Fear and Loathing in the Job Market

I’ve recently had conversations with job seekers, either side of ‘The Pond,’ that fall into one of these categories:

1. People not long out of university suffering career information overload. They worry about securing a sub-optimal job that will give them a sub-optimal life.

2. Mid-career people who need a job to support themselves and their families and fear the onset of an unemployment nuclear winter (made bleaker by AI).

3. People who could be retired but work matters too much to them to settle for golf.

Since no reader falls into all 3 categories, I will summarise my advice to each in 3 separate blogs, beginning with Customer Group 1:

Draw yourself a 2x2 like the illustration, capturing your generic work preferences and strengths and some bubbles to represent the approximate size of opportunity in the job market. This will give you 4 quadrants:

Lower left: Avoid.

Lower right: To be here you will need to work for someone who loves you and invest like heck in learning to keep it that way. It’s shaky territory.

Upper left: Millennials abhor this box. That’s a mistake. You may need to start here and work your way steadily to the right. It worked for Baby Boomers.

Upper right: Nirvana. Be ruthlessly honest with yourself about the size of this job pool and your competitive advantage therein. Be algorithmic about that last point.

Now let’s get specific. Assuming you’re on a quest for that elusive upper-right quadrant, create a vision for yourself as a self-actualised person; comfortable in your achievements, personal situation and quality of life, however defined. Indulge your imagination a little; what are you working on, who is working with you and, yes, how much money have you made? If it helps, put on some imaginary clothes and sit at an imaginary desk - if indeed a desk features in your fantasy.

Feels good? Great. Let’s assume you’re 30-ish and the ‘You-in-Full’ is aged about 50. With average company tenure averaging 4 years, maybe you have 5 big moves to get from A to B. I don’t mean 5 job rotations - I mean ‘moves’ - like a CFO or CMO making CEO, an industry switch or a corporate player becoming an entrepreneur.

Working from the top down: perhaps you visualise yourself as owner-CEO of a fashionable design-led company. Wonderful. What was the job you did before that one that served as a launchpad to get you into that desirable position? Now keep working backwards until you join the dots to the present. Of course this is an over-simplification but it will start to reveal which early moves are more likely to help you succeed. (If you’re a chess fan, think of developing your pieces in the early stages of the game rather than childish pawn exchanges).

Neither exercise will deliver an answer on a plate. But you may feel a little less overwhelmed by choice. And serendipity will always play a role. However, to switch to a golf analogy, the more you practice, the more likely you are to score a hole-in-one. Explore, network, get involved, train, code, research widely and luck may become more a matter of probabilities than divine intervention.