Introduction

A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.

—Winston Churchill

What do you want your life to be like when you’re 25? 35? 55? What are you looking for in a career? Do you want any type of job that will pay the bills and fund your eventual retirement; or are you looking for a career that will be an integral part of your life—one that will allow you to feed your passions, as well as your family and provide enjoyment and self-satisfaction in and of itself? Do you want a high-powered, high-commitment career that entails 60-hour workweeks and continuous business travel, or a lifestyle career that will give you the time and flexibility to spend time with your family or pursue your own outside interests?

Just as importantly, what do you want your life’s work to be? Do you want to be a carpenter, an artist, a teacher, a doctor, or a marketing executive? Even if you get a job in your chosen field, what are the odds that you will love your job 10, 20, or even 30 years in the future? Or the odds that that job or that field will even exist in 30 years?

Given all the gloom and doom surrounding yesterday’s and today’s employment prospects, it may be hard to believe that you may have the power to make such decisions for yourself, rather than accept whatever position a potential employer may choose to bestow upon you. After all, even though the economy is improving, progress is excruciatingly slow and good jobs will remain scarce for years to come.

This being said, some professions are struggling to find and hire employees with the right skills. More importantly, many of the forces that are destroying the jobs of today are simultaneously creating the jobs of the future. But exactly what are these jobs and how can you prepare for them? Better yet, what is your dream job and how can you find or create a position that will allow you to not only achieve your dreams but also control your own career and life in the process?

The good news is that if you’re still in school, you still have time to prepare for this future. But you had better hurry. Although the planning process doesn’t take that long, developing the skills and building the types of accomplishments that employers look for takes time, focus, and commitment. In order to prepare for the jobs of the future, you must understand how the job market is changing, the type of occupations that offer the best long-term career prospects, and how to position your own unique interests and skills in a way that will best appeal to prospective employers. You must understand and develop the skills that will not only be required to get a job when you graduate, but that will provide you with the capabilities and the personality traits you will need throughout your entire career. Or more likely, through the many different careers you are likely to have.

Just as importantly, you must understand yourself: your skills, your real interests and passions, the ways in which you learn, and the options that are open to you. You must understand how to most effectively apply your unique skills to your passions as a means of preparing for your dream job—and how to identify and prepare for a complementary safety career that will allow you to get another good job in your dream field, even if you don’t achieve your ideal objective, such as becoming a neurosurgeon or playing in the NBA.

You then need a plan. The sooner you develop and begin executing a comprehensive career plan—and an education plan that will enable it—the better your chance of not only getting a good job out of school but also of building your long-term dream career and of controlling your own career destiny. The longer you wait, the more opportunities that will be foreclosed to you.

Not Your Father’s Job Market

It used to be that you could take your time to answer these questions. Go to college and study any field in which you had an interest; take a job that sounded interesting and let your life play out. After all, a college degree had all but guaranteed a comfortable (if not necessarily psychically fulfilling) job and a salary that would ensure a reasonably comfortable lifestyle and a secure retirement. That is ancient history. To the extent these good-old days ever existed, they certainly don’t exist now. Nor will they return in the foreseeable future.

During the depths of the recent recession, half of all college graduates were either unable to get any job at all or if they were lucky enough to land a job, it did not make use of their education and did not offer a professional career path. Even many of those with two of the most marketable graduate degrees—MBAs and JDs—couldn’t get jobs in their fields.

Although the job market is slowly improving, most university graduates, not to speak of community college and high school graduates, still face a very rough and uncertain road to the American Dream. After all, there are still far fewer mid-skill/mid-income jobs than there are people applying for them. And to make matters worse, the number of employers willing to hire and train new graduates on the basis of their “potential” is rapidly declining. They want people who are immediately capable of performing the job they are looking to fill. And many are not convinced that college grads are capable. A McKinsey Center for Government study, for example, found that only 42 percent of surveyed companies thought that colleges and universities had prepared graduates for today’s jobs (in contrast to the two-thirds of the schools, who thought their graduates were prepared).1 One result: as of mid-2013, only half of 2011/2012 college grads had jobs working full time in their field.2

Even when college grads do get jobs, the jobs are not always the type of positions that their school’s career services office may have led them to expect. According to a 2014 Federal Reserve Bank of New York study on college graduate employment, the quality of young (age 22 to 27) college graduate jobs declined significantly during the 2001 recession and has not recovered.3 As of the end of 2013, four and a half years after the official end of the Great Recession, underemployment (those working in jobs that typically don’t require a college degree) rates have risen from their historical levels of about 33 percent to 40+ percent, where they have remained. Although the underemployment rate has certainly fallen from its 2009 to 2011 peak of 56 percent, in April 2013, it was still 44 percent.4 Meanwhile, the share of recent grads consigned to part-time jobs has also risen and now hovers just under 20 percent.

Few of these jobs provide meaningful career paths or pay well. Consider that the average inflation-adjusted starting salaries for college grads remain below those starting salaries at the turn of the century. Lower starting salaries, combined with the need to pay off student loans (40 percent of recent grads have loans that average $29,400), dramatically limit these graduate’s financial freedom and diminish their ability to take the risk of changing careers or starting their own companies.

And if things are still bad for the average college grad, they can be downright dismal for those with only a high-school degree (see Chapter 7. And, those without any degree at all face even a more challenging future.

It should be little surprise that a 2012 Center for Workforce Development survey found that only one-fifth of recent graduates thought their generation will have more success than the generation before them.5 One in three believed that “hard work and determination are no guarantee of success” and a quarter of respondents believed that “success in life is pretty much determined by outside forces.”

But even with all these horror stories, Accenture’s survey of 2013 college graduates found that many aspiring graduates are significantly more optimistic about their prospects for getting jobs, getting jobs in their fields, earning good salaries, and finding employers that will train them than was the case for those who graduated the previous year.6

Welcome to the New Normal

We have now entered a new chapter in the country’s economic history; a chapter that many call the New Normal. It is a period in which jobs that pay middle-class wages are scarce, competition for such jobs is steep, and inflation-adjusted wages remain below those of the late 1990s. In the New Normal, traditionally mid-skill factory jobs are disappearing and even increasingly sophisticated trade and professional jobs are being automated or moved offshore. Those jobs that remain are being continually redefined to require new skills.

In this era, high school graduates are not even considered for most jobs. Many college graduates are saddled with debt, are lucky to get a job at Starbucks, and are unable to move out of their parents’ homes. In this period, employers are cutting full-time workers in favor of part-timers and freelancers who can be dismissed if times get tough and who have to pay their own insurance and fund their own retirements.

And career stability? That too is a vestige of the past. Even some companies that had reputations for never laying off employees were forced to reverse course during the recession. These and a host of related factors are taking another toll—on people’s enjoyment of their jobs. According to a 2013 Gallup survey, 52 percent of workers claimed they were not engaged in their job, and another 18 percent said they were actively disengaged from their work.7

The changes that are charactering the New Normal, however, are not all being driven by employers. Employees are looking for different things from their employers. Gone are the days in which individuals are willing to provide undying loyalty to their first employer in return for a virtual guarantee of lifetime employment, raises that offset inflation, and lifetime pensions and insurance.

Employees now change jobs an average of every four years and many will totally change careers at least once during their working lives. Nor are workers willing to accept traditional, one-size-fit-all work rules, such as 9–5 workdays, Monday–Friday workweeks, all work in the office and two-weeks per year of vacation time. They are looking for more flexibility and an opportunity to tailor their work to the needs of their lives, rather than having to tailor their lives to their jobs.

But whatever the changes, and whoever is driving them, we are in for more of them. Generational expectations will certainly continue to change. More importantly, however, the four big catalysts forcing companies to change the way they look at their businesses and their hiring are continuing unabated. These catalysts are:

1. Automation, which is eliminating or transforming jobs traditionally performed by humans, is accelerating and expanding to cover not just factory and administrative jobs, but even some high-skill financial, legal, and even medical jobs. The Internet, meanwhile, is disintermediating or obsoleting entire industries, from newspapers to retail stores.

2. Globalization, which initially moved manufacturing jobs offshore, is now expanding to all types of professional jobs as increasingly educated and skilled emerging country citizens vie for jobs that had been the exclusive province of developed countries.

3. Flexible hiring, where companies attempt to reduce fixed costs by looking to part-time or contract “contingent workers” as alternatives to full-time employees, is rapidly becoming a standard business practice.

4. Politico-economic volatility, where political, economic, social, technology, and market forces are changing so suddenly and profoundly as to make it all but impossible to anticipate the future—thus prompting companies to reduce fixed costs and limit investments.

Remember the question I posed at the beginning of this chapter: What do you want your life to be like when you’re 25? 35? 55? In reality, regardless of how you answered that question, your life and certainly your career are not likely to look anything like what you predict today. Technology, globalization, geopolitics, demographics, and hundreds of other factors are changing so rapidly (and combining in such unexpected ways) as to make it impossible to anticipate what the world will look like. It is even more difficult to anticipate the types of jobs that will be created or the ways in which these jobs will be done.

What does all this mean for your future? How can you plan for a career when you can’t even know how a particular job, company, or industry will change in the future? Or whether it will even exist? How do you decide on and prepare for a career when all the rules are changing?

You don’t have to throw in the towel. You just need to think differently.

Creating Your Own Rules

The New Normal will be a very, very uncomfortable place for many people of all ages. For others, however, it will be an era of unprecedented opportunity. It depends largely on your skills, your preparation, your personality attributes, and your perspective.

If you are looking for stability, predictability, and stasis in your life, the New Normal may look like a version of hell. Those who hope to maintain relevancy amidst continual change (not to speak of those who hope to command premium compensation) must, at the very least, continually upgrade their current skills and add complementary new capabilities. In some cases, they will have to go much further: they will have to totally reinvent themselves or risk becoming obsolete long before they plan to, or are able to retire. And they must always be prepared to rebound from the unforeseen—such as by being prepared to find another job or go out on their own, perhaps with little or no notice.

This same environment, however, can be a nirvana for those who view change as an opportunity and uncertainty as an adventure. Every day creates a new opportunity to find new ways of doing your job—or redefining it. New technology may allow you to automate or subcontract the parts of your job you don’t enjoy, and provide you with more tools to expand or provide new levels of value to the parts that you love. Globalization requires people who can productively participate in and manage global teams and increasingly those you wish to travel to or get posted in exotic locations. Meanwhile, the rapid-fire creation of new industries and companies will provide you with totally new opportunities to change your job or redefine your career.

Need more education or hands-on training to keep up with these changes or prepare yourself for a new industry or career? Not a problem. You can now get an associate’s or master’s degree in virtually any field you can imagine. Don’t want to commit the time or the money required to get another degree? How about a certificate in a new field from a community college or one of the hundreds of new one-to-three-month “boot camps” that are springing up to teach everything from programming to launching your own software-as-a-service (SaaS) company, to running your own bed and breakfast. Or you can just take some combination of the thousands of new Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) that allow you to learn a new programming language or bone up on advanced astrophysics, all from your home computer, and often for free.

And all of these new educational options come at a time when employers are increasingly willing to hire qualified people, regardless of how or where they learned their skills. Remember when a college education was thought to be the only way to get ahead on the world?

Think about the real world: a world in which master plumbers can earn well over $100,000 annually and where only half of all technology workers in New York City have college degrees—but still earn 45 percent more than the city’s average hourly wage.8 A world in which Google incents students to drop out of college so they can learn (not to speak of earn) more by working with them than by finishing school. Or where a Silicon Valley entrepreneur gives high school graduates $100,000 to skip college in favor of starting their own dream company.9 And let’s not forget college dropouts like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg.

It’s certainly true that the higher your level of education, the better your chances of getting a good job, earning a good salary, getting promoted, and starting and succeeding in your own company. Having said this, why do many college grads struggle while some dropouts thrive? If not education, what will separate the winners from the losers in the New Normal? Who will maintain control of their careers and their futures and who will be perpetual victims of forces that always seem to be beyond their control?

Change as a Double-Edge Sword

The New Normal is, for better or worse (or typically better and worse), a world in which change is the only constant. Depending on your personality, preparation, and skills, a world with continual uncertainty will either provide you with continual frustration and challenge or will provide you with continual stimulation and opportunity.

Consider, for example, the four core sources of job market angst: automation, globalization, flexible hiring, and politico-economic instability. Are these trends, in today’s political parlance, job destroyers or job creators? While these are discussed in more depth in this book, let’s look at each at a higher level.

Automation may take the form of computers, robots, and other intelligent tools. On one hand, it has already destroyed many jobs and has totally redefined others. And with microprocessors, storage, and communication technology advancing (and getting cheaper) at geometric rates, this is just the beginning. Computers not only beat humans at chess and Jeopardy, they are even diagnosing some cancers more reliably than experienced oncologists and performing discovery more thoroughly than lawyers. And how many accountants and tax preparers have been replaced by a $24.95 software package?

On the other hand, these same technologies have created millions of high-paying jobs for people capable of designing, building, coding, and maintaining them. It has allowed millions of others to transform their jobs, such as by automating the routine parts of their work while simultaneously giving them power to do new things that were previously impossible, such as in running complex what-ifs and simulations, and finding obscure information in a Google-instant, rather than spending hours or days in a library.

Globalization has eliminated hundreds of thousands of low- and mid-skill jobs and is now taking aim at high-skill jobs. Indian lawyers now provide back-office services for hundreds of U.S. law firms and corporate legal departments. Vietnamese radiologists now read U.S. X-rays while U.S. doctors are sleeping, and Thai hospitals perform heart bypass and hip replacement surgery for thousands of Western “medical tourists” each year. All of the major technology companies have globalized their research and development efforts, hiring Chinese, Indian, and Russian PhDs to complement and supplement their United States, European, and Japanese research scientists. Now, universities in China and India (not to speak of Canada, England, and Australia) are cutting into U.S. universities’ dominance in educating foreign students.

On the other hand, domestic and foreign companies operating in this country are training and hiring U.S. employees to participate in and manage global teams and sending U.S. experts to consult with or manage foreign subsidiaries. And this does not even begin to consider the benefits that U.S. farmers, artists, entertainers, movie studios, investment bankers, and one-person Internet-based businesses gain by being able to sell their services into global markets, rather than being confined to their local markets.

Flexible hiring also cuts both ways. On one hand, it incents companies to reduce the number of well-paid, full-benefit, full-time workers in favor of often lower-priced independent contractors who must pay for their own insurance, fund their own retirements, and can be terminated even more easily than today’s employees. On the other hand, companies are more willing than ever to contract with third-party freelancers and consultants. This provides new opportunities for highly motivated people with unique skills to start their own companies and to be their own bosses. Even if their earnings and income security may be less than if they worked full-time for an employer, these new employment relationships can provide much more flexibility in building a career around your lifestyle and in giving you an opportunity to focus on projects you enjoy, rather than those that are forced upon you.

Meanwhile, it has never been less expensive for individuals to launch their own companies. For the cost of a personal computer (or even a notebook or smart phone) and an Internet connection, you can work, promote your company’s offerings, and engage with clients all while sitting on your couch, in your pajamas. New technologies and cloud-based services enable individuals or small groups of people to launch sophisticated, even global companies on a veritable shoestring, with little fixed investment.

Politico-economic volatility, which creates huge risks, also creates vast new opportunities for political and economic researchers and consultants, as well as creating new, high-pay, high-profile jobs for professional risk managers. It, for example, dramatically increases the need for people who can connect disparate dots in innovative new ways that allow them to see around the corners of dramatic change—to turn volatility into business opportunity. And this doesn’t even begin to account for all the high-frequency financial traders and hedge fund managers that exploit uncertainty and volatility for enormous profit.

But as important as these forces of change are, they do not even begin to account for the opportunities that are being created by trends in areas including demography (such as the need to treat and serve an aging population, or the need for people who can speak Spanish and Asian languages in addition to English), climate change, (alternative energy sources, energy efficiency, etc.), increased supply and reduced cost of domestic energy (through exports and lower-priced feedstocks), globalization (larger markets for U.S. products and services, need for languages, cross-cultural sensitivity), and many, many others.

The New Normal will certainly be disruptive. It will, however, also create far more and far better career opportunities than any time in the nation’s history. More opportunities to build not just a secure and rewarding career, but the career of your dreams. A career that you will be able to shape and adapt to your own ever-evolving interests and circumstances as well as your own lifestyle priorities. A career over which you will be able to maintain control, rather than being at the mercy of people and forces beyond your control.

Creating Your Own Future

Some people fear and recoil from change. Others embrace and exploit it. Since the pace and magnitude of change will only accelerate, you are going to have to live with it. Only you can decide if you will be victim of perpetual change or whether you will exploit that change for your own benefit.

Of course, that is easier said than done! You certainly want to be the exploiter, rather than exploitee of change. The question is how? What type of career will give you the greatest opportunities for employment and growth, not to speak of earning potential and job satisfaction? What type of education should you get to not only prepare for your first job and career but also for your second, third, and fourth? What life skills will you need to anticipate and adapt to the inevitable curves that you will be thrown? What industry, type and size company should you choose to work for—or should you start your own?

How can you even hope to prepare yourself to control your own career (much less multiple careers) in a world in which the rules are continually changing?

These are all tough questions. But you have taken the first step to answering them by reading this book. And it helps if you are still in school or are young enough to return to school—or get some other type of education—without disrupting an established career or risking defaulting on your mortgage, or not being able to pay for your children’s braces or education. You have taken the first steps to plan for your future and develop the skills, the traits, and the networks you will need to take control of your own career, whatever that career might be, or however it may evolve or transform in the future.

But you also need a plan. And you need one now. The sooner you develop and begin executing a comprehensive career plan—and an education plan that will enable it—the better your chance of not only getting a good job out of school but also of building your dream career and of controlling your own career destiny. The longer you wait, the more opportunities that will be foreclosed.

How This Book Will Help You

This book can provide the tools you will need to plan and prepare for a rewarding career that builds upon your strengths and your interests, engages your passions, and provides you with the flexibility to adapt your career to your continually changing lifestyle. It explains the forces and trends that are reshaping the job market and the nature of careers in the 21st century, and especially the types of skills that will be required to thrive in virtually all types of careers in a volatile, unpredictable world.

The book’s 20-step process will take you all the way from identifying your unique combination of strengths, interests, and passions around which you can begin to identify the types of careers for which you are best suited, to what you should look for and how you can improve your chances of getting your first job. It provides a guide for simultaneously narrowing your focus to the types of “dream careers,” which are most likely to feed your passions, and selectively expanding your focus to a synergistic set of “safety careers,” which not only provide fallback options but can also improve your chances of working with and around the field you love (even if you don’t get your dream job).

Once you have identified your career options, you will learn how to determine the types of skills and experiences that will not only maximize your chances of getting the job you want but also of preparing you for a 30-, 40-, or 50-year career in which you are likely to change jobs and fields multiple times. You’ll gain insight into the various ways of developing these skills and gaining these experiences: the different types of colleges and universities and the much less formal (and less expensive) non-college options—from online courses through apprenticeships and Gap Year programs. The goal is to help you determine the types of majors, courses, and extracurricular activities that will best prepare you for your career and then, when you are ready to launch your career, what you should look for in a company, a manager, and in your specific job.

And, since the number of nontraditional career options is expanding so rapidly, the book also discusses the advantages, limitations, and requirements for success in start-up companies, in freelance businesses, and in starting your own company.