#labier

[roughridingrednecks]

Mr. Labier

[flexpaths-blog-blog]

The Flexible Workforce and the 4.0 Career

Three stunning facts:

The average worker between the ages of 18 and 34 works at one place for 2.9 years “before moving on to greener pastures”.

In the 90s, 80% of young workers aimed to climb the traditional corporate ladder. Now, only 60% of people in that cohort have those career aspirations - and that number is steadily declining each year.

Most of these workers will quit a job to take a longer vacation or to pursue a personal goal, and “then, when they're ready, they return to their career”.

  This is the new HR reality: to maintain an engaged, consistent workforce and therefore, companies need to consider offering flexible work arrangements.

Sabbaticals, for example, might be less of a luxury than a necessity - which is undoubtedly why companies like Google and 3M, both of whom rely on employing young creatives and innovators, have built furloughs and sabbaticals into their corporate culture. And their investment is rewarded. While at first glance millennials come across as the job-hopping generation of uncommitted workers, they are, in fact, entrepreneurial, collaborative, flexible, invested in innovation...and, argues Douglas Labier, “focused on having an impact on something larger than oneself, contributing something socially useful that connects with the needs of the larger human community”. Labier calls this kind of work practice the “4.0 Career”, mostly to emphasize that it is an orientation rather than a generation. It is an orientation, for example, shared by Generation X and Generation Y, both of whom value work-life balance and, surveys say, will increasingly seek flexible work over a 401K. What do you think?  Do you agree with Labier that the way we see work has more to do with an orientation vs. a generation?

Image credit: Mykl Roventine