Changes in the working place make 'a job for life' increasingly unlikely

How many careers should you expect to have in your lifetime? Dr MARIE WILSON, head of management and employment relations at the University of Auckland Business School and a veteran of 20 years in corporate management and small business, offers ideas.

I keep hearing folk say that people shift careers a certain number of times during a lifetime, and a story about boomerang staff said mobility was now seen as an asset. Is there any real research, and hard data, that backs that up? Exactly how many careers do people average in a lifetime?

Certainly, there is research to document that fewer of us are employed in the same job, family or industry throughout our working lives.

Changes in the workplace increasingly mean that we may be contractors, temporary staff, employed in several or one part-time jobs, or even displaced from the workplace for periods.

There is also good evidence that we are seeking more training and are returning to retrain more throughout our working lives.

The outcomes of these changes would certainly include an increased emphasis on flexibility and mobility.

All of these suggest that we are having many more career combinations in our lives, many of them at the same time rather than sequentially.

A number of writers have documented the trends in this area. Charles Handy, who refers to this trend as the "portfolio career", has just been in Auckland to discuss these and related business changes.

This research has yet to establish an average for careers, and the term "exactly", combined with average, is a bit tricky anyway.

The most commonly cited numbers are in the range of five to seven distinct careers in your lifetime - and remember this includes a fair amount of your future work life.

This can, of course, mean that you might have one career, or dozens of changes.

None of us knows until we are finished with our worklife. I think you can comfortably count on having to change the way you work throughout your work life, from the impact of new technologies, the change in the economic and industrial base of New Zealand (or wherever you are working), and the rise in new forms of employment.

How many times will depend on your own circumstances and your mobility, as well as your interest and motivation to try new areas and develop new skills.

I've taken over a mentoring group at work. The discussion is often dominated by how to maintain the work/life balance when people are losing jobs all over the place, without losing your job or the balance. There is a lot of self-applied pressure to work long hours, let alone anything else. Any advice? Are we unusual?

No, your group is not all that unusual in its concerns. The competitive pressures experienced by business are passed on to employees in terms of increasing expectations of productivity and performance.

Work hours are creeping up, and the requirements of home, school, family and other relationships, not to mention our own health, have not diminished.

The common denominator in these concerns is the issue of time. If you cannot create more of it, you have to manage what you have extremely well.

There are lots of resources to assist your group in investigating ways to manage time, but the fundamentals usually include focusing on things that are important to do, and doing them as efficiently as possible.

The first thing many people should ask themselves is whether they would get as much, or more, work done if they worked fewer hours but with greater focus (the effect that many of us achieve on the last day before we are leaving the office for a week or more).

Some of the unhealthiest trends are a result of employees who work late because those who leave "on time" are seen as uncommitted or under-worked, rather than just efficient.

The first resource is yourself, and taking steps to make sure that every member of your group is physically fit will increase their capability to be productive in all the spheres of their lives, while also increasing their ability to deal with any stresses in balancing.

My three personal favourites for work/life balance are: removing one day a fortnight from my calendar - physically tearing it out of my old-fashioned paper diary so that I physically cannot book any more work on that day; getting a buddy to carpool home or go to the gym, so I cannot beg off because of the work on my desk; and using flexi-time to work really late one night a week to catch up all the routine things that I collect in a plastic tub on my desk during the week, and then taking a late morning in exchange for all my personal and family errands. This frees my weekends for other activities.

* E-mail your questions for Dr Marie Wilson to answer.