As a lot of my work recently has been with people who are unemployed, I have a ton of articles coming through my feeds on job search, unemployment, etc. Most of them are about "personal branding" and "building your network," how to manage your social media presence, write a great LinkedIn profile and navigate ever-more confusing and time-consuming online applicant tracking systems.  This morning, I ran across one that lists 18 Reasons Why You're Still Unemployed. These include being pierced, tattooed, angry, depressed, interviewing poorly--the list goes on. All of this, of course, suggests that the reasons for your unemployment lie somewhere in YOU. YOU need to do something to fix all of these flaws and once you do, then (presumably) a new job will be waiting for you.  I have a secret for you though. You could fix every single flaw on this list--including re-training for another career and magically erasing the depression and anger that pretty much go with the territory of unemployment--and you could STILL be unemployed. Do you know why? Because there are 3.3 job seekers for every job opening.  I'm going to repeat that.  There are 3.3 job seekers for every job opening.  That's on average, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Depending on where you're looking for work and the kind of work you're seeking, the numbers can be even worse.  It's kind of like playing musical chairs with three people walking around a single chair. When the music ends, only one of them will be able to sit down. And no matter how awesome the other two may be, through no fault of their own, they will still be sitting on the floor.  This is the elephant in the room we're not really discussing. We're all so busy looking at what we can personally control (like our "personal brand" and endlessly re-writing our resumes) that we've completely lost touch with a fundamental reality.  There are not enough jobs to go around.  Why does this matter?  Well if you're unemployed, it matters a lot. It gets old feeling like you've done everything you can and still you're having no luck landing a job. And then when you feel angry or depressed about it, people admonish you to "have a better attitude."  Worse, they will argue that it's your "bad attitude" that keeps you from finding something new! What about people who have a job? Well this should matter to you too, because this trend of fewer jobs for more people is going to continue, and probably accelerate. See this and this to get an idea of how technology is impacting jobs. Then read this Business Week article on the disposable worker to see how that dynamic is intersecting with technology. You may be safe for now, but that may not last forever. And if you're one of the lucky few who doesn't have to deal with this reality, you are still going to have a spouse, child, parent, or friend who does. At some point, we are all going to be dealing with unemployment, many of us more than once.  I think we're doing tons of damage to people by continuing to peddle this story that it's individual shortcomings and flaws that explain long-term and/or frequent unemployment. Yes, we can all do a better job of job searching. Yes, people still continue to find jobs in this economy.  But focusing on individual flaws keeps us all from discussing the bigger problem--that there aren't enough jobs for everyone who wants one.  So let's stop putting all of our energy into figuring out how to "brand" ourselves so that we can compete for the limited pool of jobs that are available. And let's stop acting like the unemployed are lepers who somehow deserve their fate because they didn't create a great LinkedIn profile or keep their skills updated.  Instead, let's turn to discussing what we're going to do about the fact that the pool of available jobs is shrinking and the real crisis is not about personal branding. It's about needing more jobs.  And let's quit telling the unemployed that it's their fault they can't find work. Believe me, if there were tons of jobs that needed doing, then employers would be a lot less picky. Your tattos and piercings and lack of a social media profile wouldn't get in the way of needing to get some work done.  It's simple math. So let's start dealing with that. 

  Charlie Kim, CEO of NextJump A few weeks ago I wrote a post on the "disposable worker" and the damage I think we're doing to ourselves and our economy with this approach. Yesterday in a comment on that post, Catherine Lombardozzi pointed me in the direction of an interview with NextJump CEO, Charlie Kim, whose company has adopted a "no fire" policy. Here's how that policy emerged:   I always thought we were a company with a strong focus on people, and it was for that reason that I advocated "fast firing" — if you knew someone wasn’t working out, don’t prolong the agony. Allowing bad behavior to perpetuate is one of the worst things you can do for team performance. . .  I was talking with Bob Chapman, CEO of Barry-Wehmiller at Massive, a gathering organized by Simon Sinek, and Bob challenged me on this point and asked me how I’d like my son to be fired by someone in the future. That floored me. Being fired is a highly traumatic emotional event. It’s the equivalent of being told "you are no good."   Charlie is right, of course. It's difficult to not take a lay-off personally, even if it has nothing to do with our performance. We see it as a commentary on our worth, especially if others are staying behind. Why were WE selected to be laid off, when others were considered valuable enough to keep?  Charlie goes on to describe the impact of "no fire" on his company's operations: Once you realize that you are entering into a lifelong relationship, hiring starts to look a lot more like adoption, or dating. Multiple interactions over some time are required before our team would get comfortable with a prospective hire. Every hiring manager started hiring more carefully, something I’d been advocating for but couldn’t make happen in every manager. Without further direction, they started treating hiring like adoption: once we take someone into our family, they’re here for life, when things don’t work, they’re responsible for training them, helping them. Training also became much more comprehensive, touching subjects such as character, grit, and integrity in ways we had previously viewed as beyond the scope of company training. Almost immediately turnover went from 40% to 0%. Recruiters and other CEOs have told me that NxJumpers aren’t even taking their calls. The percentage of employees who said they "love," not like, not tolerate, but LOVE their jobs went from 20% to 90%. I told you about the formal deliberate changes we made to our training programs. There were powerful, self-organizing impacts as well. Peer counseling groups formed in every part of the company. Groups of 3 to 4 people meeting regularly to help each other grow, talk through hardships. Probably the biggest impact was the effectiveness of performance evaluations. Development discussions were usually wrought with skepticism from the employee standpoint — are you really trying to help me or just documenting material to potentially fire me? Since getting fired wasn’t an option, everyone became more open to talk about their real problems. Performance evaluations became what it was always intented for - development discussions, open, honest and often real and raw conversations on what people are struggling with. Since people could voice real concerns at work, they left those toxins there and didn’t take them home with them. Home life improved as well.   There are still times, of course, when a hire doesn't work out, but NextJump provides the support and encouragement for people to move to their next position: I reassigned a person to a job position and told them their new job was to look for a new job. We continued to pay them, provide office space, access to company resources, and promised positive evaluations as appropriate. This "no fire" policy seems like a huge win/win for both individuals and the companies they work for. When employees feel the deeper commitment from the company to their professional well-being, they can focus on what really matters, rather than on the protective behaviors a more uncertain work environment tends to engender. There's also time and space to deal with the deeper, more personal issues that inevitably impact company performance but that we currently address by discarding  a person and moving on to the next one.  What would happen if more companies took the "no fire" pledge? How could this change the experience of work and the quality of our workforce? 

  Last week I wrote about an elephant in the room of careers and employment that we aren't really acknowledging or discussing--the fact that there are 3.3 job seekers for every available job opening.  Today I want to acknowledge another elephant in the room that is the reality for both those who are unemployed and those who are currently working. It is this (and pardon my bluntness here): From a job seeker perspective, many, many jobs suck. On just about every measure you can imagine, job quality from a job seeker perspective is trending downward. Real wages for many jobs are declining. Adjusted for inflation, the average U.S household has lower income than it did in 1997.   To the extent that there is any job growth, most of it has been in low-wage industries. And healthcare benefits and retirement fund costs are being shifted onto workers, contributing to the erosion of their wages. Assuming, of course, that they have healthcare or retirement benefits available to them at all.  For many workers, full-time employment is a dream, especially in those industries where employers are using just-in-time scheduling to bring workers in for the busiest few hours, rather than for an entire shift. And in an effort to avoid the requirements of the Affordable Care Act, many companies are cutting hours even further, preferring to hire a number of part-time workers rather than fewer full-time employees. This forces workers to try to juggle multiple jobs with each employer demanding that their job be the first priority.  For salaried workers, hours are longer  and increasingly we are on call 24/7, afraid to not respond to an email or answer a client call because we could be seen as not being dedicated enough. No one wants to be the target in a layoff, so we do whatever we can to appear to be the most productive and "value-add," even if that means giving up the necessary down-time that actually helps people function.  Many, if not most workplaces are short-staffed and those workers "lucky" enough to have a job, find that they are expected to pick up the slack for those who have been laid off or not hired in the first place. Workplaces are engineered to wring every ounce of productivity from their workers and managers spend much of their time trying to make sure this happens. Unfortunately, workers aren't even the beneficiaries of these productivity gains.  We are also dealing with a great deal of uncertainty at work. Many jobs are now explicitly temporary or contingent work, so those workers know they are always on borrowed time.  But even "permanent" workers know there is no guarantee and that lay-offs can come at any moment.    On top of all of this, job duties change quickly, and requirements for doing those jobs change even more rapidly, often in ways we didn't anticipate. With a glut of workers in the market, it's easier for employers to demand more skills, education and specific work experiences largely because they can. But how do you keep yourself prepared for what is essentially a moving target? And how do you keep upgrading your skills when you're spending so much of your time just trying to keep your head above water at work? The reality is, that in addition to the sheer lack of available jobs, we are also dealing with a severe decline in the quality of those jobs that are available. All of the talk about "poorly prepared" workers obscures these facts and keeps us focused on job seeker deficiences, rather than on the deficiencies of the modern workplace. This is not to say that we don't need to find ways to continue to learn and grow as workers. We do. But at the same time, we need to push back on the notion that if we only fixed workers, then everything else would fall into place. This simply isn't true. We need to broaden the conversations we are having about work and the economy beyond the simplistic "pull yourself up by your bootstraps and you'll  be OK" discussions that currently dominate our national landscape. There is something much bigger going on that we need to address. But we have to start by acknowledging the realities of our situation. There aren't enough jobs for everyone who wants to work and the jobs we do have are of increasingly poor quality. 

  I wrote a couple of long posts in February on the two major factors most job seekers are dealing with in this economy. The first was on the reality that there aren't enough jobs for everyone who wants one. The second was on the poor quality of many of the jobs that do exist.  After writing these, though, I was left wondering what it is we can do to operate in this kind of environment. How do I advise people about career and professional development in a world that is so uncertain, risky and, frankly, negative?  Yesterday it hit me. There is only one thing we can do if we want to be successful when change is happening so rapidly and when so much of our work life is about dealing with stress and curve balls.  We have to develop our career resilience skills.  That's it. That's all we can do. We have to develop our resilience skills and use that resilience to meet the challenges that have become a regular part of our work lives.  Why Resilience? According to the American Psychological Association, resilience is your capacity to deal with stress, adversity and uncertainty. Resilience is about bouncing back, rolling with the punches, getting back up on the horse. It's our ability to take what life throws at us and use it to grow stronger.  Our careers are no longer a matter of making a decision about what we want to do with the rest of our lives, getting an education and then following a straight-line career path to that dream job. Those days are long gone.  Today's careers require us to be agile, flexible, and adaptable. To see opportunity in challenges and to develop our capacity to deal with constantly changing parameters and requirements.  When you build your resilience, you are in a better position to adapt to ongoing changes. You accept change as a part of life and see change as an opportunity, not as a series of insurmountable obstacles.  Resilience can also help you feel more in control. You're able to keep things in perspective and to see yourself as an actor in your life, rather than as a victim. High resilience also allows you to be more pro-active in responding to whatever gets thrown at you.  Four Patterns of Career Resilience In looking at resilience as it applies to our careers, I see four patterns we need to incorporate into our lives. I see these as patterns, because they are ongoing components of our behavior and thinking that we need to work on. Career resilience is not a once and done event. It is a way of being that you must focus on developing. The four patterns I see are: Patterns that support Clarifying Patterns that support Connecting Patterns that support Creating Patterns that support Coping Patterns for Clarifying Resilience needs clarity. We need to understand who we are, what we want, and how we bring value to the work that we do. What are our signature strengths? What do we want more of in our lives?  Clarity is also about knowing what's going on in the outside world. What occupational, industry and economic trends impact our careers? What is the likelihood that technology or outsourcing could eliminate or completely change our jobs? What credentials and skills are needed to be successful?  Most importantly, what goals and plans do we need to develop for ourselves, based on our awareness of ourselves and the changes that we see going on in the world? Clarity gives us a sense of purpose and control because it allows us to know where we stand and to see where we can fit in as new opportunities and challenges come our way.  Patterns for Connecting Resilience thrives on connections. Resilient people have a core group of individuals they know are always in their corner. They look for who is available, who's trustworthy and who's helpful and they go toward the light of these connections.  They aren't afraid to ask for and receive help and they offer their own services in return.  Connections and relationships are also at the heart of what it takes to be successful in a networked world. It is your relationships that bring you information, knowledge and opportunities. Your connections can help you bounce back and spring forward, even under the most adverse conditions. But connections don't just happen. We must be purposeful and intentional in developing those connections that will most support us in adapting to change.    Patterns for Creating Resilience is also about action. What steps are we taking to achieve our goals, to learn from our misakes, to engage in new experiences that can grow our skills and networks? Resilient people have a plan and they work that plan.  We also have to ask ourselves what patterns do we have in place that provide the best structures for creating and experimenting? How do we spend our time? What rituals are part of our work lives? How do we move from insight into action?  Flow needs a framework. If you want your career to flow more easily, you must create frameworks for that to happen.  Patterns for Coping Ultimately, resilience is about how we cope with life's ups and downs. How do we manage our emotional responses and maintain an optimistic outlook, even under dire circumstances? How do we nurture and take care of ourselves on a regular basis so that we can bring our best selves to our lives? What stories do we tell ourselves about our work, our strengths and weaknesses and about how people relate to us? How do these stories impact our ability to meet challenges head on?  Resilient people have a generally positive outlook on life and have learned to persevere in the face of challenges. They feel their emotions, but they don't allow their emotions to overwhelm their ability to act. Effective coping mechanisms are a critical component of developing career resilience.   Additional Thoughts on Resilience I see the four patterns of career resilience working together synergistically, each connected to and reinforcing the others. All of them are critically important, although at different times we may find ourselves more focused on a particular pattern. When we're confused or uncertain about where to go next, we may pay more attention to Clarifying. When we're overly stressed and anxious, we may need to spend time on our Coping patterns. If we're trying to expand into something new, we'd be well-served to focus on the Connecting and Creating patterns. And if we've lost our jobs, we need to spend time working on all four patterns.  There are two things that feel most important to me about developing career resilience. The first is that resilience should be our goal. We cannot control the people and events that surround us, but we can control our capacity to meet the challenges that inevitably arise at work. By focusing on resilience as our goal, rather than on trying to control what is uncontrollable, we put ourselves into a much healthier position for moving forward.  I also see the idea of patterns of behavior being critically important. Resilience is not something we summon at will. It is something we must build and work on every day. Believe me, we know it when we haven't paid attention to one or more of the career resilience patterns in our lives. I see this all the time when I'm working with people who lose their jobs. They've done little to develop these patterns in their lives, so they are less equipped to move on to their next opportunity.  For me, working on career resilience is a worthy goal. It's a way to respond to all that is negative and challenging at work and to focus our attention where it's most needed--on our capacity to creatively and effectively respond to a new normal.  What are your thoughts on this? Does the idea of career resilience resonate with you? What do you do to build your own career reslience? 

  Last week I wrote about career resilience and the need for us to develop four patterns in our work lives: Clarifying Connecting Creating Coping One thing that I've observed about resilient people is that they persist. Even when things are at their worst or it seems like they are going nowhere, resilient people are persistent people. As Steve Pavlina puts it, "they press on, even when they feel like quitting." Persistence is one of the major Coping patterns we need to develop in our lives if we ever hope to be truly resilient. Without persistence, we won't be able to work on any of the other patterns we need to grow in ourselves, because honestly, developing career resilience isn't always easy work.  The problem with persistence is that it's not terribly sexy. It's the daily, weekly, monthly grind of self-discipline, of slogging through mud when we feel like just giving up. Believe me, I struggle with persistence all the time, so I know it's not an easy thing to do.  But resilience requires persistence. It takes diligence to forge new habits and self discipline to bring our vision into reality. The essence of reslience is not giving up. Persistence is what makes sure that we don't.  Where do we need to show persistence? I think in two ways--persistence of vision and persistence of action.  Persistence of vision is having a clear image of where we want to go--direction, not necessarily destination. Persistence of vision is what drives us to create, to the actions that we need to take to move forward.  Persistence of action is even more important, though, because this is often where we fall down. We may have a persistent vision of where we want to go, but we fail to take the steps to actually get there.---especially if we encounter obstacles or challenges along the way that make us want to give up.  So how to develop our persistence muscles? Probably the best advice I've seen on this comes from this post by Todd Warren (quoting Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich). We need to have: 1. "A definite purpose backed by burning desire for its fulfillment" 2. "A definite plan backed by continuous action."  3.  "A mind closed tightly against all negative and discouraging influences, including negative suggestions of relatives, friends and acquaintances." 4.  "A friendly alliance with one or more persons who will encourage one to follow through with both plan and purpose."   A purpose, motivation to achieve that purpose, a plan that turns into action, a positive mind and supportive people--that's what we need to practice persistence. And these are the tools of career resilience, too. 

I'm currently facilitating an 8-month long leadership course that meets monthly. Yesterday's topic was networking and connecting. As part of our work, I had them go through some exercises to look at their networks and diagnose where they had gaps and needed to do some more work.  What started to emerge as we went throught the exercise was how many of the participants network and connect on behalf of their companies, but they pay little attention to building connections that support their own career resilience and professional development plans. Connecting, for them, is about connecting to benefit their companies, which may or may not actually benefit them.  When we think about building our networks, clearly we need to pay attention to developing the connections that allow us to be successful in our jobs. We need to connect with customers and clients and people in our industries so that we're able to be effective in our work.  However, we need to understand that the connections that we make on behalf of our companies or organizations are not necessarily the connections we need to make to increase our own career resilience. We should never confuse what our company needs us to do with with we need to do for ourselves.  Connecting to build your resilience means developing connections that energize, nurture and challenge you, connections that help you grow personally and professionally, regardless of whether or not those connections get your company more business.  You need mentors, communities of practice, and "way-showers"--people who can be role-models and supporters of your career and personal growth.  So here's your challenge for today. Go through your contacts and ask yourself if the people you're connected to are basically connections who benefit your company or organization, or are they connections that also help you grow and adapt to change? 

  A few weeks ago I had lunch with a friend who started a solo business last year. I was sharing with her my thinking about career resilience and the 4 patterns of success, describing each in more detail.  When we got to Connecting, she grew thoughtful. "I don't think I've been doing a lot with the Connecting pattern," she told me. "I've been focused on Clarifying and Creating and have let some of my connecting fall by the wayside." As we talked further, what became clear was while she'd been doing some connecting, she'd been missing a crucial group--people who are still in the trenches of the field where she is working. And she was missing their practical, day-to-day experiences in terms of challenges, aspirations, etc. This is important to her business as well as to her own personal/professional development.  From there, as the resilient busineess owner she is, she moved into what to do about it.  She decided that she was going to come up with a plan to reach out to some people and invite them for coffee, just to pick their brains and share ideas. A few days later, she sent me the draft of an email she wanted to send out and she has begun putting her plan into action.  My friend is a great example of how to work with the patterns of career resilience. She looked at the 4 patterns and how she was applying them in her work life. She saw that there was an area where she needed to do more work  and then came up with a plan to address it. If you look closely, you see that she was actually using the patterns of resilience to come up with a resilience action plan. She used Clarifying to identify where she needed to make some changes and then Creating to develop the plan to make the changes.  Another critical element of this story is that she followed up. The Creating pattern with its focus on action and follow-up is one of the most important patterns we can strengthen in developing our resilience. I see so many people (myself included) who recognize a need to take action, but who let that action fall by the wayside as other, competing priorities take precedence. But it's only in the Creating that we truly see change.  Career resilience is a process. It is not a once and done thing, but an ongoing strategy for approaching our career and professional development. My friend's experience with looking at how the patterns were playing out in her life currently clearly demonstrates how this works.  You can see as well that the patterns apply not only to employees and job seekers, they also apply to business owners. They too must develop and strengthen their resilience patterns in order to keep their businesses on track.  For me, it was gratifying to see how my friend worked with the patterns of resilience. She's someone I admire for her ongoing committment to development and it was interesting to see how the resilience framework gave her another way to think about what she needed to do for herself.  How are you applying the 4 patterns of resilience in your life? Which pattern do you need to work on some more? 

  Regular readers know that I'm a strong proponent of working for yourself. Even if you have a day-job, I think you should always be looking for ways to diversify your income streams as the next lay-off could be right around the corner, despite your best efforts.  Yesterday's post on career resilience in action got me thinking about how the 4 patterns of resilience apply to those who run their own business(es). These patterns are not just for people who work for someone else. They're patterns that support successful self-employment too.  Clarifying The Clarifying pattern when you work for yourself is something you must constantly be working on. What is going on with your customers and the industries you are working in?  How do your strengths and assets intersect with these trends?  What are the most important priorities for you and your business?  How do you want your business to reflect your values and the values of your customers?   Clarity of purpose, clarity of assets and clarity of goals are all critical to the healthy functioning of your business. As a small business owner myself, I find that I must be intentional about integrating patterns for finding clarity into my work life. It's easy to be so caught up in projects and business administration that I forget the need to periodically take a step back and get clear about what I'm doing and why I'm doing it. This is where rituals and reflective practice become important. Clarity can also be found in making the right kinds of connections and creating mastermind groups for support and accountability.  Connecting Clearly the Connecting pattern is critical to small business owners--this is how we find our customers and connecting to others to market our products and services is like breathing for most successful entrepreneurs. We do it without thinking.  What may happen less often, but be equally important, is using the pattern of connecting to support other aspects of our work.  As small business people, particularly if we are solo entrepreneurs, we need to make connections that can reinforce our personal and professional growth and that feed our need for social contact. We need to find mentors, communities of practice and mastermind groups who can challenge our thinking and hold us accountable for achieving our goals. We also need connections that can help us cooperate to compete--people who may offer complementary (or even competitive) products and services with whom we can build new offerings that benefit both their businesses and our own.  Connections from diverse industries and occupations are also important. They feed us new information, new ideas and new possibilities. But we must seek them out because they won't necessarily come naturally to us.  We can use our clarifying activities to help us get clearer about where we need to build and strengthen our connections. Then we can be intentional about growing those connections as my friend is doing through her own career resilience work. This is an example of the next pattern we need to work on--Creating.  Creating Most successful small business people I know are pretty good at the Creating pattern. After all, without creating, you have nothing to sell.  But Creation is more than just daily doing and activity. It's also about risk-taking and experimenting. How are we stretching ourselves in the creative process to bring something truly great into the world?  How are we using what we learn through Clarifying and Connecting to create a business that plays to our strengths and that achieves the goals we've set for ourselves?  How are we dealing with and learning from failure?  The Creating pattern is also about making sure that we've put into place for ourselves the right structures and supports for getting our work done. Are we constantly putting out fires or do we have an infrastructure in place that allows us to be more deliberative and intentional in accomplishing our work?  Are things falling through the cracks and are we missing opportunities or have we created processes that allow the work to flow? Our patterns of creating should be structured around inspiration and purpose, not just around our daily to-do lists. For this to happen, though, we must be intentional in developing patterns that allow us to create from a place of inspiration, not desperation.  Coping In my dealings with other small business people, as well as in looking at my own life, I see that developing patterns for Coping is probably the area where we entrepreneurs can have the most holes.  There is a cult of entrepreneurship that drives us to believe that working for yourself means working 24/7, which makes taking care of your emotional, physical and spiritual needs a very low priority. This is true particularly when our businesses are new or if we've failed to put into place the right structures for Creating, Clarifying and Connecting.  But creating healthy Coping patterns is critical if we hope to run our businesses for the long-term. Making sure that we nurture and sustain those non-work parts of ourselves will prevent burnout. And healthy coping patterns also feed our capacity to engage with the other 3 patterns of resilience.  In particular I've found that healthy Coping mechanisms are about what I call "following the energy,"--that is, paying attention to how we're feeling throughout the day so that can see which activities and people feed and nurture us and which of these are a drain. Emotions are a powerful indicator of what is and isn't working, but we need to pay attention to them in order to address what they are telling us.  Coping is also about paying attention to our mental frames--the stories we are telling ourselves about our business and ourselves. Resilient business people need to focus on developing frames that support our business plans, while weeding out those thinking and behavior patterns that hinder us.  I find that as an entrepreneur myself, I'm constantly having to look at the 4 patterns of resilience and how I'm using/developing them in support of my business. When things don't seem to be going as smoothly, by examining what's happening with these patterns I can quickly see where I need to do some work.  Resilience is something we all need to develop, but for entrepreneurs, this is probably job one. How are you, as an entrepreneur developing your career and business resilience? Which areas of resilience are easy for you and which are harder for you to develop? 

This may be the one of the most important career posts I've ever written. I urge you to read it, even if you don't think it applies to you.  This morning I was tagged in a G+ conversation that linked to this article on the impact of technology in the workplace. It got me thinking, once again, about how technology is transforming the workplace.  One of the things I've been harping on for awhile now is that as individual workers, we need to be paying better attention to technological changes that are coming our way. This is a HUGE part of the clarifying pattern we need to be developing for career resilience.  Here's the thing. Clarifying is about looking at how your strengths and skills and passions intersect with what's happening in the job market. As technology continues to transform work and occupations, one area we need to be evaluating continuously is what technology is able to do and how that might impact what we currently do in our jobs. Stop Underestimating the Impact of Technology on Your Job If I've learned anything in the past 20 years, it's that the elimination of jobs due to technology keeps creeping up on us. We seem to consistently underestimate the consequences of technological change when it comes to our employment. One minute people are happily doing their jobs. The next, entire occupations are decimated by new software capabilities or robotics. How long did it take for travel agents to essentially disappear once you were able to book your own travel online? What about all the distribution center workers who are out of work because robots can manage with only 20 human workers?  Technology is disrupting entire INDUSTRIES--hello Blockbuster, Kodak and every newspaper on the planet--so of course it's going to change your job. You have to start anticipating the changes, though, rather than assuming that technology isn't going to impact you and then having your world turned upside down when it does.  A couple of examples. . . Right now, drivers of all stripes--cabbies, truck drivers--should be re-thinking their careers because within 5 years, I predict that Google's driverless car is going to put them out of business. Or, at a minimum, drastically reduce both their employment numbers and their wages.  And teachers, you should be concerned too. Work with robot teachers is showing that they can achieve the results of most human teachers in terms of learning gains and in some cases, the kids actually prefer the robots, as they are more patient and can explain the topic in multiple ways. As artificial intelligence continues to improve, this trend could (will) start to accelerate.  While we're speaking of teachers, we don't need robots to replace workers to completely disrupt an industry. Technology can impact in other ways. The rise of MOOCs (massive open online courses) could be just as devastating to the employment of teachers as any robot. If it works at the university level, it's only a matter of time before the same model works its way down to the secondary and elementary level--perhaps aided by robot TAs.  Technology WILL Change What You Do and How Much You're Paid to Do It and May Eliminate Your Job Altogether I say all of this because I think that as individual workers, we are terrible at thinking through how technology might impact our jobs. Unless the technological change is explicitly happening in our industry or occupation, we tend to ignore it. This is a huge mistake.  And don't be fooled into thinking that if an industry is growing, that means jobs are growing within that industry. Over the past few years, for example, we've heard about the resurgence of manufacturing in the U.S.. What isn't talked about as much is that this growth in the industry isn't translating into more jobs. That's because robotics and software are doing most of the heavy lifting. Just because an industry seems to be going gangbusters, doesn't mean that jobs are abundant.  For us to be truly resilient in our careers, we must start educating ourselves more consistently on general technology trends and how these could start disrupting the industries and occupations we work in.  Here's an example of what I mean. Read this from How the Internet Made Us Poor:  In a gleaming new warehouse in the old market town of Rugley, England, Amazon directs the actions of hundreds of "associates" wielding hand-held computers. These computers tell workers not only which shelf to walk to when they’re pulling goods to be shipped, but also the optimal route by which to get there. Each person’s performance is monitored, and they are given constant feedback about whether or not they are performing their job quickly enough. Their bosses can even send them text messages via their handheld computers, urging them to speed up. "You’re sort of like a robot, but in human form," one manager at Amazon’s warehouse told the Financial Times. "It’s human automation, if you like." Now let's apply this to nurses in a hospital. Imagine them walking around with hand-held computers that give them feedback on each patient hooked up to wireless monitors that track everything going on in the patient's body (smart pills will come into play here too). Nurses are able to administer medications, monitor vital signs, etc. on multiple patients through these devices. Bosses can monitor how efficiently they are carrying out their duties and send them messages urging them to speed things up. You may think this won't happen, but I promise you that it already is.  In general, when it comes to technology, you should assume that if your job involves routine processing of information aided by computer software, then either that job is virtually going to be eliminated (think travel agents and administrative assistants) or there is going to be HUGE downward pressure on wages--neither of which is good for you.  Don't assume that this applies only to "lower-level" jobs either. One of the reasons we're seeing massive reductions in employment for lawyers is because software can now more efficiently and effectively do the routine document reviews and filings once done by entry-level attorneys. By one estimate, one attorney can do the work of 500 lawyers now. Another way to think about it--If your job involves telling a computer what to do (think programmers), then you are in pretty good shape. If a computer is telling you what to do, start planning for something else.  The push for profits and productivity is going to continue to drive the spread of technology. We will not be putting the technology genie back in the bottle. The issue for you is to start thinking NOW about how you're going to respond. Do you need to start looking for another occupation, beginning the re-training process now, rather than when you get laid off?  Do you need to start developing additional skill sets that will help you adapt to changes that may be coming your way and that would make you more valuable in a technology-enhanced occupation?  Is self-employment an area you need to explore, recognizing that entrepreneurs and owners of capital will be the winners in a technology-enhanced future?  Technology is happening. How are you going to respond?  A Technology and Jobs Reading List If you want to dive more deeply into this topic, here are some resources to get you started: How the Internet Made Us Poor Job Fight: Haves vs. the Have Nots Better Than Human: Why Robots Will-And Must-Take Our Jobs Holy Hal!  A Robot Stole My Job! 60 Minutes: Are Robots Hurting Job Growth?  (answer--yes they are) The End of Labor: How to Protect Workers from the Rise of Robots The Age of Big Data Are You Prepared for the Internet of Things? UPDATE--Harold Jarche's bookmarks for "Automated and Outsourced" UPDATE--The Tech Debate Blasts Off: A Linkfest Also, I would highly recommend doing some google searches on technology and your industry. Try searching on: "robotics and (your industry)" "robots and (your industry)" "nanotechnology and (your industry)" "automation and (your industry)"   Technology-Proofing Yourself And here are some resources to help you keep yourself relevant and employed in a technology-enhanced world.  A Whole New Mind--Although Dan Pink's book is 7 years old now, it still has some important things to say about how to technology-proof yourself for work. Future-Proofing Your Career Managing Your Career When You Have More than One--Think multiple income streams and self-employment instead of full-time, permanent job.  Become Your Own Job Creator--How to take advantage of disruptive trends. Future Work Skills 2020 Build Your Career On Three Hopeful Trends   UPDATE--Here's another link to add to your reading list from Harold Jarche--The Post Job Economy.  Thanks to Marco Campana for the link.  A huge part of developing your career resilience is paying attention to what's going on in your external environment. Technology is one of the biggest trends likely to impact your career. You need to start thinking now about how you're going to respond.  And you need to put some structures into place that let you keep up with how technology could change what you're doing in the future. Otherwise, you're going to be caught in the technology squeeze that has left us with more job seekers than available jobs.  HERE'S THE LINK TO PART 2 IN THIS SERIES

Last Friday, I wrote about how technology is eating your job. Since then, I've been immersed in further exploring the extent to which this is true and finding more resources to convince you that this is one of the most critical trends impacting your career today.  First, if you care at all about the future of your job, I encourage you to watch Andrew McAfee's TEDXTalk in Boston above. It provides a compelling summary of how technology is impacting employment and will be the best 15 minutes you can invest in yourself today.  (Here's a link to a blog post about his February TEDTalk appearance, that builds on the video above.)  I want to pull from it an important chart that you need to pay attention to:  This is the projected number of people coming into the labor force contrasted with the number of projected jobs that will be available. As you can see, for the forseeable future, these lines do not meet. In fact, they get futher apart.  And McAfee argues that he's being optimistic in predicting the number of available jobs in the future because he's basing his predictions on the past. There's a lot of evidence to suggest that, in this case, the past is not a good predictor of the future.   We're on the leading edge of the technology revolution and just beginning to feel the real impacts.  I also want to point you to some other ways that software and robots are taking over the intellectual tasks we have traditionally considered to be the exclusive domain of humans (from The Rise of Our Robot Overlords). These are important because I think they give you a flavor for the breadth and scope of these changes. We now have:  Software grading essays (Teachers, pay attention)  Software that can spot trends in big data and write stories about it.  (Writers of all stripes, are you listening?) A robot scientist that can formulate and test hypotheses, doing the work of dozens of lab techs and assistants in the process. (Hello, STEM careers)  And this is just the beginning. As McAfee points out in his TEDTalk, imagine what we'll have when we're able to put together the technology of Siri with the technology of Watson. I don't think we can even begin to fathom the possibilities there.  What concerns me about all this is that I'm afraid we have "a failure of imagination," as Daniel Lemire describes it. It's hard for us to envision a future where machines do most of the work. Right now, I think this is partially because we are currently picturing robots taking over our jobs, in a future reminiscent of The Jetsons. Since we don't see too many robots in our daily life, it's easy for us to say "Oh, technology isn't going to impact MY job." But I'm not so sure it's the robot you need to worry about at this juncture (although that's coming.) I think it's the increasingly sophisticated software that is everywhere, including on that smartphone in your pocket.  And here's something else we rarely discuss, but that is very real and one of the reasons I think we need to be concerned here. Aside from their obvious abilities to perform the tasks,  machines don't have the messy complications of humans, like personal lives and responsiblities or the need to sleep, eat and re-charge. Machines don't want a vacation. They don't call off sick or come in late because their kid had croup.  They don't argue with co-workers. They aren't passive-aggressive, or jealous or lazy.  Then don't dress inappropriately, make rude comments or harass other workers.  They don't complain about their work load or about having to work on weekends They don't ask for a raise. In short, machines have that much touted "work ethic," that so many employers complain humans are lacking. Think about it. If you were a business owner and could buy a machine for $30k that could easily learn new tasks and work for you 24/7 without complaint, what would you do? Hire a person to do that work? I don't think so.  Finally, we need to pay attention to the fact that there has been a decline in overall demand for cognitive skills that has been going on since 2000. From a recent paper, The Great Reversal in the Demand for Skill and Cognitive Tasks: Many researchers have documented a strong, ongoing increase in the demand for skills in the decades leading up to 2000. In this paper, we document a decline in that demand in the years since 2000, even as the supply of high education workers continues to grow. We go on to show that, in response to this demand reversal, high-skilled workers have moved down the occupational ladder and have begun to perform jobs traditionally performed by lower-skilled workers. This de-skilling process, in turn, results in high-skilled workers pushing low-skilled workers even further down the occupational ladder and, to some degree, out of the labor force all together. This is partially why a B.A. is now a ticket to a job in a coffee house. Education isn't the panacea we're all claiming that it is.  In my work over the years as a career coach, I've found that the majority of people do little to really manage their careers until they are hit by some kind of bomb. Sometimes it's being laid off or fired that creates the impetus for change. Sometimes it's when the person can't take it anymore.  The reason I'm harping on technology so much is because for most of us, I believe this is a ticking time bomb we are trying to ignore. Most of us want to keep our heads down and just keep working, hoping that we aren't going to be the ones displaced by a piece of software or some other form of automation. This will be a mistake. And it will blow up in your face. You need to start thinking now about how to future-proof yourself as much as possible so that you're more prepared for this breaking wave of technology.  Some Additional Resources (Thanks to Matthew Price for these links) The G+ Technological Unemployment Community--This group is constantly posting new examples and discussing the implications of technology, particularly for knowledge workers.   Technological Unemployment Resources--A Google doc with tons of links collected by the G+ Technological Unemployment community.  Lights in the Tunnel--Martin Ford's book on the topic and his excellent blog with more links/reading  is here.  Andrew McAfee's Blog Part One of this discussion, with more links.    Related articles Clarifying Your Career Path: Technology is Eating Your Job The Four Patterns that Should Guide All Your Career Moves