The Declining Traditional Job

The Decline of the Traditional Job

by Ron McGowan

In trend-setting California, according to a study by the University of San Francisco, only 33 percent of the workforce, have traditional jobs. The rest are part-time, temporary, contract workers, or are self-employed.

This is where we’re all headed. We keep waiting for the Great Recession to be over and lots of jobs to come back. It’s not going to happen. For a growing number of workers, the era of the traditional job, and all the stability that came with it, is over. The millions in the category of “long-term unemployed” and “underemployed” in the U.S. and elsewhere are proof of this. A recent report in the Harvard Business Review suggests that the growth rate for contingent workers will be three to four times that of traditional workers.

The countries that will succeed in the 21st Century are the ones that can tap into and nurture the entrepreneurial spirit within their workforce and that support and encourage the creation of small businesses. The ones that will fail are the ones that continue to depend on the traditional job.

Professor Mohammad Yunus was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for establishing the Grameen Bank, which has helped millions of people in over 40 countries to become self-sufficient by giving them access to small loans.

Last year, in an initiative to create more entrepreneurs by getting school kids to compete among themselves, a group of 11-year-old girls in Scotland made 4,000 Pounds from a one-Pound loan in just four weeks. A Scotsman newspaper report describing the project said, “the kids loved it.”

The challenge in this century is to give more kids the chance to participate in these types of projects and to help unemployed people to become more enterprising and entrepreneurial in their attitude towards earning a living. Going forward, one of our biggest challenges is to reduce our dependency on the traditional job.

William Bridges pointed out in his bestseller JobShift that: “The job is a social artifact, although it is so deeply embedded in our consciousness that most of us have forgotten its artificiality or the fact that most societies since the beginning of time have done just fine without jobs.”

Millions of dollars, euros and pounds are being poured down the drain by governments trying to recreate the second half of the twentieth century through questionable programs that are supposed to help the unemployed find jobs.

If these funds were instead made available to successful small businesses that are ready to expand, we would make a significant dent in the level of unemployment and at the same time affirm the reality that entrepreneurs create jobs, not governments.

Ron McGowan is the author of the international bestseller “How to Find Work in the 21st Century”, currently in use at over 400 colleges and universities worldwide. http://www.howtofindwork.ca