The political season is upon us, and I’m always struck by the contrast between the world our politicians are talking about and the one we live in. The candidates seem to cling to this persistent delusion that we are still living in the 1950s. In those halcyon days, the US was the only developed economy not decimated by the Second World War, the GIs were back home and starting families, and the population held the deep-seated belief that we could lick the world – hey, we just had! The US embarked a growth phase that spurred a rise in the standard of living the likes of which we’ll likely never see again.
Our politicians are now taking the stage to call for a return to the days when our economy produced those “good middle class jobs” that came with security, pensions, and health care benefits. While we’d all like to see that future for our kids, I’m afraid that type of existence is going to be the exception rather than the rule. Sure if you’re coming out of Wharton or Stamford at the top of your class in a field with strong growth prospects, you can still pretty much write your own ticket. However, that is not the prospect most young people are going to face.
When I work with clients, the last thing they want to hear is we want to add full-time employees (“FTEs” for short) because that means commitment and benefits costs. Large companies now routinely maintain “extended” workforces using temporary workers who they pay on 1099s (i.e. no withholding) and for whom they provide no benefits. Not that I can blame them however, I run my own business and I know how expensive health insurance and other traditional benefits really are.
Hence the dilemma our recent college grads are encountering. When I got out of college there were plenty of entry-level office jobs with benefits (even for English majors!), and most of us made our way painlessly into the workforce. Of course, those of us who wound up in IT (or “MIS” as we called it back then) spent the rest of our careers “automating” those jobs out of existence or coming up with tricks like low-cost VoIP services so we could send them overseas. I do feel partially responsible for the difficulties my son’s generation is now facing.
I for one do not hold that the American economy is on its last legs or that Americans are pampered or lazy. If anything, we’re the exact opposite, and that is seen even more strongly in our recent immigrants. Rather, we are witnessing is a major transition to a new type of economy where more workers will have to take greater responsibility for themselves rather than depending on a big company to do it for them.
A “career” for many will increasingly involve working part time for a number of different companies and developing an expanding set of skills as you go. That also means learning to save for those months when all of your opportunities tank simultaneously, remembering to budget for things like health insurance, retirement savings, vacation time, and for continuous retraining to ensure you to have skills that are relevant to the needs of the market.
I don’t hear any of our politicians talking about that type of workforce, but that’s exactly what I’m encountering. Even though I started in the “big company” motif (ITT and AT&T), I’ve managed to run a fairly successful consulting practice for over 30-years, and have managed to keep pushing my expertise in areas that I saw as growing. Well, I did take a bet on ISDN some years back, but fortunately it was one of a few things I was pursing at the time and most of the others paid off.
The big question is, “What will this mean to UC?” This new workforce and this new type of work will absolutely require the types of flexible communication and collaboration tools that UC puts on the table. Probably the most obvious requirement will be federation. In an environment where “many of the people who work here don’t work here,” they will all need access to the same set of tools and capabilities to get the job done. The question is will those tools be the big company variety pushed by the Cisco’s and Microsoft’s, or more consumer-oriented versions from Skype, Facebook, and Google?
Clearly we have already seen the move toward comsumerization in the mobility space, and now the big company types are bringing these tools into the large enterprise. It also means that part of the skill set this new workforce will require is the expertise in using WebEx (or Lync, or SharePoint, or whatever) effectively.
Management skills will have to adapt as well. A command-and-control mentality will simply mean that the best available people find their way to other opportunities that allow them to grow and prosper without having some ogre breathing down their necks. “Management”, at least management of skilled resources, will be a matter of agreeing on objectives, deliverables and timeframes, and then getting out of the way unless further assistance is sought. These UC tools, particularly those that foster communications and collaboration will be key, as will mobility elements that allow talented people to do the best job in the most flexible manner.
For “people of a certain age” this type of reordering of work is a scary prospect. However, to prosper in this new environment people are going to have to change their expectations and learn to thrive in it. Getting nostalgic about the past is not going to bring it back, and frankly there was a lot about the 1950s that wasn’t that much fun. So as you listen to the politicians wax eloquent about “good jobs for hard working Americans,” try to keep reality in focus. I love “It’s a Wonderful World” as much as the next guy, and it remains a wonderful though changing world – it’s just not starring Jimmy Stewart!
Happy New Year
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