The organization you worked for mapped out your career; they provided career opportunities and progress. Now, though, many of the organizations and companies that used to offer steady lifelong jobs are no longer presenting a linear career path and/or the security that previous generations experienced.
The three‐stage life of education, work and retirement is clearly not fit for purpose. That's a huge shift for the young as they consider lifetime learning and multiple career shifts. What worked for their grandparents' generation won't work for them. And it's not only the young who face this challenge – those in their forties and fifties have to plan for longer careers in a world where jobs will be changing with technology and their skills may no longer be relevant.
Lynda Gratton – professor of management practice and Andrew J Scott, professor of economics, both at London Business School.
Professors Gratton and Scott, authors of the book, The New Long Life: A Framework for Flourishing in a Changing World, suggest that ‘a core aspect of this new multi stage life is that it is “self‐authored”, in the sense that the dynamics and trajectory lie with you, rather than, as was the case in the past, with your employer. When we live longer, we inevitably have more transitions – from one job to another, but also from a job to a time to learn, or from a job to a time to care.’
Today, even if you do stay in one profession or industry or with one employer, you might travel a career path that changes direction. The UK's Civil Service, for example, on their career page https://civil-service-careers.gov.uk/ suggests to prospective employees that ‘whatever your passion, to specialize or try something new, there's a path for you.’
From A&E nurse to psychotherapist
In 1995, at the age of 31, Donna Butler started work as a staff nurse in the A&E department of Brighton's Royal Sussex County Hospital. She soon became aware of the stressful impact – whether in a cumulative way or from single traumatic incidents – that working in A&E was having on her and her colleagues. Too often, staff struggled to cope with the stress: they either carried on and their mental health suffered – depression and anxiety and/or trauma and burnout – or they left the job.
Donna identified a clear need and determined to do something to support herself and her colleagues. She took the initiative and, for the next four years, while continuing to work in A&E, she studied for a counselling degree so that she could qualify and register as a psychotherapist with the aim of persuading the hospital to give her a post supporting her colleagues in A&E.
After qualifying in counselling in 2002, Donna devised a questionnaire asking all staff in different departments at the hospital if they felt they would be better supported in their jobs if they had access to counselling therapy: 98% said yes. As a result, the hospital agreed to create a new post for Donna as a counsellor offering a safe, confidential place to talk, supporting A&E staff, patients, and relatives with counselling and to facilitate debriefs following specific traumatic events on the unit.
In 2009, after eight years of delivering the counselling service in A&E, Donna determined to widen both her knowledge (she studied for and achieved a master's in Integrated Psychotherapy) and the counselling service she was providing.
She presented the executive team and hospital board with a business plan to make a counselling, psychotherapy, and training service available as an ‘in‐house’ provision to all Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals NHS Trust's 9,000 staff.
Donna is now the lead psychotherapist with a team of therapists – delivering the Trust's Health, Employee, Learning and Psychotherapy service. She also became part of the senior HR team and leads on advising the Trust on psychological care for staff.
So, while some people may stay with the same organization, and move up the career ladder in the conventional way, some, like Donna, stay with the same organization but move into a very different role.
Then there are other people who can't or don't want to rely on one organization to provide the structure and opportunities around which they can develop a career. Instead, they move to a different employer every few years in order to progress. In fact, according to recent research by life insurance firm LV=, on average, a UK worker will change employer every five years.
Increasingly, people change professions completely. One person I know has gone from being a plumber in his 20s to becoming a fire officer in the Fire and Rescue Service in his 30s. One friend went from working in book design for 30 years to working as a tree surgeon. Another friend changed direction from being an illustrator to becoming a portrait painter. Someone else I know went from working in hospitality to working in social media. And one friend, who I met when we were both waitressing as teenagers, many years ago, went on to be a pop star, then a TV producer and an investigative journalist, and is now a furniture maker.
Writing in the Financial Times in September 2017, Work and Careers Editor Helen Barrett described having recently met a woman in her fifties who was soon to qualify as a lawyer, her fourth career.
Helen explained that for this woman, an early academic career had led to museum work, and, by her thirties, she was curating exhibitions at leading international galleries in London and Berlin. ‘In her forties,’ Helen wrote, ‘she developed a sideline: teaching the practicalities of entrepreneurship to art undergraduates. This turned into a fascination with intellectual property law. At 46, she started legal training. Years later, she is now a trainee for a boutique intellectual property law firm in the City of London. In another year or so she will be qualified. Would it be her last career? She couldn't say.’
Some people spend their working life with one employer, others change employers and change professions every few years. Many people eschew being employed by someone else and set up their own business, work freelance, and are self‐employed. And some people have more than one career at the same time – a portfolio career: a portfolio of jobs which involves dividing their time and skills between two or more part‐time jobs, one or more of which may be self‐employed.
Clearly, then, career paths are far less predictable than they once were. There's been a huge shift from individuals relying on their employer for job security and career development to individuals taking responsibility for their own career management and employability.
Over a person's lifetime, their own personal circumstances – their values, skills, abilities, and interests – change. There are continual economic and technological changes at local, national, and global level; economies collapse, companies go under, entire professions get automated by technology. And pandemics occur. All of which impact on each and every one of us in terms of jobs, work, and a career.
In good times and bad, whether life appears to be stable and secure or uncertain and unclear, we must manage our own work and career and create our own opportunities. We each need to be open to new ways of thinking and doing and be willing to acquire new knowledge and skills.
Career progress or ‘success’ is no longer measured by how far up an organization's hierarchy a person can climb. Career success and progress is now more subjective: a ‘good job’, ‘good work’, and a ‘successful career’ is defined by you, the individual; it's work that is consistent with your own personal values, circumstances, and priorities at any one period of your life.
What career success means is down to you; you can have your own definition of success and use this definition to guide you in your career choices.
Rather than see a career as a ladder to be climbed, it's more appropriate and helpful to liken a career to a road trip. In the past, a career was like getting on a bus or a train; there was a clearly defined route with stop‐off points and a clear destination. Now, the direction and progress in a career is more within your control and your responsibility. As with any road trip, you control your departure and arrival time, the directions, the itinerary, and stops along the