NZ Management thinker Charles Handy is in NZ to talk to the Institute of Management conference in Wellington and a seminar in Auckland. He says that in the new sort of economics, wealth does not trickle down like it used to. Handy told Kim Hill on National Radio that he has advised his children not to go looking for a job. Manawatu career catalyst Angela Baker, one of the workshop leaders at the Wellington careers conference, says that although many of those writing about changes to the structure of work, write of these changes as offering 'opportunity', 'flexibility' and 'challenge', these are not the attributes that many 'ordinary folk' are looking for in their working lives. The whole notion of one job for life has gone forever.
People are likely to have to change their careers many times in their working lives.
Retraining a number of times could be the reality for many, with periods out of the paid workforce. It used to be the case that people performed the same job for different firms. Now the jobs themselves are changing rapidly with new skill requirements and changing markets. The Guardian Weekly reports that a committee of enquiry into the future of higher education has been told that the supply of graduates is likely to outstrip the economy's demand for them in the next three years. It warns that this will mean a substantial increase in student numbers, but there will not be enough 'graduate' jobs to absorb them.