It is increasingly becoming clear is that the shape of our working lives will change. In fact, it’s changing right in front of our eyes now. How do we know? Well, it’s not just hidden in the recession-related numbers – the impact of reductions in public service jobs or the redundancy announcements by private businesses. Whilst it might be hidden in those figures, what we also know is that we have structural issues around high numbers of young people without work – 900,000+ under the age of 24 – and the many people in their 50s and 60s who’ve lost jobs and believe they may never work again.
The management writers and thinkers have been saying for a generation that the workplace will change. They predicted outsourcing, offshoring, interim management, fixed-term contracts and so on. And they also believed that core businesses would shrink in size and be led by younger people. If you’re wondering why, the underlying drives in the capitalist economy are for greater efficiencies that drive higher levels of profitability for greater returns to shareholders; both in dividends and in share price improvement. These drives, these trends will not change. What is changing, however, is the impact that time is having on jobs and on the workplace. This article discusses about how individual workers need to take greater control of their own work at a time of uncertainty and change for everybody.
As the workplace is changing, one of the key issues for organisations is how to stay flexible and, if they are an international business, how their flexibility and adaptability can be made most appropriate within a global context. You can probably think of a business which, in the last 20 or 30 years, has needed to change its model; possibly manufacturing its products outside of the UK. Possibly you’re thinking of an organisation in the service industry, where certain components of service have been outsourced to different companies and possibly even different countries.
The impact of these changes inevitably leads to job losses but it also leads to a change in the type of work available. In addition to understanding the volume of young people who are out of work, it’s interesting to see the number of young people who have been to university, gained a degree and who do not believe they are doing ‘graduate’ work. Sometimes, they are in work. Sometimes they have two or three jobs, all part-time, none of which are at their level of expectation, but they are earning. A higher proportion of part-time work available is part of the new landscape of jobs in our economy. The loss of work for older workers is a travesty for those affected and for the country and potentially it will get worse in the future. The percentage of individuals over 50 who are bored because they’re not able to contribute and utilise their experience and wisdom is a huge waste to our economic activities.
So how does this situation come about? Many people have left employment, sometimes with no choice, other times, where they did have a choice and took the package to leave, on voluntary redundancy terms. They have sleepwalked into a situation where they believed they could find a new job. The impact of the global financial crash three years ago is starting to be felt in a harder and tougher way as each month passes and the signs are that it is not going to get any easier in the near future. It is tough to get work if the work you want is the same sort that you’ve had. Demand is high and competition is furious. Even if you are smart about the way you seek work, it is still a real challenge.
We are not a society that has traditionally invested time and attention into helping schoolchildren, and later, those in higher education through to people with professional working lives, to think about their careers; to think about the skills required to keep working in the manner to which you have become accustomed. What this means is that there are a large number of people that are struggling with a lack of confidence and skills around how to find work.
So what can we do in these circumstances? The first issue is that we need to be objective about what it is that we’re capable of doing. For some of us, that is simple to do. For many of us it may be more complex than even we realise. We need to take a fresh look at our capability. We want to address this as a holistic process and not just about your skills and your work but about the wider issues in your life including your health and your wealth. For many people, thinking harder about their financial situation can point up exactly what it is they need to earn, which may or may not be what they originally thought they needed. It’s clearly very individual and dependent on one’s stage of life, one’s age, whether you’re in a dual-income household or whatever. Also, many of us make the mistake of thinking about issues of work purely in our own world without taking account of how this might fit with one’s spouse or partner.
How clear are we about the short-term or long-term view? And how much do we believe we need other people to give us work as opposed to us identifying what we can build and sell ourselves? We once were criticised as being a nation of shopkeepers. The truth is that the British economy has always been fuelled by entrepreneurship and innovation and never more so than during hard economic times. We must not be afraid to build if something does not exist for us and we think we have skills we can trade.
Mostly we have never learned career skills and we need to know how to go through a process that enables us to work and to earn and to gain a proper and appropriate economic reward through our labour. Our incentive is to stay working, stay earning and to provide ourselves with the mental stretch and the physical opportunity to stay fit and healthy for a long and prosperous life.
