Jobs numbers have, to quote Forbes Magazine, fallen “off the table”.
Everyone knows at least a dozen people who are un-, or at least under, employed. And several more who are decidedly nervous about their continued employment.
Here’s what I’ve been thinking for quite a long time now: jobs are dead. Long live daily individual value delivery.
This is a multi-channel challenge. I can hear the benefits administrators of the world saying, “oh, HELL no!”
I can hear the education system, in this country and many others, protesting that they’re teaching to the test already (pumping out potential employees), and if they have to start teaching critical thinking again…well, things could get ugly.
I can hear the legions of job-holders around the world winding up their best roundhouse kick to knock my block off.
Change happens. If you’ve been on the employee train for a long time, trying to wrap your mind around not finding another job when you lose the one you’ve got can be downright scary. Just ask Paul Nawrocki, who lost his in February 2008 when the toy company he worked for went under.
Nawrocki has become both internet, and news-network, famous, thanks to his self-propelled mobile advertising (f/k/a “sandwich board”) – what a great opportunity to recast himself as a buzz marketer!
I’m kidding. But not really.
What times like the present call for is a change in thinking, for all of us.
The job may not be dead, but it is on life support. Start thinking like a consultant, a freelancer, a solopreneur, even if you toil alongside thousands of co-workers at a Fortune 100.
If you don’t bring it – “it”, in this instance, being that daily value delivery I mentioned above – the out-of-work sword will constantly dangle just above your cranium.
Don’t hug that job. It’s unlikely to hug you back for very long, and it’s highly likely to be unfaithful.
And don’t ever neglect your daily value delivery requirement.
That’s my story, and I’m stickin’ to it….
