Tours of Duty

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, help them develop slowly and steadily and expect some to become leaders and some to become specialists.

Today, as research suggests, the days of a steady, stable career are over. Organisations have become less ladder-like, making upward progression less common (often replaced by team or project leadership). Young, newly hired employees often have skills not found inexperienced 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 And the rapid pace of technology makes many jobs, crafts and skills go out of date in only a few years.

LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman believes that careers are now simply ‘tours of duty’, and it is proved by research that 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.

The changing world of work has disrupted the three components of the traditional idea of a career, which are expertise, duration and rewards.

Expertise has an ever-shorter shelf life. Artificial intelligence is doing the rote work of lawyers, simplifying the work of doctors and changing skilled jobs from truck driver to financial analyst.

On account of the changes of today’s business structures, the idea of a single, long-lasting career is becoming a thing of the past. The iconic industrial companies of the early 1900s (steel, automobile, energy and manufacturing) have outsourced to smaller firms many of their business processes and sales channels. The result has been a steady increase in innovation and profitability but a dramatic decay in the security of a ‘company man’ career.

Driven by opportunism (why stay at a company where advancement opportunities are limited?) and necessity (what else can you do when your job is outsourced?), the practice of switching jobs and companies grew more common, until job-hopping became the norm. People over forty, for instance, typically worked for four to five companies during their working lifetime.

Indeed, while many companies have outsourced specialised tasks over the years, big companies still need myriad technical and professional talent. Bersin, by Deloitte’s research and data from labour market analytics firm Burning Glass Technologies, shows that skills in maths, statistics, project management and logical thinking are now prerequisites for most positions. However, there is the risk of outsourcing such technical expertise.

In the 1800s, machinists and metalworkers were the computer scientists of today; as automated manufacturing grew and more powerful machines were invented, these ‘metal-bending’ careers often turned into careers in developing, operating and fixing machines. Today, while the core need for technical skills remains strong, another theme has entered the job market: the need for people with skills in communication, interpretation, design and synthetic thinking. The jobs of the future, driven by the increasing use of technology, require social skills complementing more technical abilities.

Harvard researcher David Deming shows that some of the best jobs in the future are those that draw upon both technical and social skills. Yes, developers can program computers to take on rote and information-based tasks, but machines are not yet so good at listening, empathising, communicating or convincing.

Excerpt from Deloitte Review