Risk-taking works as career move

By BRONWYN SELL

Drew Collett spent five years studying to be a medical researcher, then a further eight years deciding what he really wanted to do.

After stints as a boatbuilder, haybaler and fast-food worker, the Mt Albert man is now a mortgage broker and plans a career in personal finance.

Rachel Jackson left on her OE as a fashion designer - her dream job since she was 10 - and came home as a natural nutritionist.

A decade ago they might have been called fickle, but mobile, fragmented careers are becoming more common, according to Kerr Inkson, professor of management at Massey University's Albany campus.

Professor Inkson teamed up with Auckland University lecturer Dr Judith Pringle and Professor Michael Arthur of Boston in a research project on the careers of 75 people.

Their research discounted long-held beliefs that careers were continuous and steady and found successful careers were experimental and unpredictable.

In his recent inaugural lecture at Massey, Professor Inkson told students that the career winners of the new millennium were well-educated and flexible people.

"The losers are those with low skills and unwanted skills, who do not thrive on change."

Norman, aged 54, is one of the latter. His future seemed assured when he qualified as an accountant more than 30 years ago.

But a disillusioned Norman walked out of his job shortly before the 1987 stock market crash, and did not get another decent offer.

"So I spend my time at home, walking the dog, doing the crossword."

Professor Inkson said Norman invested in a career he thought was secure and never upgraded his skills. When he left the job, rather than designing a new career, he waited for the phone to ring.

"He believed in a lifetime employment career system that crashed in the eighties."

Professor Inkson is a fan of the OE (overseas experience), which he says is good preparation for the ambiguous, rapidly changing 21st-century world of work.

OE travellers typically created their own luck, tried different things and improvised - and became more versatile and confident.

Ms Jackson said her OE was a huge catalyst for career change.

The North Shore City woman, who had worked in fashion before going to London, went half-heartedly for job interviews in the industry there before deciding instead to study her hobby, natural health.

She was able to experiment with her career away from the pressures and preconceptions of home, and there were more opportunities in London.

Like Mr Collett, 60 per cent of the people in the study finished the 1990s in a completely different career to that they had begun the decade with.

Mr Collett knew by the time he finished his masters degree in cellular and molecular biology that he did not want to be a researcher, but it was not until he bought a house years later that he became interested in personal finance.

"It's taken me 14 years to figure out what I'm doing. Most people go from one thing to another to another and they end up in a different position to the one they thought they would be in. You've got to try things to find out you don't like them."