Mid Life/Career Renewal and Transition

In JobShift: How to Prosper in a Workplace Without Jobs (1994) author William Bridges explains that the past vision of U.S. jobs that entailed Monday to Friday, nine to five, twelve months a year, with promotions and then pensions beginning at age sixty-five are going, going, and will mostly be gone. Newly designed work methods and increased business focus on control of labor costs have enabled greater American competitiveness based on the economies from labor. 

Updated with today’s competitive global marketplace, explosion of technological innovation, and benefits from internet-enhanced virtual operations; the jobs of old are an endangered species. Bridges warns that "All the jobs in today’s economy are temporary – for two reasons: (1) the job is a social artifact on the wane along with the (past social and economic) conditions that created it, and (2) that work arrangements themselves are temporary in the sense they are created to meet the productivity needs in an immediate but changing situation." 

He comments that: "In the future your job security will depend on your developing three characteristics as a worker and as a person: employability (your momentary abilities and attitudes), vendor-mindedness (your being hired to accomplish a specific task), and resiliency (your ability to bend but not break and to deal with uncertainty).

Given how the cards have become stacked against being able to use the same knowledge and skills learned and applied for a lifetime of dedicated work with one firm or industry, Bridges encourages most people to prepare for inevitable changes while we still have the time and temporary financial stability to do so. He summarizes his guidance (p.60) as:

1.Learn to see every potential work situation, inside an organization as well as outside it, as a market. (Some day you may be marketing yourself.)

2.Survey your desires, abilities, temperament, and assets (DATA) and recycle them into a different and more viable "product." (Some day your services may be someone else’s product.)

3.Build a business plan for your own personal enterprise, refine it as you move forward, and begin to see yourself as being in business for yourself. (Some day you may actually do this.)

4.Learn about the psychological impacts of life in this new world of work – and make a plan to handle them. (Don’t be surprised by the emotional challenge.)

Concerning the last item (psychological impacts) Bridges reminds his readers of the research work done by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross on the process of mourning/grieving observed in a large number of people undergoing significant loss. The stages of denial, anger, bargaining, despair, and acceptance are usually witnessed – and people being traumatized by forced career change are known to experience many of these stages of adjustment. Using the Kubler-Ross framework, Bridges recommends a process that people in need of making such a transition adopt a procedure (p.195) along the following, overlapping lines:

1.An ending, during which one disengages from and breaks the old identity with "the way things were."

2.A neutral zone, when one is in between two ways of doing and being, having lost the old and not yet having found a way to live with the new.

3.A new beginning, after which one again feels at home and productive in "the way things are" with a new identity based on new conditions.

In his conclusion, Bridges offers a discerning perspective: "Life is a teacher. Periodically it destroys how things have been and forces us to say good-bye to how we have done things and define ourselves. The external details of the change may be unique and confusing, but the real transitional task is always the same: to let go of some reality or strategy or personal identity that characterized the previous leg of our journey. The question life asks is always, ‘What is it time for you to say good-bye to?" (p.220)