Nature of work changing
Published Saturday September 6th, 2008
Balance Individualism and the transferability of skills make recent grads ideal employees
It wasn't long ago that an English degree made you nothing more than well-read and well-educated. But with the changing face of work today, that English degree may open doors to a whole host of careers.
A hundred years ago, it was the Industrial Revolution that brought workers off their farms and into factories. Fifty years ago, those factory jobs were replaced by work in the service sector. Now, the information revolution has turned the ideal employee into a person with skills such as the ability to understand, synthesize and analyze information, says Nancy Johnston, senior director of student learning and retention at Simon Fraser University.
Those kinds of skills can be learned in a variety of ways, including taking an English degree.
Generations ago, workers might have learned a very specific trade such as die-casting, she said. That skill is very specialized, aimed at a particular job. Today, while there is still a need for die-casters, the "commodity" for sale is information and knowledge, Johnston said. To create that commodity requires "a bit more of a generic skill set" than a trade would.
So people, instead of being trained for a particular career or industry, have more general skills. In turn, that gives people "many, many, many options," she said.
Johnston tells students not to worry if they don't know what they want to be when they finish school, because with the right set of generic skills they'll have the ability to do a variety of jobs.
"It creates a lot of confusion for young people growing up, but it creates incredible opportunities as well," Johnston said. "So there is a breadth of opportunity that wasn't there before."
The changing look of work has also changed family dynamics.
"One hundred years ago people relied on their families to survive and the interdependence of families and work was really strong," said Barbara Mitchell, associate professor of sociology at Simon Fraser University.
Most families worked together, with each having very distinct roles, she said. Families looked at work as a means of survival, not a means of self-fulfilment.
That view has now changed. Families are still important, but in terms of emotional gratification not as a necessity for economic survival, she said.
With that change has come a shift toward individualism and autonomy of family members that is reflected in their work, Mitchell said.
The individualism of workers and the transferability of skills gives people the ability to be choosy so recent grads "will only do what their passion is," Johnston said.
It's not just about the pay cheque anymore, said Brooke Sheridan, operations manager with the Vancouver office of Hunt Personnel.
People will always care about the money and want to be paid what they're worth, Sheridan said. But they are also looking for more balance in life, a good company to work for and a better relationship with management.
The workplace has become like a surrogate family, Sheridan said.
"You want a feeling of community and if you're not getting it, you feel like there's something missing," Sheridan said. "And I don't know if that's how people felt 20 or 30 years ago or they just thought of it as a place of employment and when they left it at the end of the day, they didn't think about it much any more."
The change in work has also made workers more mobile, enabling them to move from job to job and from one career to another.
Even someone with a specialty, such as nursing, will learn skills that can be transferred to a different job, Johnston said.
That's why Johnston talks about careers planning, emphasizing the plural.
Today's students or recent graduates can expect to have a number of careers over their working lifetime, unlike their grandparents or even parents who may have had more than one employer, but likely in the same career area, she said.
However, the belief that workers are less loyal and tend to change employers more frequently is not completely supported by the statistics, said Craig Riddell, an economics professor at the University of British Columbia.
While statistics show that the number of people who stay at a job for less than one year has gone up, so too has the number of people who have been at their jobs for longer than 20 years, Riddell said.
Most of the shorter jobs are in low skill areas, like coffee baristas.
"I think the turnover at your typical coffee place in Vancouver is probably 50 per cent a year," Riddell said. "And those are people who take a job, they work for a while and they leave it. They go from job to job."
That's possible because with the shift to service sector jobs, many jobs don't require extensive training, Riddell said. So it's not expensive to bring in new employees. If it was, employers would offer better incentives - like gradually increasing wages - to ensure workers stayed longer.
At the other end of the spectrum, people who are with an employer for more than 20 years are probably being paid more than they would be elsewhere.
"So people might want to change, but it's costly to change if you are paid very well compared to the alternative," he said.
"If there's not much of a gain with experience or seniority on the job then people are more likely to leave," he said.
Education has also been affected by the new look of work, with its foundations firmly planted in the information and computer age.
The shift to computers has "certainly changed the kind of skills demanded and in general it's favoured more highly educated workers and disfavoured people with lower levels of education," Riddell said.
That's even true for some assembly-line jobs, like auto manufacturers that now have their employees work in teams to build a car, rather than each employee having a discrete task, he said.
"So even in relatively low-paying jobs people need more skills and more education than they needed in the past," Riddell said.
The resource boom has kept some unskilled workers employed, but when the boom ends there may not be many opportunities for the unskilled, Riddell said.
"So for people with just a high school diploma, the future isn't that rosy," he said.
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