How to Stay Employable 10 Years Down The Road

No job is secure and no industry will be “safe” indefinitely. That means none of us is immune to layoffs, downsizing and redundancy. The bottom line is that we’ve all got to be ready to switch professional gears with little notice. Here’s how to direct your career so you can stay the course no matter what the future brings.

BY CHARLOTTE HERROLD

“It was an extremely stressful job,” remembers Farnoosh Brock, referring to her position as a project manager at a Fortune 500 company in New York City. “Not only that, but I found it wasn’t fulfilling at all,” says the thirty-something engineer-turned-entrepreneur. When she started at the multi-national communications giant (as a customer support engineer) she attributed her dissatisfaction to being underpaid and often passed over for promotions. She couldn’t understand why.

“Then I hired a career coach and found out how to promote myself professionally,” she says. She learned to identify key influencers in the company and to position herself as a valuable contributor by speaking about her accomplishments to the right people. “Over the next two years I doubled my salary; I had perks, such as being able to work from home and travel all over the world. I had benefits, stock options, you name it. And I was happy for a little while—but only for a little while. That’s when I realized I was fixing the wrong problem.”

She looked for fulfillment outside of work, and became interested in health and wellness and started blogging. Quickly she built a community of followers and, after about a year of “playing around,” started an e-newsletter. Her community grew from about 100 people to several thousand in a few years. That’s when she resigned from her six-figure-a-year job to pursue her side project full-time. She self-published an e-book, about juicing. It quickly climbed the ranks on Amazon’s bestsellers list and attracted the attention of a New York publisher (Brock produced two more books with them).

Brock’s career shift is hardly an anomaly.

Where one’s career trajectory was once linear, now it might represent something more like the lines on a heart rate monitor: jutting up, dipping down, moving forward but not always in a straight line. Career experts estimate the average person has between 10 and 15 job changes in her lifetime. The reality is clear: the days of a single career are gone.

RECOGNIZE THE NEW LANDSCAPE

One reason for this change is an escalating retirement age. Adults 55 and over make up almost 20 percent of the Canadian labour force; at an age when traditionally folks were looking to retire, now they’re considering what career coach Alan Kearns calls “Career 3.0.” People who have been working for decades or longer are expressing a desire to do something “more meaningful,” more in line with their core values.

Lisa Taylor was a manager at a multinational IT organization when she noticed this trend among her staff. “Despite it being a great company and there being lots of opportunities for development, most of my staff fell into the category of ‘successful but not satisfied,’” she remembers. Delving into research on the issue, she realized that many people over 50, especially women, had a growing sense of the later working years being “their time.” They’d paid their dues, earned some stability, and their kids were starting to stand on their own two feet—time to try what they had always wanted to do.

Recognizing a trend, Taylor made a move of her own and started Challenge Factory, a coaching service that helps mature workers manage the risks and challenges of changing careers. “So many people want to continue to work, but they don’t necessarily love what they are doing and aren’t sure how to navigate themselves to something better,” Taylor says. Emerging industries, particularly in technology, continually present new opportunities—titles like mobile app developer or social media community manager didn’t exist 15 years ago. Finally: the nature of work is shifting. According to Laurel MacDowell, an expert in Canadian labour history and professor at the University of Toronto, there are many more “non-standard” jobs today, characterized by irregular schedules and hours outside nine-to-five.

ANSWER THIS: WHAT’S SO SPECIAL ABOUT YOU?

Brock’s success might be attributed to the fact that she tapped into a popular trend (juicing) and a growing industry (online publishing). Taylor, too, recognized a new market and opportunity. But how do the rest of us predict the “next big thing” and identify our place?

According to Alan Kearns, it’s less about trying to forecast which industries will boom and more about knowing ourselves, and our unique skills. Recognizing and enhancing what sets us apart is what will give us a competitive advantage in any market. “As a society we tend to think it’s a luxury to go after your true passions, but really it’s a practical thing to do,” he says.

Kearns has his clients consider five factors before deciding on a job: their talents, values, passions, lifestyle and ecosystem. Only after coming to a true understanding of themselves and their needs do they look for careers that will be a good fit. “No one can predict what will happen 10 years down the road,” he says. “The best way you can prepare yourself is to think about who you are.”

From there, he advocates personal branding, something that is more important now than a generation ago. Thirty years ago, demand for workers was high and supply was low. “Now it’s the other way around. Marketing yourself is so much more important; no matter how talented you are, you need to show people that you have something unique to offer.”

FIND THE UNIQUE NEED

When Melissa Crnic started studying HTML and CSS coding, she realized a need for more beginner-level training in computer programming and other technical skills, which led her and three friends to launch workshops called Ladies Learning Code. After their first Toronto-based classes sold out in seconds, they knew they had tapped into something. Ladies Learning Code became so Popular Crnic expanded it to major cities in nearly every province and established more comprehensive multi-week courses as well.

“Technical skills are becoming core skills, like math or English,” Crnic asserts.

“You can’t escape technology in your job or in your life anymore. And having the skills to engage with technology rather than just consume it—by creating a blog rather than simply reading one, for example—is extremely empowering.” But for some, especially for people who didn’t grow up plugged in to the Internet, grasping the basics of how to use these tools may require training.

UNDERSTAND YOUR EGO

Aside from the obvious financial concerns, Kearns advises his clients to consider what it might be like to give up their title and status. What will it mean for them to leave the community they have worked in for years? Some clients don’t consider that leaving one job for another might also mean leaving Bay Street for Burlington.

“[My former employer] was my identity,” Brock remembers. “I thought I would miss being part of a team and feeling valuable, but I’ve found a more meaningful value in what I do now, and I find community in my peers and through my clients. ” To get there, Brock had to develop some new skills of her own. “I had to learn all about online marketing, social media, digital product creation, podcasting and book writing itself.”

Brock admits that it wasn’t, however, an overnight success. “I didn’t replace my income with blogging,” she says. But now she feels more financially secure than she did at her engineering job. “Several of my former colleagues have been laid off,” she says. “That was their entire income, tied to one source, and someone else’s decision as to whether they could stay or go.” Now that her income is diversified—revenue comes from her blog, her book deals and other projects—Brock is confident that she’s in a much better position to sustain herself over the long term.

“Entrepreneurship is not a path for everyone,” she says. “But I think it’s important to understand that no job is safe, and it’s necessary to have a contingency plan, whether that’s a side business, investments or some other idea for what will happen to you if your boss walks into your office tomorrow and says ‘you’re done.’”

While entrepreneurship may not be for everyone, according to Lisa Taylor, women over the age of 55 are the fastest growing cohort of individuals going into business for themselves. For some, it might be a case of necessity being the mother of invention: some women fear they will face age discrimination and be rejected if they go through the process of a traditional job application later in their careers. According to Laurel MacDowell, these fears aren’t entirely unfounded. Women are still locked out of many high-paying positions; there is still an “informal boys’ club,” she says. (According to Statistics Canada, about 50 percent of women say they have experienced some form of discrimination at work or when applying for a job or promotion.) For many women, finding a way to work outside of this boys’ club is the only solution. “I’m not going to work for someone else,” Brock says. “So the only other option is to make my own business work.”

Alan Kearns believes this type of focus and determination will pay off. “We live in a competitive society that’s only going to get more competitive,” he explains. “If you are doing something that’s truly in line with who you are, you’re going to have a lot more stability.”