Wake Up and Smell the Coffee: Employment is Over

I don't write and draw and preach and sing the stuff I do to seduce anyone into trying entrepreneurism if they don't want to.

Some people have no interest in being their own boss. That's understandable. They prefer to get a job and do the things the job requires and go home and go to bed. They feel this way: "I do my job. Why do I have to be burdened with managing my career, as well?"

I don't write about envisioning the exact sort of life you want and stepping into the things that feel scariest to you because I simply want you to evolve as a person and to be happier, although I do.

I write this stuff because the world is changing whether you are ready to find your entrepreneurial side and exalt it, or not. We are becoming entrepreneurs through the pressure of the world around us. There is no more long-term employment. Today's story is: you get a job, you work for a while and then things shift.

Maybe your company closes a division or maybe you decide to move on. Either way, there is no opportunity to go to sleep. People who go to sleep on their careers regret it. We have to stay awake and aware of the world outside our cubicle walls!

Pundits predicted the fraying of the so-called social contract thirty years ago when I was a baby HR person. It was all we heard about back then - how long-term employment was going away - but the shift took some time to make its presence known.

Now we understand what the pundits were talking about. We see the erosion of long-term, full-time employment happening to us and around us.

When 47-year-olds come to us at Human Workplace and ask for career guidance and say "I just need one more job to get me to retirement!" we say "If you are committed to that perspective, we can't help you."

The traditional job-seeker's point of view is poison to a Mojo-fied job search. The traditional job-seeker's cry is "Hire me and let me disappear into your company! I'll be a good employee - you'll see!"

That mindset asks an employer to be so kind as to stoop and consider its humble servant, the lowly job-seeker, for a job. We can't survive, much less thrive, thinking about our work that way these days.

Living, breathing people get hired -- not bundles of skills or certifications or years of experience. They get hired when they know exactly how they solve big, thorny problems for their employer.

They get hired because they know they're good. They don't beg for a job.

You are becoming a business owner day by day, by your will or against your will. It's your career now, and you have to drive it. Traditional employment is over.

You have to know exactly what pain you solve for your employer,  and you have to think of your employer as a consulting client, no matter how long you've had your job. Things can change on a dime.

There are meetings taking place in Philadelphia and Hong Kong today that will put people out of work weeks or months from now -- including folks who are reading this column right now. We have to take steps most of us haven't taken before. We have to get actively involved in our careers whether we're job-hunting right now or not.

That means knowing who might need our talents and our pain-solving abilities if our current employer ( our client!) should cease to need our services one day. It means knowing what "our" type of Business Pain -- the irritating and expensive problem we solve for our clients and employers at work -- costs a client until they can get the pain to stop.

It means knowing how our services compare to the cost of the pain we relieve. None of this is hard to explore or to determine, but it requires a business owner's perspective. That's the first muscle all of us need to grow.

It's hard to see a bubble when you're in it. I was getting my hair done a dozen years ago in a salon when I spotted a business magazine that had come out the very month the Internet 1.0 tech bubble burst (the "dot-bomb" burst) and I eagerly read it.

The issue was three inches thick with advertising and overheated stories about new startups and flowing vc money. The business magazine had never printed an issue any thicker or more redolent of well-deserved and limitless success than that issue, and a month later Internet 1.0 was over.

Like I said, it's hard to see a bubble when you're in it.

We're in a slower-moving bubble now. My dad took his first job after college in 1950 and retired from the same company in 1985. That kind of career is unheard-of today. We work for shorter and shorter durations at each stop.

We're coming to the end of the post-war employment bubble, and stepping into a new era of entrepreneurism. 

Today's mantra is no longer "Work hard and make your boss happy" but "Keep multiple oars in the water, and keep your eyes open! Jump on every opportunity you see, and attend to your own needs before your employer's - that's how you'll become more and more marketable as you keep growing your flame!"

Some of us have traveled the employee-to-business-owner path already. When your life gets disrupted by a suddenly-disappearing job, you learn how to job-hunt all over again. If it happens two or three times, you realize you've become an entrepreneur without even trying.

People who've been fortunate enough (from a muscle-growing perspective) to have changed jobs several times have already slid into entrepreneurism.

Those folks are ahead of the curve that is overtaking all of us as the glaciers of steady employment in big, stable companies turned into ice floes first and then little chunks of mushy ice, melting in the ocean.

We're going to have to swim - so let's get ready!

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