knowledge work. Project work and teamwork have also changed the nature of jobs.

Careers that once were viewed as progressions "up" a ladder are now often multidirectional and lateral. DeFillip and Arthur (1994) define these changes as the creation of the "boundaryless career," where the career path is defined by the individual's soft and hard skills, not by their formal education or experience.

Today, people need to gain "employability" rather than "secure employment." To survive in a multi-career employees need to have multiple intelligences, resilience and employability—essentially survival tools. Jobs now are defined by expertise, multiple skills, not just uniform experience. Employees who continue to practice their skills repetitively without improvement or flexibility run the risk of making themselves obsolete. In that sense, static job mastery is a liability both for the individual and the organization. Your value as an employee is no longer "I am good at my job," but "how much demand is there for my skills?"  Just look at what happened to specialized computer programmers, who have no other IT skills.

Part of the wrenching dilemma of what will happen to careers lies in answering the question—What is work for? A means to an end—pay the bills? Self-actualization? Status and social position? To sustain a desirable lifestyle? And connected to that inquiry is the question of what purposes do business serve? To provide financial profit for the owners and shareholders? Increasingly that narrow view is no longer embraced, as evidenced by the publc's concerns about employee welfare, the welfare of our communities and the environment.

In his Harvard Business Review article, "Create a Meaningful Life through Meaningful Work," author Umair Haque writes, "Maybe the real depression we've got to contend with isn't merely one of how much economic output we're generating – but what we're putting out there and why. Call it a depression of human potential, a tale of human insignificance being willfully squandered."

Recent studies from research at McKinsey conclude that providing meaningful work to employees was the most important contributing factor to a high level of engagement. In her book, The Progress Principle, author Teresa Amabile reports that of all the events that can deeply engage people in their work, the single most important factor was meaningful work.  According to Ms. Amabile "Beyond affecting the well-being of employees, research shows that the 'inner work life' affects the bottom line."           

So do we begin to define work and careers as "inner work," as well as "outer work?" Where life challenges, self-fulfillment, meaning and social network occupy equal importance. Yet, when you're unemployed, these considerations seem frivolous.

Whose responsibility is it for an individual's career? In the past, particularly in North America, it has been the individual's. Today, we see more progressive organizations are sharing that responsibility, in an effort to retain talent and keep job satisfaction high.

As we go through this huge redefinition of what constitutes a career, both future and current workers would be advised to consider the following advice:

Take responsibility for managing your own career. Don't wait until you're fired, laid off, burned out or fed up to revitalize your career. Manage your career on an ongoing basis, particularly through the good times. This includes becoming your own benefits manager;
Realize that the old social contract—employee work in return from employer loyalty and job security-- is dead. Even if you work for someone else, think of yourself as an entrepreneur;
Become comfortable with change. It's likely you'll be in several careers during your lifetime, sometimes as a result of changes outside your control;
Establish and develop a strong social network. Connecting with people on an ongoing basis will strengthen your capacity to manage your career;
Create and develop your own personal brand. To be marketable in the workplace, you need more than experience and an education. You are more than your job, and being able to see and promote who you are in totality, makes you more marketable;
Establish and develop your professional reputation. It's portable, and hugely affected by social media. A positive reputation can make or break individuals or organizations;
Accept that you are more than your job. Whether you love or hate your job, making it your identity is a big mistake. Reflect on what legacy you want to leave in life, and be happy with your definition of personal success.

The reality is that our traditional notion of a career is obsolete and not likely to return.

[Neil]

From the sounds of it, the total fucking assholes will inherit the Earth.

You know, maybe the wrong team won the Cold War.

[Zanza]

My employer has started a program to reduce the number of freelancers and suppliers and built capacity itself. Obviously the reduction of freelancers happens in Germany, whereas the increase of capacity happens in India. You have to wonder who'll eventually buy our products because it won't be those Indians - they aren't paid well enough for that.

[garbon]

My company seems to be a nice sort of place then as we've been hiring for many positions the whole time I've been here.

[CountDeMoney]

From the sounds of it, the total fucking assholes will inherit the Earth.

I thought this was interesting:

For example, the number of financial counselors and loan officers ages 25 to 34 has dropped 40 percent since 2007, outpacing the 30 percent drop in total jobs for the profession, according to the Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. In the investment business we are seeing the replacement of financial analysts with quantitative analytic systems, and floor traders with trading algorithms. Mutual funds and traditional portfolio managers now compete against ETFs (exchange-traded funds), many of which offer completely automated strategies.

I completely expect predatory capitalism to destroy as many jobs as possible, but you know you've got problems with your economic model when its starts eating its own young.

[KRonn]

Strange new world. Interesting though. The article states something I've been thinking before, that the idea of jobs is relatively new since the industrial revolution when the need for jobs really ramped up, and who knows how much that will change. But rising technology has been predicted to replace so many jobs and it really hasn't, not yet anyway.

I don't think we can blame Capitalism entirely though, since if the new ways are better, more efficient, less costly then the ideas will be more widely adopted by all, non-Capitalists as well. New and more efficient ideas are always being developed.

For a while now though I've felt bad for those just starting out in work, jobs, careers. Things are changing fast, a slow economy which is on a snail's pace towards growth over too many years. Fewer jobs, insane out of control college tuition costs, house prices too high. Kids starting out are already in trouble just getting going.

[Caliga]

, insane out of control college tuition costs

Yes, and shame on the government for not doing anything about it.  This is one of those cases where I think government should intervene, since a) a lot of the problem is with the for-profit educational sector which is bascially defrauding both the government and the students it's pretending to serve, and b) kids that age really aren't equipped to make responsible financial decisions on their own yet and could potentially ruin their lives on the in many cases extremely poor investments they are being pressured to take on.

[CountDeMoney]

For a while now though I've felt bad for those just starting out in work, jobs, careers. Things are changing fast, a slow economy which is on a snail's pace towards growth over too many years. Fewer jobs, insane out of control college tuition costs, house prices too high. Kids starting out are already in trouble just getting going.

They should borrow $20,000 from their parents and start a business.

[Jacob]

For a while now though I've felt bad for those just starting out in work, jobs, careers. Things are changing fast, a slow economy which is on a snail's pace towards growth over too many years. Fewer jobs, insane out of control college tuition costs, house prices too high. Kids starting out are already in trouble just getting going.

They should borrow $20,000 from their parents and start a business.

Probably need more like $100K these days. That anecdote was a few years out of date.

[CountDeMoney]

They should borrow $20,000 from their parents and start a business.

Probably need more like $100K these days. That anecdote was a few years out of date.

2012 wasn't that long ago.

[Jacob]

They should borrow $20,000 from their parents and start a business.

Probably need more like $100K these days. That anecdote was a few years out of date.

2012 wasn't that long ago.

What I meant was that the chap who borrowed the $20K to start a company - Staples, wasn't it? - did so some years ago. You are, of course, correct that the inspirational anecdote was widely shared last year and thus is current; I just feel that Mr. Romney didn't account for inflation if he meant for us to apply his advice today.

It's a minor point, of course; there's not much difference between $20K and $100K, is there?

[The Brain]

Marshall Brain
Daniel Pink
Penelope Trunk

Any "omg teh sky is falling" article with real people in it?

[MadImmortalMan]

I don't think this change is necessarily negative. There's a lot to be said for not having a traditional boss from a quality of life perspective. Plus, it's bound to continue to reduce our reliance on transportation to get a lot of things done. In a lot of ways, being an employee is a shitty way to live. The main benefit being that you get to feel all snuggly and safe that your paycheck is regular and somebody higher up is taking care of keeping everything solvent. How's that working out, anyway? 

Frankly, I'm a competent adult and I don't need that safety shit. Right now, independence is looking really nice.

[CountDeMoney]

Right now, independence is looking really nice.

Mine, not so much.  YMMV.

[Darth Wagtaros]

I don't think this change is necessarily negative. There's a lot to be said for not having a traditional boss from a quality of life perspective. Plus, it's bound to continue to reduce our reliance on transportation to get a lot of things done. In a lot of ways, being an employee is a shitty way to live. The main benefit being that you get to feel all snuggly and safe that your paycheck is regular and somebody higher up is taking care of keeping everything solvent. How's that working out, anyway? 

Frankly, I'm a competent adult and I don't need that safety shit. Right now, independence is looking really nice.

He said as he waits for the unemployment cheque.