Customising your career

Today there is a trend towards mass product customisation. We customise our iphones, trainers, our golf clubs and our Coke bottles. We customise our playlists on Spotify, and our newsfeeds on Facebook and Twitter. As product personalisation becomes the norm then why isn’t it time we also customised our careers?

There’s a huge misalignment between the workforce of today and a workplace that has not changed since the beginning of the industrial revolution. By 2025, over 75% of the global workforce will be made up of millennials who expect more from a career than ever before. forget work-life balance, we demand a work-life blend, more flexibility, better variety and faster progression. In summary, we want a custom-made career.

Organisational change is not an option

The changing world of work is not an oncoming threat to organisations; it’s already here. In fact, a recent study reports that 84% of male executives said that they would trade career responsibilities and further progression to have more family time. They’re saying, I want it all, I want to progress, I want more money but I also want more time for my family.

For years we’ve been accustomed to climbing the career ladder. We ‘pay our dues’ at the start of our careers with long hours, average pay for the prospect of a corner office, fancy title and a company pension in 40 years’ time. Today’s workforce is different, we’re bored with ladders; we want a climbing wall to play on instead. We want more time for personal pursuits, We want more time to give back to our communities, we want work to have a sense of meaning and we want to do a variety of things on a daily basis not just follow the predictable path in front of us.

From career ladders to career walls

So how can we change careers when the system is so rigid? One of the main enablers in career customisation has been the introduction of collaboration software in the workplace. Inter-company messaging systems such as Slack, Skype, Yammer and Flow have given employees a voice to get involved in new projects. Good ideas once either lost in a corporate hierarchy or silenced for fear of credit being stolen can now rise to the top.

A friend of mine Sophie, started her career in sales but had a strong personal interest and passion for sustainability. She followed her company’s ‘sustainability channel’ on their internal chat system, which enabled her to explore what projects they were working on, demonstrate her passion through commenting and offering to help out on projects. Recently she made a complete career transition into a sustainability role internally. Collaboration tools like these are powerful enablers to get noticed as a superstar in order to facilitate a career shift. We’re not just bored of climbing the ladder, in Sophie’s case; she’s creating her own ladder, she’s writing her own rules.

The emergence of Modular work

We change jobs to learn new skills and develop ourselves in ways we believe our present company cannot. Why not allow employees to do that within your organisation rather than letting good people leave? By allowing employees to pick and choose the projects they want to be a part of, the organisations that are able to customise their employees’ careers are the ones who will thrive in the new environment.

This type of modular work is present in Valve, a $multi-billion US gaming company. Their employees are free to move around and work on company projects of their choosing. They operate a structure without managers; no one is there to tell them what to do or what to work on. Employees are not hired to fulfill a list of fixed duties on a job description; they are hired to find things to do that add value to the company’s objectives. To many this sounds like work utopia, but perhaps unsurprisingly, because most of us are conditioned to take direction and seek external approval from an early age, both through our education system and parenting, lots of people really don’t fit in at Valve.

Avoiding toxic cultures

In fact most companies historically embody the opposite of the freedom and flexibility demonstrated by innovative companies like Valve. Most companies typically create competitive work environments where sharing is rarely rewarded, if you share an idea; we fear someone else will take credit. Systems like ‘stack ranking’, where the worst performers are fired each year, forces employees to battle each other, where good workers don’t want to be associated with lower ranked colleagues. Companies that have adopted stack ranking include General Electric, Enron (need we say more) Yahoo (who have recently adopted it) and Microsoft (who have recently abandoned it). All this has helped to create a toxic culture of fear and back-stabbing in many corporate workplaces. When we’ve created a world where most employees have no trust in the company that employs them, it’s no wonder new employees at Valve have trouble fitting in!

Sharing as a competitive advantage?

But the new workforce is different. Today we share a lot! Social media has changed our behaviour. Sharing may or may not yet be touted as a competitive advantage in business, but the benefits to an organisation to adopt a culture of career customisation are multi-dimensional. It clearly helps with retention and loyalty, it helps with satisfaction, which helps with productivity. It also helps attract talent because it’s a more adaptive model and it’s a more progressive workplace. If you take a look at what mass product customisation delivered for consumer products, it was increased customer loyalty, it was decreased cost, and it was increased profitability. I hope it can be the same when it comes to mass career customisation, but whether it does or it doesn’t is almost irrelevant, it’s already upon us and companies need to adapt quickly to the changing world of work.

Originally published at blog.talentrocket.co.uk on May 8, 2015.