Bamboo You

When Work Screws You

My earlier post on job security has been haunting me in the past few days as I get word from various friends of how their employers are screwing them. I'm tired of watching competent people with a desire to do good work get trampled under the boot heel of employers who seem oblivous to the dysfunctional ways in which they run their organizations. But I also recognize the economic realities of needing a paycheck. So how to make poor work environments bearable while you explore other options? I think the answer lies in shifting your understanding of yourself in relation to your employer.

Most conscientious people I know join an organization with the desire to do what's best for their employer. They recognize that they are being paid to help the company do it's work and they want to make their individual contribution to that process. The longer they work for the organization, the more deeply connected to its fortunes they feel and the more they  pour themselves into their jobs and into doing work to get the company ahead.

When the company is treating you well--essentially holding up their end of the bargain--I think this is the right thing to do. But many people seem to operate in this mode long past the time that they should. It's like being in a bad romance, where you keep giving yourself for the good of the relationship without recognizing that your partner is not doing the same thing. It seems to be particularly true for those people who "live to work, " as opposed to the people who "work to live."

As I watch more and more organizations NOT holding up their end of the employment contract, creating workplaces that make it virtually impossible to feel successful and competent, I begin to believe that we need to start thinking of our employers in different ways. Rather than always thinking about how we can do well for them, I think we need to start considering what they can do for us. Not in the sense of salaries and benefits (although those are obvious baseline issues to be addressed as well), but in exploring how we can wring from them every last opportunity for learning and growth that we possibly can.

Several years ago I was working with an employment and training program where we were helping dislocated workers find new jobs. One company that we worked with had horrible working conditions, poor pay but great training. Another company (same industry) had great working conditions and great pay, but wouldn't hire anyone who didn't have the skills and 6 months of work experience. The first company, not surprisingly, had very high turnover. We tried for months to get them to see that the pay and work environment were killing them, but they didn't want to hear it. Eventually we began to advise workers to go to the first company for six months to get the training and work experience they needed and then when they had used up the learning opportunities at the first company, they should apply for a job with the second. We helped a lot of people that way.

This is something you can do for yourself, too, if you can shift your way of thinking about your employer. My rule of thumb has always been to pay attention to what I love doing and to my strengths and to use my employer as a way to develop my skills as much as possible. If you begin to see work as a learning opportunity and a way to make yourself more marketable, then you can sometimes make the unbearable bearable for a while. The key is to know what you want to build in yourself and then to figure out how you can use your current employer to make that happen. I think there's tremendous satisfaction in learning how to use them before they've used you up. And it positions you well for that day you can go in and say "Thanks, but I'm moving on, now."

Poster from one of my favorite sites, Despair.com

What is Job Security?

In 1995, I was teaching job search skills to laid-off workers in the Allentown/Bethlehem area of Pennsylvania. At that time, we were seeing a ton of former Bethlehem Steel workers who had made a phenomenal living doing relatively unskilled labor. We were also working with the last of the sewing machine operators from the garment industry.

Both the (largely) men from "the Steel" and the (largely) women from the sewing plants had been living the American Dream for many years. While by no means wealthy, they had been able to send children to college, have a decent home and a second house at the shore and generally live a solid middle-class life with little more than a 6th grade education, nimble fingers (or a strong back) and a willingness to put up with a LOT of crap from supervisors. In return, they had expected basically one thing (besides the wages, of course)--job security.

During my classes, we spent a lot of time talking about the death of job security and the fact that the only security they could have for the future was skills security. They got this, although they weren't happy about the fact that the skills they were in a position to develop were only going to get them jobs that paid at best half of what they'd made in their heydays at 'the Steel" or "the factory."

I think that in the past 11 years, though, we've seen an even bigger shift, one that I'm not sure we've fully absorbed as workers. Yes, most of us get that the road to job security is having the skills that are in demand in the workplace. But what we DON'T seem to get is that using those skills at just one company may be just as suicidal as not having them at all.

Dan Pink has been talking for several years  about living in Free Agent Nation and Tom Peters has been preaching the realities of working for "You Inc." since 1997. I've been a fan of their thinking for a while now and many of their ideas have guided my own career path. But  Cathy Seip's discussion (via the Dynamist) about "job security"  got me thinking about this whole issue again.

Cathy says:

"But I've always felt more job security as a freelance writer than I did as a newspaper staffer. And even [Barbara] Ehrenreich admitted at the PBS press conference that as a freelance writer, she's probably better off now than most of the traditional media types in the audience.

I know how she felt. If I were to lose one of my regular gigs, for instance, I'd be unhappy; but unlike the laid-off staffer, my income wouldn't suddenly plummet to zero. In a world of constant corporate downsizing, anyone who doesn't realize this is sadly out of date.

Several years ago, as it happens, a veteran editor doing some consulting work at a local mid-sized newspaper offered me a staff job. Knowing the paper's legendary cheapness, I explained that I doubted they'd be able to come up with as much money I made freelancing - and it would have to be a LOT more for me to even bother thinking about it.

"Why would it have to be MORE," he asked, sounding genuinely shocked. "What about the SECURITY?"

Now I was shocked. This guy had been in the business half-a-century, witnessing God knows how many tanking media enterprises and in-with-the-new, out-with-the-old staff reorganizations, and he still could use the words "security" and "newspapers" in the same sentence without laughing?

I guess so. But as I explained, he'd have to count me out of that particular deadpan club."

I've been on both sides of the fence and I get where Cathy's coming from.

About a year and a half ago, I went to work for a former client of mine after spending several years as a freelancer. With a daughter going to college and my mid-40's with no savings staring me in the face, I thought that it made sense to get some "stability" in my life. What I had forgotten about, though, was the fact that when you work for someone else, you are at the mercy of their business decisions. Rather than learning from the experiences of most of my friends who had been laid off not once, not twice, but several times within a 10-year span, I thought to myself that being an employee brings greater security, so I went for it.

But the reality is, as Cathy points out, when you rely on your employer to be your brand, then you're limiting your options in ways that may ultimately be career killers. Freelancing is scary, sure. No health insurance (fortunately I'm on my husband's), you can't count on regular paychecks, and the job of getting clients falls squarely on your shoulders. But if you've done the work of diversifying your client base, then when work slows or disappears with one customer, you don't end up in the unemployment line.

Somehow I recognized this (without the thought being as cogent or conscious as Cathy's perceptions) and a few months ago I re-joined the freelancer ranks. I continue to do work for my former employer, but I'm now able to pursue other clients as well. And even better than that, I'm able to use a larger set of my skills because instead of doing the work that my employer wants me to do, I'm able to look at myself and say "This is what I have to offer--how and where do I want to use it?" It's a very freeing realization and one that I think will, in the end, bring me far greater security than I ever had as an employee.

What I wish, though, is that more people realized the realities of this new world. There is still a somewhat mistaken belief that working for a company will be more secure than working for yourself. For a large segment of jobs, this is simply not the case. And more than that, it ends up being the company that benefits from the value you bring, rather than you reaping the total benefit of the skills you have to offer.

In the end, I think it's time that we re-evaluated the meaning of "job security" and looked at what that really means in the new economy. As part of figuring out what to do with our careers I think we need to get a better handle on the environment in which we're conducting them.

Hot Jobs for the New Breed of Workers

The other day we were talking about the new breed of workers.  Now Fast Company has a slide show on 9 Hot Jobs for Web 2.0. A pretty interesting combination of technical and "soft" skills with a particular emphasis on usability and design.

Even more interesting is their list of 6 jobs that won't exist in 2016, including:

• Auto Mechanic (cars will be running on software so no need for the "grease monkey")

• U.S. High Tech Workers (who will presumably now be repairing your car)

• Advertising Creatives (apparently we amateurs do a better job of marketing than the professionals)

• Bloggers (at least the kind who would get paid)

Predicting where we'll be in 10 years is a pretty dicey proposition, but one thing that is very certain is that there WILL be change. Which brings me back to the issue of needing to prepare for the future by looking at skill trends, not job trends. Just because creative types may not be necessary in advertising doesn't mean that creative skills won't be valued and needed--most likely just in a different context.

I do agree with Dan Pink that we're continuing to see a need for design, empathy and symphony and their associated skill sets. I also see where we are doing very little to prepare people for this future, particularly our kids, which is pretty scary to me. We need a plan, people. . .