Your career has a Diminishing Marginal Utility
Diminishing Marginal Utility is not a new concept. We all know that utility deriving from a product or commodity reduces as more and more we consume of it.
The utility, here, can be defined as a level of satisfaction that we get from consumption of a commodity. On the contrary it can also be defined as the lack of desire to consume more of something, as we don’t feel same urge towards it.
Then how this concept will affect your career. It is an economic concept which doesn’t have real life applicability.
Let’s get back to the history, do we have same profession paying same salaries as they paid 10 years ago. For example, an accountant is not paid the same salary and perks as was paid to him 10 years ago. Why?
What has changed? Don’t we need any more accountants?
No. We need them. We will need them even in future. However, the value derived from them is not unique now and now can be easily substituted with a computer program. It is just that, when the profession was at peak it was a good career. But now we have much better alternates and the professionals out there do not provide any unique value. That’s why the perks available for the profession are diminishing. Its diminishing marginal utility.
Each and Every profession was made to deal with some problem existing in the society. Such as Accountant was created to handle finances because there were no tools like excel and accounting softwares. Engineers to create stuff but now we have robots to do the same work more swiftly.
But the sad part is we are sending our children to join those professions which have lost their charm and expecting the results (monetary) as were of back days. How can you expect that world won’t change? World will keep finding cost effective solutions to the problems.
You can’t complain or expect that labours will be appointed in a world where robots can generate 10x results at half of the cost. You can’t expect that accountants will be appointed calculate finances where one can himself do the same in seconds.
If you expect it, then you’re surely heading to the wrong path.
Is it that hard to understand that we have to adapt to the change?
We have to know one simple basic fact that, the time is changing. We need to analyse the things practically.
Let’s take another example, Engineering. In India, every parent wants their kid to be an Engineer. Result of which in the last two decades we have produced more engineers than CHINA and USA combined.
Consequently, we can see the decline in the value of Engineers in India and the market becoming less qualitative and highly competitive in terms of job and career oppurtunities.
It is a simple fact that more the quantity, less the quality unless you have clear cut benchmarks for quality. In India, we clearly lack. The engineers produced out of the so called engineering colleges are not at all serving the Industry demands.
What’s the solution then?
Adapting to the changing environment and knowing the actual demand of the industry. Be aware of the changes that are coming in the Industry. In simple words:
