The Changing Landscape of Employment

Answer 1

There used to be a way that employment worked in this country. You may have heard one of your grandparents talking about it. Time was when a man (and it was usually just men) would go to work with a company and he’d prove he was loyal to his employer by serving them tirelessly for his entire career. The employer would pay the worker a fair wage and continue to employ him until his retirement, at which time he’d be given a gold watch and a pension for the rest of his life to cover his living expenses in retirement. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that, for the most part, pensions are a thing of the past. Almost no employer these days is willing to take on the responsibility or the risk of planning for the financial burden of your retirement. But there’s a corollary to the fading era of the “gold watch” employer. It is the disappearance of the “gold watch” employee.The employment landscape has changed drastically within a few generations to make it hardly recognizable to our grandparents and their contemporaries. Women now make up much more a percentage of the workforce than they did in the years prior to WWII. And workers of both genders will change employers much more often than those of decades past. It’s difficult to get good data about the average number of employers that today’s workers will see. We can tell from a longitudinal study performed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (NLSY79) that this trend had at least started to manifest among some of the younger baby boomers. This longitudinal study tracked these younger baby boomers over the course of their working lives and found that on average, over the ages of 18 to 46 that the average number of jobs held was 11.3. So with the changing environment of today’s workforce, it’s important to remember that loyalty to ones employer is no longer the virtue that it used to be. Sometimes in order to advance your career, move ahead financially, or even just stay afloat; you may find that you need to separate ties with your employer and move on. I recommend keeping a cash reserve on hand and keeping your résumé up to date. In this environment, you may just be one interchangeable cog in a machine, but if you have an emergency cash reserve there’s nothing stopping you from going to another machine.