Is the relentless careerism of the 80s a thing of the past now that employees have new aspirations, or do some people still value their careers more than others?
Some time ago, I was invited by Lucca for the prevention of a study on the aspirations of French people in relation to work (The French and work: changing aspirations and worsening conditions), an event around which we were entertained by battles in which two experts opposed each other in a verbal joust on one of the study’s themes.
The first was “do companies makes people incompetent“, followed by the question of whether pursuing a career is still desirable.
After a brief summary of the exchanges between the two speakers, I’ll give you the thoughts that inspired me personally.
Pursuing a career: between self-fulfilment and submission
Here’s a quick summary of the arguments that were put forward
Yes, a career is still desirable, but the definition needs to be revised, because it’s a has-been today. Today, you can make a career as a blue-collar worker by retraining and, generally speaking, no longer just by climbing the hierarchy. Today, you can create your own career and not just follow a set path.
No! A career at any price is no longer desirable, because it means having to give up.
It’s important to remember that identifying with one’s professional activity is a fairly recent phenomenon. It used to be that there were different trades, that you took on a job and stayed with it for the rest of your life. In fact, it was the introduction of the social security system that changed everything: you had to be in paid employment to acquire rights, and then logically the question arose of the need to climb the ladder to get ahead.
Today, more and more people don’t want to become managers because of the workload. There are many people who have chosen to decline professionally by choice, but the model remains masculine and virilist, and this raises the question of universal income.
That’s not true: to live one’s career is to live one’s life , and not necessarily in a linear fashion.
No: a career implies allegiance and subordination. At least in the civil service, we’re not subject to that.
But no You can take charge of your career and not be subjected to it. And here the speaker cites her own example, since she holds two positions with her employer at her own request, and also has a freelance activity on the side.
At the end of the debate, a survey of participants, mainly from the HR world, showed that for 51% of those present, a career was no longer desirable.
Redefining the notion of career
The first speaker stressed that the definition of the word “career” was outdated, and this, in my opinion, is the essential point to remember. In my opinion, it’s not just the word “career”, but the expression “ to pursue a career”.
When we think of career, we inevitably think of a company and something linear and ascending, which is no longer the reality. Or, rather, it may no longer be the reality for those who decide to take matters into their own hands.
In fact, I think it would be more appropriate to speak of “leading one’s professional life ”, which is less connotative and leaves the door open to many different options.
The pressure of career progression
Where I agree with the most radical position taken by the speaker is that many people, at least in France, no longer want to manage: the Lucca survey shows that only 4% of respondents want to manage a team.
Nothing new under the sun: it’s an underlying trend to which we were turning a blind eye, an elephant in the room that we could no longer pretend not to see after COVID.
” 20% of managers (25% of whom are women) don’t want to manage a team This proportion is even higher in the 35-49 age bracket (27%), the age group most likely to hold managerial positions. This is all the more questionable given that 87% of employees aged between 18 and 34 – the youngest on the job market – would like to manage a team.
Les Echos – Crise sanitaire : les managers, sur les nerfs, se détournent de leur fonctio
I’m going to avoid repeating what I said in my analysis of the study, but we’re back to a problem of definition: what is a manager and do we promote the right people to these positions, knowing that the best-performing employee in the field won’t make the best manager, and that the opposite is often true?
So there are two avenues to explore
The first is to stop making promotion to a managerial position a reward, and to appoint people who have the appetite and skills for the role.
Since the 50s, the US army has understood thatthere is a big difference between a good soldier and someone capable of leading soldiers, and it is constantly refining its tests in this direction. In the same way, it’s one of the great plagues of consulting firms, where the “up or down” system can put out of the game very good future managers or partners who weren’t exceptional juniors, but have other qualities that would have been useful to them in a more senior position.
The second is to promote career paths based on expertise, in order to make the most of people with unrivalled technical skills, who don’t want to become managers and who, moreover, promoting them to manager would lead to a double penalty: losing a valuable employee in the field, only to inherit a bad manager.
A company like IBM has understood this. At IBM, the Technical Career Path is designed for those who wish to remain focused on their expertise. This path allows you to move up the career ladder while continuing to focus on the technical aspects of your job.
The final stages, Distinguished Engineer or IBM fellow, are among the most prestigious and highly valued positions in the company.
And you’ll see in my next article on these battles that Apple has adopted a different but equally interesting path.
Career or career at any cost
The beginning of the debate introduced an essential nuance: career or career at any cost?
It’s the “ at any cost ” that changes everything.
And it’s true that a career requires effort, and sometimes sacrifice, which not everyone is prepared to make. But this is another subject on which it’s hard to generalize: what is a sacrifice for one person will be a motivating factor for others, and vice versa.
But I think this problem can be partly, if not totally, solved by changing our vision of things , as explained in several places in this article: thinking in terms of “leading one’s professional life” rather than making a career, rethinking the managerial stream and non-hierarchical career progression…
All this should enable each individual to find his own path, without upsetting the essential balances that are unique to him.
The elephant in the room: wages
Strangely enough, there is one key element of the study that has been overlooked, and which I believe is central to the debate.
Many people are forced to make a career for themselves, even though they are very good at their job and level of responsibility , with money as their sole motivation. We have to stop being hypocritical about this, and the Lucca study shows that it’s the number one aspiration of those interested.
So if, on the one hand, we paid people properly and, on the other, allowed them to progress in their careers and therefore in their salaries in a way other than through the hierarchy, we might be able to get a lot of people out of this logic.
Bottom line
The question is not whether a career is still desirable, but what price we are willing to pay to achieve it, which is certainly not the same as in the past.
And the price to be paid can be made more acceptable, or even disappear, if we change our perspective on the notions of career and promotion: we need to be able to lead a fulfilling professional life without having to constantly chase promotions, but to achieve this we need to rethink our entire system.
Image: making a career by IR Stone via Shutterstock
