Soundbytes: Nice work if you can get it
A friend of mine changes jobs every 18 months or so, on average. He used to call it ?keeping his hand in?. Now he calls it ?job-surfing?, which at least avoids the suspicion that it was the till he was keeping his hand in.
He claims the computer business is ideal for his staccato style of career development. ?They divide the years you?ve been working by the number of your employers and if the answer is more than four it makes them suspicious,? he claims. ?In IT they expect you to job-hop.?
He?s a salesman, has been for years. One or two of the hops have landed him jobs with ?manager? in the title, but basically he?s happiest ?getting straight down to business?. I presume he?s good at what he does. I?ve never visited his office ? for all I know there is a steady trickle of Eskimos leaving with the blocks of ice he?s just sold them.
He used to describe the technique required to provide a regular supply of new jobs as ?networking?. This has gone the same way as ?keeping his hand in?, although it seems more relevant than ever. He used to put a lot of time and effort into networking ? being sociable, being interested, above all being forward. Now, the way he tells it, it doesn?t involve any effort. All the people he has assiduously cultivated over the years have become a circle of friends and, in several cases, ex-employers. He boasts that he stays on good terms with old bosses ?because you never know when you might want to go back?.
Accusations of disloyalty make no impression on him. ?There?s a new type of contract between employer and employee,? he says. ?The old one dealt with terms and conditions ? annual holiday entitlement, period of notice, things like that. The new one isn?t written down. If it were it would say you?ll try to be good for each other for as long as it lasts.?
There is clearly opportunism on both sides, to judge from the years of business process re-engineering, downsizing and a touching corporate faith in the view that bulimia nervosa is a promising start to long-term growth. But if opportunism works, why knock it? Specialists in recruitment say job-surfing is going to become more common. People will no longer look at a career as a number of steps up a ladder but as a series of opportunities that different types of skills open up. The way you acquire those skills is apparently by job-surfing.
Recruitment consultants would say that, wouldn?t they? It means more work for them. But people outside the IT business note that the industry has a reputation for fluidity. They are still citing the old notion that IT specialists have more loyalty to the technology than to their employer. That may be where a different outlook originated, especially among software developers, but it must have mutated to reach sales and marketing departments.
It is certainly true that job-hopping no longer attracts the disapproval it used to. Not many people will expect to stay with the same company all their working lives, as our fathers? generation might have. As the practice of job-surfing moves from being merely acceptable to being actively encouraged, it could easily become self-perpetuating.
In practice, where opportunities in the channel are concerned, there could be geographical problems. Certain towns do better at creating employment opportunities than others. According to last Sunday?s paper, a consultancy called Business Strategies is trying to discover why. For the reseller community to be expanding and offering job opportunities it must help for the local economy generally to be buoyant.
The towns on the up apparently include Exeter, Leeds and Stockport. Towns where job creation ? and by implication the overall level of economic activity ? has been below expectations include Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester, Portsmouth and Swansea.
According to the American gurus, this geographical variable should be no barrier. On the contrary, their advice is to get experience in different regions. It may be that they mean Europe, the Middle East or Africa, but there seems no reason why the principle should not apply on a more homely scale.
My friend is equally unimpressed at being called a trend-setter or fashionable. He notes that he has not yet used the internet to find a new job, and he regards this as ? temporarily ? the height of fashion. Later, he says, the technology will turn round and bite the trend-setters.
?Eventually it?ll be like a return to the old days. A crowd of men presented themselves at the factory or the dock gate and the company picked a dozen for a day?s work. When we?re all self-employed consultants, hot desking and teleworking, companies will be able to get the work done that way. The only difference is the crowd of people will present themselves at the Web site.?
He reckons sales people will never be subjected to this indignity ? but if goods are sold over the Net, why should selling not be done over it as well? With any luck he will have settled down somewhere by then.