Moses should know. She has talked to senior executives who've been forced into early retirement and still have huge mortgages or children in university. She has talked to middle managers who are afraid to leave hated jobs because there's so little out there. And she has talked to anxious parents of young children who wonder what career advice to provide. She has concluded the work force has undergone a vast and permanent change.
People understand, psychologically, that they can no longer afford to rest on their laurels.
To survive in the new workplace, people have to adopt a whole new attitude toward work, she says. They have to start defining their jobs as what they do, not who they do it for, she says. In the new environment, job security comes not from the employer but from the employee, she says. It comes from staying on top of the latest trends, keeping skills up to date, networking, marketing and promoting themselves, and creating a safety net, such as a second source of income. Moses admits this may all sound a bit daunting to the average two-income family struggling to get through the day.