What is an individual’s typical path through employment and life?

04/20/2007

Positively Minnesota
April 2007


A few decades ago, the Andersons in "Father Knows Best" and the Nelsons in "Ozzie and Harriet" showed the 20th-century American model of work— the male breadwinner would get a job immediately after school or military service, knowing that his steady work and loyalty would let him advance and eventually retire from that company (with a comfortable pension). Getting a job was an event— and something that would happen only once in a lifetime because job changing was within the same company. Meanwhile, his wife stayed home to take care of the house and kids, comfortable in the security that her husband’s paycheck could support their needs through retirement. Certainly, many Americans lived lives that were exceptions to this picture, but this was the model to which many individuals and families aspired and which public workforce development programs assume.

At the dawn of the 21st century, the workforce model has clearly changed. The old descriptor was stability; today, it is constant transition. We tell today’s college graduates that they will go through seven careers and countless jobs over the course of their working lifetimes. Current statistics report that the median job tenure is 3.5 years, not the 40 years that Jim Anderson sold insurance in Springfield. Moreover, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reports that, in 2000, less than 20 percent of married-couple families reflected the Ozzie and Harriet model where only the husband works for pay. Clearly, the definition of breadwinner has changed since the 1950s.

The newspapers are full of stories about major corporations laying off thousands of workers at the same time that employers report a shortage of potential employees with cutting-edge skills, particularly around computers. As a result, workers must be increasingly responsible for their own job security and career destiny, and constant learning of new skills has become essential for economic vitality.

The previous picture of work could be seen as linear— from school to work to retirement with discrete steps between each stage. Today’s path through employment is a dynamic revolving process. Think of the process of a working life as a series of gears that are continually moving— starting a job is not only the end of one job search but also the beginning of the next job search. We’d like to outline a model of four gears— foundation, launch, resilience, and transition— that describe the typical stages we all go through in navigating our careers and employment paths. There are also some smaller gears that engage occasionally when we slip out of or fail to enter the mainstream of work.

From our parents, our families and our early schooling, most of us have developed a foundation for employment— the values and skills needed to be a productive and contributing part of society. These include communication (both written and oral), teamwork, personal management, problem-solving, responsibility, and so on. In today’s technology-based economy, we can also add basic math and computer skills to the minimum foundation. These basic skills have a high correlation with high-wage occupations: a recent DEED report, "Skills for the 21st Century," found that reasoning ability, verbal skills, and math skills are all likely to be required in the highest-paying occupations (see also the March 2000 issue of Trends, "What Could Your Next Job Be?"). In addition, because most people are rapidly moving from job to job, they also need skills in career exploration and career management.

People lacking this solid foundation will have trouble competing in the workforce and acquiring additional skills. The BLS finds that the poverty rate among high school dropouts— 14.5 percent in 1998— is more than double that of workers with a high school diploma (6.6 percent). Poverty rates were even lower for those with an associate degree (2.8 percent) and for college graduates (1.4 percent). The same pattern holds true for unemployment rates, varying from 7.1 percent for high school dropouts to a mere 1.8 percent for college graduates in 1998.

The soft skills that are necessary to understand and navigate a workplace are an equally important part of the foundation. For example, counselors who work with welfare recipients report that some of their clients transitioning to work have had to adjust to using an alarm clock to arrive at work on time, calling to inform a supervisor when they are sick, bringing a lunch or lunch money to work, and so on. Individuals without these core workplace skills are likely to change jobs at a faster rate than average; they may lose jobs frequently because they are in the wrong job or environment or simply can’t maneuver in an employer’s culture. Because people lacking this foundation are less likely to progress beyond entry-level jobs, they are more vulnerable to falling off the typical path of work and thus are likely to require special assistance.

Launch, the second gear, is an entry into the world of work. For most people, this first occurs at the end of schooling, whether at age 16, 18, 22, 26, or older. While some people combine work and education— launching into the workforce at an early age— others delay entering the workforce until all of their schooling is completed. For other individuals, such as new immigrants, former military personnel, or welfare or prison graduates, their first launch may take place later in life.

Whenever it occurs, launch involves making career decisions based on an accurate assessment of one’s skills, interests and abilities in comparison with the opportunities in the current labor market, local or otherwise. There are several dimensions to a successful match: clearly, someone who dislikes the outdoors would be unhappy as a forest ranger just as someone who avoids the sight of blood would not enjoy a nursing career. But it is just as important to recognize that an individual unwilling to leave Bemidji, Minnesota, will never see a career as an astronaut or that opportunities as an aquaculturalist would be more common in Minnesota than Arizona.

Parallel to an accurate assessment of skills and abilities is an understanding of one’s own interests and life goals: in other words, recognizing the mix of work and life that we want. For example, each individual must decide for themselves if they aspire to be a CEO or if they’re seeking employment at an income level that supports raising children, volunteering at the senior center or writing the great American novel.

The next stage is resilience, which is the combination of work and life skills that are necessary to maintain an overall healthy and satisfying life. Resilience includes the ability to anticipate the competing and fluctuating demands of work, family and home as well as the capacity to adjust quickly to the unexpected, whether it is a setback or an opportunity. With the rapid rate of change that is characteristic of today’s economic environment, resilience is critical to job success and long-term economic security.

The first dimension of resilience is the ability to balance the occasionally conflicting needs of personal, work, family and home life. Finding a stable equilibrium among these demands requires the skills of budgeting, goal-setting, and time management, among others, as well as a sustainable support network of family and friends. When this balance exists, work and life seem to be under control, and unexpected emergencies have at least a chance of being manageable.

The second dimension of resilience is having the skills and the preparation to recover from life’s little tricks— for example, maintaining the financial reserves to weather a family medical emergency. While saving ahead may not be possible for some households, individuals can choose a positive coping strategy. For example, it becomes vital to recognize that unwelcome changes, such as layoffs, are usually not personal affronts but can often be the outcomes of larger, even global, trends. Individuals with neither resilience nor transition skills may feel powerless in the face of change and are likely to experience negative emotions that will make the inevitable transition even harder.

The third dimension is the capacity to not merely survive but thrive through transition. For example, a corporate reorganization, complete with a new corporate identity, new boss and new ways of doing business, could easily be threatening to those accustomed to stability. Individuals may act out their anxiety about change by adopting a bunker mentality, resisting anything new. On the other hand, these changes could also create tremendous opportunity to move up in an organization. For example, resilience may entail learning to play golf because the golf course is where management decisions are made. If the changes themselves prove to be intolerable, the resilient worker will take the initiative to move into the next gear— looking for a transition. In the 21st century, the savvy worker already has a resume and a plan in place when the need to move on becomes clear.

Transition, the final gear, refers to the process of moving through and beyond a given job or career. The old model of the "company" providing for regular promotions from first job through retirement has been largely relegated to reruns on Nickelodeon. In the old pattern, transition was the exception in worklife, or at least something that happened once or twice over a working lifetime. Now, transition is the norm. Today, individuals must themselves take on responsibility for and ownership of their own working lives, making informed decisions and moving through jobs and careers. Because successful transitioning to a new career or job requires current skills, upgrading one’s skills has become imperative to remain competitive in today’s rapidly-changing job market.

While transition may be voluntary or involuntary, those with the skills and willingness to be flexible can prosper through a transition. Voluntary transitions are the changes we undertake as we move up career ladders or change careers or jobs to find a better lifestyle fit. Involuntary transitions— resulting from business restructuring, mergers, acquisitions, or rightsizing— are numerous. Over the two-year period from January 1997 through December 1999— a period of healthy economic growth and low unemployment rates— 3.3 million workers were displaced nationally from jobs they had held for at least three years, according to BLS. In an economy of high job "churn," preparation for the next transition is critical.

The final transition is often leaving the workforce. Leaving the workforce can be temporary and positive, as for raising children, going on a sabbatical, or returning to school. And, of course, all workers face the decision to retire at some point. Most people have the opportunity to prepare for these events and provide their own financial safety net through mechanisms like savings and retirement accounts. Others are not so fortunate in either having the choice of when to leave the workforce or being prepared when they do so. Accidents, disasters, major illnesses or business closings can cause unplanned exits from the workforce. For individuals without resilient coping skills, these events can be emotionally, financially and professionally devastating. Wiping out personal financial and emotional reserves, these abrupt transitions can force people into the safety net for services ranging from emotional support and medical services to income maintenance.

The safety net provides for those who cannot move smoothly through these gears of employment. In itself a complex collection of gears, the safety net is comprised of services for people who are not or cannot be independently competitive in the workforce. Providing support for individuals whose lives are exceptions to the usual path of life and work, the safety net includes unemployment insurance, transitional housing, emergency cash assistance, and more. Remember, though, that those benefiting from the safety net are the exception to the typical process of a worklife. While roughly 50,000 people are receiving welfare benefits and approximately 140,000 applied for unemployment insurance in 2000, this is less than 10 percent of the total state workforce.

This isn’t the end of the process because the process isn’t linear. While we would hope that any person would need to move through the foundation phase only once, people move in and out of the other stages throughout the course of their working lifetimes. An individual who steps out of the labor market for a period of time— whether for child rearing, additional schooling, or illness— will probably need to move through the launch stage again. For some, a second launch could be merely a re-assessment of their skills and interests in light of current labor market conditions. For others, a subsequent launch could be the process of identifying the accessibility accommodations that would be necessary to work with a given disability. If, on average, people change jobs every three to four years, then an individual could easily go through the cycles of this process six, seven, eight times over the course of a lifetime.

We think it is important to encourage a holistic view of how people move through work and life in order to more precisely identify where the departures from the typical pattern are. In today’s economy— when at least one newspaper a week has a lead story of major layoffs— no one can afford to be complacent about upgrading their skills. Similarly, both business and government have a responsibility to help people move through the gears; we all lose when a potentially productive individual stalls in one of the gears. Spells of unemployment are likely to be more typical as we move through more and more jobs throughout our lives. Rather than fearing unemployment, today’s workforce should anticipate and prepare for being temporarily jobless and then, when job loss occurs, work to turn this event to advantage as quickly as possible. Thus, in addition to performing well at work, we all need the ability to look for work not just at the beginning of our working lives but throughout our lives.

From the policy perspective, a better understanding of the typical process of work will help people with less typical paths enter and compete in the workforce. For example, entry-level jobs are typically part-time and low wage, regardless of the age of the individual. If we can provide the systems to ensure a successful transition to a next job, then we can respect entry-level jobs for their role in successfully launching individuals into the culture of work— at whatever age this occurs.