Forbes
The Secret To Job Security
By: Liz Ryan
It’s amazing how fast and how dramatically the working world has changed. Back when I was a kid, my dad and all the other dads had the same jobs for years on end. The few moms in our neighborhood who went to work never thought about changing jobs, either.
Once you had a good job, you kept it! That world is gone now. There is no more job security — not the kind, at least, than an employer can bestow on you. Even if you are lucky enough to have an employment contract, the organization that employs you could disappear tomorrow and your contract would disappear with it.
There is a new kind of job security today. It’s the kind of job security that we build in ourselves and carry around with us.
Our job security now is our knowledge that if we lose one job, we can get another one. We are all entrepreneurs now, whether we get paid every two weeks by our employer or less frequently, by invoicing our clients.
We are all business owners now. The secret to job security is your knowledge that you can solve a particular kind of pain that people or businesses experience.
Personal responsibility for our careers is nothing new, but it’s been a long time since most of us have experienced it. From the earliest days of human civilization, we’ve had to look out for ourselves and our families.
Only in the past sixty years have we marched into glass-and-chrome buildings and expected our employers to manage our careers and look after our livelihoods. It was a bubble, the bubble of lifelong employment – and the bubble has burst. We are back to looking after ourselves again.
Now we have to ask new questions: What kind of pain do I solve? Who tends to have that kind of pain, and how much does that pain cost them?
Until you know a lot about the pain you solve for your employers and clients, you’ll be just another banana in the bunch. You’ll be forced to talk about your degrees and certifications and years of experience, as though those things were the most significant aspects of your background.
They’re not! Who you are and what you’ve done are far more important than the diplomas stuffed away in your closet, but for years we believed differently. Now we are moving back to an entrepreneurial business ecosystem.
We had better see ourselves as entrepreneurs, because if the lily pad we’re resting on suddenly sinks, we’re going to have to jump to a new lily pad fast! The more tuned in we are to the talent ecosystem around us, the easier that jump will be.
