Catch The Wave: The 21st-Century Career

Offering employees a rewarding career used to be easy: You’d hire a bright young person out of college, plug him into an entry-level role, and then watch him climb the corporate ladder over the years as he progressed toward retirement. The company could plan for this continuous process—hire people based on their degrees, slot them into well defined job profiles, help them develop slowly and steadily, and expect some to become leaders, some to become specialists, and some to plateau.

Today this model is being shattered. As research suggests, and as I’ve seen in my own career, the days of a steady, stable career are over. Organizations have become flatter and less ladder-like, making upward progression less common (often replaced by team or project leadership). Young, newly hired employees often have skills not found in experienced hires, leaving many older people to work for young leaders. And the rapid pace of technology makes many jobs, crafts, and skills go out of date in only a few years.

The training department used to offer a stable and well-architected career (I spent my entire first year at IBM as a “trainee,” with a 10-year career path clearly laid out). Today, many training departments are struggling to keep up, often pointing us to online courses and programs, telling us that it’s our job to “reskill ourselves.” And while they try to give us what we need to stay ahead, research shows that they are also falling behind: Employees rate their L&D departments a dismal -8 in net promoter score, lower than almost any product in the consumer landscape.

As technology evolves apace and more of us work part-time, these trends are only accelerating. LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman believes that careers are now simply “tours of duty,” prompting companies to design organizations that assume people will only stay a few years. And data bears this out: 58 percent of companies believe their new employees will stick around less than 10 years. (LinkedIn research shows that, on average, new degree-holders have twice as many jobs in their first five post-college years now as they did in the mid-1980s.)

But hold on. The world of careers doesn’t have to be so difficult and unforgiving. Organizations can adapt their career strategies and help people learn faster and continue to stay engaged. It just takes a rethinking of the problem, and a need to be aware of how jobs, careers, and skills are rapidly changing.

The bottom-line question is this: How can organizations build career models that encourage continuous learning, improve individual mobility, and foster a growth mind-set in every employee, year after year? This is the opportunity for today; companies that figure this out will outperform, out-innovate, and out-execute their peers.

Surfing can be scary even on the sunniest of days; when people’s livelihoods are at stake, career surfing feels treacherous, especially as waves cast workers off their surfboards again and again. How can we help people navigate and thrive in this new world of careers, while keeping our organizations intact?

The answer is clear: We as organizational leaders should redesign our companies so they offer diverse and continuous opportunities to develop. We should change our reward systems to encourage people to change roles, build technical expertise, and move horizontally for breadth and experience. Does your company reward people for technical expertise and breadth of experience? Or do you promote only people who move up the corporate pyramid?

We should also put resources into coaching, career planning, and career assessment. The old adage that “you manage your own career here” often means people managing themselves right out of the company. Forward-thinking companies today offer career-planning tools, actively post jobs internally, and encourage and support internal hires and transfers.

One of our clients, a large Asian energy company, characterized its job model as so rigidly structured that many people cannot get promoted until someone in the leadership dies or quits. Executives told me, laughing, that the best way for employees to get a better job was to “quit and reapply for a different job.” But this is no joke: I find this story true in many large organizations today.

In short, we have to blow up the traditional career model and work to make it easier for people to take the skills they have and use them in new roles within the organization.

No one would suggest that dealing with the career dynamics of the future will be easy, for either employees or employers. It’s important to actively redesign our learning organizations, rethink our job models, create more hybrid roles, and throw away our traditional ideas of the up-or-out approach to success.

And let's not only focus on technical education. As technology automates more and more of our work, skills in communication, listening, empathy, and integrated thinking have become more important than ever.

For companies that handle this well, the payoff can be huge: Our research has found that organizations that define themselves as great places to learn achieve 23 percent greater financial returns, out-innovate their peers, and endure business cycles far better than their contemporaries.

Think about this this way. Are YOU ready to grab your surfboard, paddle back out, and find the next big wave in your own career? With the next big wave just appearing on the horizon, we all need to focus on our surfing skills.

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Continue reading the original Deloitte Review 21 article on the Deloitte University Press website. Or listen to My Podcast describing the 21st Century Career here.

Copyright ? 2017 Deloitte Development LLC. All rights reserved.

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About the Author: Josh Bersin is the founder and Principal of Bersin by Deloitte, Deloitte Consulting LLP, a leading research and advisory firm focused on corporate leadership, talent, learning, and the intersection between work and life. Josh is a published author on Forbes, a LinkedIn Influencer, and has appeared on Bloomberg, NPR, and the Wall Street Journal, and speaks at industry conferences and to corporate HR departments around the world. You can contact Josh on twitter at @josh_bersin and follow him athttps://www.dhirubhai.net/in/bersin . Josh's personal blog is at www.joshbersin.com .