Career

What is ‘Job Security’?

Posted on by Alan Thompson

Summary: Long-term job security is gone, even in communist countries. Automation, outsourcing, and robotics affect the future of 9-5 employees.

This tutorial will explain how to protect your long-term options by becoming less reliant on tradition lines of business and looking at alternatives ways to generate income.

Does job ‘security’ really exist anymore?

True story.

Twenty-five years ago, a family friend was asked by the owner, have you trained Jim to go you’re job, in case anything goes wrong.

Sure, all my team are trained.

That’s good. But I need you to know that we’ll have to let you go. Cost cutting. Nothing personal.

Here’s the kicker. The reason for this was our friend, who’d worked there for nineteen years and ten months, was due a pension in eight weeks. So they axed him. Maybe you know similar stories.

This brings me to the theory of job security.

Certain careers have more job security than others. Few brain surgeons are out of work.

Other areas are less secure. For example, if you work in any of these areas, your job security is at risk:

  1. A job that can be automated.
  2. A job that can be done for less.
  3. A job that will no longer be needed.

Job Insecurity

An interesting question for me is why ‘job security’ is still seen as a holy grail of sorts when the evidence suggests otherwise. Every year, more jobs get automated, outsourced, or removed.

I suspect it’s that we associate: job + security = happiness.

And in an ideal work, this would be true.

So, this leaves (at least) two options:

  1. Upskill. Become a brain surgeon.
  2. Define a path – develop some other skill that’s hard to replicate, outsource, or automate.

Examples?

  1. Artisans. Hand made products will become more cherished as manufacturing becomes increasingly automated.
  2. Deluxe products. The popularity of status products, such as iPhones, shows there will always be a market for status ‘must have’ products.
  3. Privacy. Software, services, and courses that help people get off the network, to protect their identity, to stop others snooping into their lives.

All of these have a future. They’re not jobs. But they are an option.

Alan Thompson