Since the collapse of Lehman Brothers almost three years ago, a number of people who had recently lost jobs due to downsizing, bankruptcy and lack of funding, have asked me where they should look for jobs.  My answer has been consistent: become your own job.

What is it that you love?  What is it that you are good at? What are your most marketable skills? What is your greatest value to the marketplace? If you stop and think about it, there should be a lot of overlap in the answers to these questions.

It is time to become the job you are.  It is time to embrace being a free agent.  It is time to be a one-person company.  It is time to let go of the concept that there is a job out there that provides security.

As early as late 2008, I forecasted that the unemployment rate in the U.S. would push through nine percent and perhaps reach 10 percent.  I further suggested that the country would stay close to these historically high levels of unemployment for ...]]> It is time to slowly say good-bye to the “job” as it has been known in our lifetime and the lifetime of our parents.  The parents of baby boomers were the first full generation that lived with the general concept of “life-long employment.” Baby boomers left college and stepped on lower rungs of a “career path.” Now, after three consecutive “jobless recoveries,” it should be clear that jobs as we had defined them are disappearing.

Since the collapse of Lehman Brothers almost three years ago, a number of people who had recently lost jobs due to downsizing, bankruptcy and lack of funding, have asked me where they should look for jobs.  My answer has been consistent: become your own job.

What is it that you love?  What is it that you are good at? What are your most marketable skills? What is your greatest value to the marketplace? If you stop and think about it, there should be a lot of overlap in the answers to these questions.

It is time to become the job you are.  It is time to embrace being a free agent.  It is time to be a one-person company.  It is time to let go of the concept that there is a job out there that provides security.

As early as late 2008, I forecasted that the unemployment rate in the U.S. would push through nine percent and perhaps reach 10 percent.  I further suggested that the country would stay close to these historically high levels of unemployment for years. This reality is only now being discussed and accepted.  Two years ago, this forecast was doubted.  What led me to make this forecast?

The social concept of jobs, careers and companies really developed over the last 300 years in the Industrial Age. Before the invention of the steam engine, the centralization of industry, and the urbanization of the developed countries, people were artisans, cobblers, blacksmiths and farmers. One apprenticed with a master and gradually learned the trade. Craftsmanship and high-quality work were prized; scale was small and individualized. People plied their crafts on a one-to-one basis.

The 100 years from the Civil War through the 1950s was a time of scale, mechanization, centralization and the creation of vertical hierarchies that rapidly became bureaucracies. People started at the bottom, or if they had a college degree, slightly above the bottom, and over time, moved up the career ladder in a life-long sequence of promotions, often moving wherever the company told them to. The apotheosis of this was post-WWII America, with its triumphant manufacturing power that was the envy of the world.

The 1970s ushered us into the Information Age – with computers and communications satellites – and started the transition from production of goods to the generation of information at ever-increasing rates. An economy based on atoms was ceding to an economy based on digits. Waves of technological innovation across all sectors of the economy provided us all with moments of Toffler’s “Future Shock.”  The future kept showing up and altering our life, work and behavior.

The last decade of the 20^th century, with the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, unleashed globalism and the global economy. Work began to transcend national boundaries. The birth of the Internet launched the connectivity revolution, which is playing out to this day. Technology moved from the desktop to the briefcase, and now to the pocket. It moved from the office to the home. The clear consumerization of technology is flowing through the global workplace.  People can now sit in a coffee shop or on a park bench and run companies, create products, collaborate globally.

In the Industrial Age, machines replaced manual or blue-collar labor. In the Information Age, computers replaced office or white-collar workers. Hardware and software replaced people doing jobs.  The Internet connected the world, so the lowest-cost producer became ascendant. Now in the Shift Age, all is in a state of shift. Instead of hierarchies, silos and vertical management structures, we are becoming a global net of connected work.

Jobs have less and less value, which is why people who have lost their jobs in the recent Global Financial Crisis cannot find jobs that pay the same as the ones they lost. It is time to let go of the concept of a job and think of becoming a node in the global network of commerce, of creativity.  What might be your highest value to others? What is your greatest passion? What is it that you do well?  What can you give to others in the connected global economy that will give you money in return? What is your innovative idea? In the Shift Age, wealth will flow from IP, intellectual property. What is your IP?

Stop looking for the “job” that is increasingly hard to find. Create your own job.  Become the job you are.

As a member of the baby boom generation, I have seen many people my age change careers at least once during middle age.  We are all living longer, move more often and of course are all living in a much faster paced world than the one our parents lived in.  This leads to a lot of us choosing to do more than one thing in our work lives.   These career changes are usually fed by a passion, by disillusionment or some unforeseeable event that changes our lives.  My fiancé left a successful business career as a comptroller to serve humanity as a compassionate therapist, going back to school in mid-life and committing years to this effort.  A good friend of mine was a successful media executive and decided to reinvent the world of wine retailing.  Another good friend who has successfully built and run media companies  decided that he could be happier, and more financially successful working solo from home, taking time to smell the roses.  In all of these cases they followed their passion, listened to their heart and applied developed talents or learned new skills or complete new areas of knowledge and expertise.

The key driver in a mid-life ...]]> We live in a time of great shift and transformation.  I have written here about disintermediation and other trends that are reshaping the economic and cultural landscapes.  It is increasingly important to consider these forces when making major life decisions, especially as it pertains to work, business and the economy.

As a member of the baby boom generation, I have seen many people my age change careers at least once during middle age.  We are all living longer, move more often and of course are all living in a much faster paced world than the one our parents lived in.  This leads to a lot of us choosing to do more than one thing in our work lives.   These career changes are usually fed by a passion, by disillusionment or some unforeseeable event that changes our lives.  My fiancé left a successful business career as a comptroller to serve humanity as a compassionate therapist, going back to school in mid-life and committing years to this effort.  A good friend of mine was a successful media executive and decided to reinvent the world of wine retailing.  Another good friend who has successfully built and run media companies  decided that he could be happier, and more financially successful working solo from home, taking time to smell the roses.  In all of these cases they followed their passion, listened to their heart and applied developed talents or learned new skills or complete new areas of knowledge and expertise.

The key driver in a mid-life career change is to find greater happiness and more passion in ones’ work life.  Mid-life brings with it a sense of mortality, that life in fact may be half over and that raises the question of how to spend the remaining time we have on this earth.  Happiness is individually defined.  Some feel the need to serve others.  Some want to be more creatively expressive, and others want to make more money.  All these motivations are personal and should be at the core of any mid-life career change.  However, once this internal process has been completed it is important to really take a macro look at the world to make sure that this personal decision fits into the larger dynamics at play in the marketplace.

Disintermediation, globalization, the growth of high speed connectivity, and the changing energy environment are all factors that should be thought about before making the final career change decision.  For example, if, in the mid-1990s someone had made the decision to enter the music business, that career would probably be short lived due to the disintermediation of the Internet and legal and  illegal downloads.  Any new job or occupation that is reliant on transportation whether it be shipping or just a long commute now must be considered within the context of oil prices and the changing landscape of energy.

Recently, the premier web site for mid-life issues invited me to become a guest columnist, the resident futurist for the site.  While www.lifetwo.com covers the many personal aspects of career change, they asked me to write on the dynamics that are reshaping the world to suggest to their readers, as I have done here, things that must be considered outside oneself when making this important decision.  A column listing seven things to consider before making a career change is now posted at http://lifetwo.com/production/node/20070526-how-to-avoid-becoming-obsolescent-outsourced-and-disintermediated .

A phrase I use to end the section called Blog Origins as to why I started www.evolutionshift.com  is quite relevant:  “Look Up.  Look around.  Look within.  Or look out!