America is
moving from an employment-based workforce to an entrepreneurial workforce. Today’s
employment question is less, “where can I find a job?” and more “how can I
create a job?”
Seeking jobs
that someone else builds reflects an Industrial Age paradigm. Compare the small
teams who create massive wealth for Information Age billionaires (Gates,
Buffett, Ellison, Brin and Zuckerberg) versus the masses who toiled incrementally
for Industrial Age barons (Ford, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, Duke and Rockefeller).
Information Age employers simply do not need many employees. Only the likes of
Walmart and McDonalds hire in great numbers. They need bodies not brains – and
pay accordingly.
Our Industrial
Age grandparents sought career-long jobs in a single factory, shipyard or
store. They “knew” their company would span a career. Those days are gone. Does
anyone think our Information Age grandchildren envision 40 year careers with
the same corporation? Yes, they may work for someone else. But that “someone”
will change in purpose, pay and personage many times.
Jobs of the
future will be less corporate and more entrepreneurial – because wealth in the
Information Age comes less from employing thousands of others and more from building
small temporary teams to create technologies and applications.
Like it or
not, workers must keep pace. Employees must align and realign with employers,
not vice versa. As workplace projects change so must workforce skills.
Employers will
pick teams, not for hierarchical careers, but for uncertain and transient
projects. Candidates for employment must anticipate emergent value and
re-create their value and contributions accordingly. They must do this
repeatedly throughout their working life. They must also re-create their value simultaneously; working for several employers at the same time will become the norm, not the exception.
Jobs in big
companies and in government will certainly exist. Just as we still have
Agrarian Age farmers, we will always have Industrial Age workers. However,
fewer field and factory jobs will be “good” jobs. Workers who expect others to
create their jobs will be left standing in dispiriting unemployment lines or
staring at barren recruiting websites.
The
implications for this shift on retirement, healthcare and education are
profound. Retirement will continue shifting away from job-stable defined
benefit plans and towards job-flexible 401k’s. The greatest contribution of Obamacare
is guaranteed medical coverage despite constant career changes. Obamacare and
401k’s are aligned with the tough realities of the emerging Information Age.
Education is the
great problem. Schools remain enslaved to the mass-production priorities of the
Industrial Age. Schools treat confidence-building activities (such as sports
and clubs) as “extracurriculars” when the self-reliant courage they instill is
absolutely necessary for entrepreneurial success. Our society institutionalizes
expensive education from K-through-college, but it’s no longer enough to
educate a young person and expect a lifetime of self-sufficiency. The Information Age demands continual cycles
of education. This system of renewal does not exist and Luddites oppose its
formation.
Breaking fealty
with education’s mass-production and entry-level paradigm is the next great revolution.
States and societies that instill personal courage while aligning life-cycle
education with workplace demands will equip workers to create their own jobs.
This is how to germinate and grow the jobs of the 21st Century.
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