For those of you thinking ahead to the job search, I’ve got some interesting news for you! I recently read an article in Fast Company called “The Four-Year Career” that offered some great insight into the future of the career search with the shortening of the job cycle. It offered many suggestions on how to adapt to this shift in the career market and how you can approach your search.
According to recent statistics, a US worker has been in his or her current job a median number of just 4.4 years, a figure that has gone down sharply since the 1970s. The shortening of the job cycle has been driven by two specific factors: 1) a significant decline in the “long job” aka the traditional 20-year capstone to a career and 2) an increase in what is called “churning”—the movement of workers who, well into their thirties, have been at their job for less than a year.
What you should know:
The article profiles several individuals who in recent years have begun practicing a “smart strategy”, each who has found his own way to adapt to and succeed to the new career world. In the future, everything that can be collected, condensed, and routinized will eventually be done by machines, and what will set humans apart is both their social and emotional intelligence. It’s important for younger people to build harder skills in the early part of their career—it will give you much more credibility as you move up to higher positions if you’ve done the work yourself. The repackaging of existing skills, along with building new ones, is essential for successful four-year-career shifters; and as Nicole Williams, LinkedIn’s connection director explains, “So many skill sets are transferable” today. For job seekers, telling an appealing story about your career’s unusual and varied path is now an essential aspect of self-marketing.
See Adam Hassler’s background as an example:
Hasler has several of these skills in spades. His interests are transdisciplinary–he’s what might be called a “T-shaped person,” with both depth in one subject and breadth in others. He demonstrates cross-cultural competency (speaking fluent Spanish, living abroad) and computational thinking (learning programming and applying data to real-world problems). The intellectual voracity that drove him to write 50,000 words on Western cultural history while running a coffee shop is a sign of sense making (drawing deeper meaning from facts) and excellent cognitive load management (continuous learning and managing attention challenges). Above all, Hasler’s desire to synthesize his knowledge and apply it to helping people, and his ability to collaborate with those who have different skills, shows a high degree of social intelligence.
To learn more and read the full article, click here.