Why is ‘burnout’ the buzzword du jour?

Lately, we’re hearing the word ‘burnout’ as often as ‘transformation’. This prompted me to sit in and learn at a webinar the other day.? It was an international event with 70-plus participants, and the audience was predominantly female, which made me wonder why.

There’s no generalised answer, but might it derive not from work, but from life choices? Work bears little resemblance to the environment that I joined many years ago. Only a small proportion of our workforce are manual workers, so burnout isn’t due to physical fatigue. WFH is partly designed to ease the pressures of commuting and work/life balance issues, so are we hearing more about burnout because folks are speaking out, or is there something else going on?

I started wondering if the issue may be related to disappointment.

Since Tony Blair’s decision to get 50% of 18-year-olds into tertiary education, we have young people pushed by parents and schools to work hard and get into university to gain a good job and get their careers underway. But what are we seeing? We’re seeing graduates earning no more than those who chose a less expensive route to a career and didn’t start with debts of ￡30,000-plus to pay off.

I’ll say it again: we’re witnessing – indeed we’re complicit in – some disingenuous behaviours by schools, universities and employers (parents are of little help). The result is that by the time folk reach their early 30s they’re asking themselves, “Where the hell is this taking me, and what’s the point of everything I’ve done to get here?”

Why do we have some 120 ‘universities’? Has no one woken up to the fact that having a degree in some of the subjects available from universities at the bottom of the league table is of questionable value?

When it comes to apprenticeships as an alternative to a degree, employers seem to find it easier to recruit from universities than find well-qualified apprentices, so that part of the market isn’t working particularly well either. If an employer can recruit from the placement resource at the leading universities, why would they go to the colleges sitting down at numbers 50+ on the leaderboard?

When I started teaching career management at business schools back in the 90s, I was shocked to discover that students didn’t realise they’d be competing for positions with fellow students who would all have the same MBAs – not with previous colleagues who had decided not to go to business school. But having the qualification isn’t enough – they need to be taught how to promote their difference. This is still not happening.

I had a similar experience recently when delivering two sessions to Masters students at a well-known university (interestingly, the vast majority were from overseas). I asked why I wasn’t being used to teach career management to undergraduates. They didn’t need it, I was told, because their graduate placement rate was so high. I remarked that they were measuring career management by the wrong criterion and asked how students fared three years after graduation. They didn’t know! Yet that is the measure of success – not getting a job in the first instance.

All of this draws me to a conclusion, which is where this article started. Disappointment is a key factor in feeling undervalued and worn out. It’s not that the work itself or today’s work environment are the problem. It’s that many of those who worked hard to pass the exams they were led to believe would set them on a lifetime career course have discovered that qualifications don’t necessarily lead to reward, personal satisfaction or progress. They feel they’ve been duped.

But wow, look at today’s “blueprint for change” announcement on higher education (30/09/2024) from Universities UK (UUK). It calls for 70% of 18-year-olds to go through tertiary education. Yet none of these institutions has so far acknowledged the need for career-management education, which means none has created the resources to provide it. If the “blueprint for change” goes ahead without it,?then all we’re doing is furthering the pre-conditions for stress and burnout. It’s a con trick!

To be continued…

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Andrew Garner is an executive senior management and C-suite mentor. He is the author of the career management manual: ‘Your Career Satnav… Switch It on!’? Get your copy here.