Thanks for the feedback on last week’s post. It meant the world to me. This week I give you the basic history of the J.O.B. to provide some context for how the concept of how we work is never stagnant.

How work became a job

We all need to earn a living to support ourselves. That's the first reason for work. The more aspirational reason is to make a difference in the world. To have a purpose. To achieve a goal, a title, a standing in society. Jobs are often our identity. When you meet someone new, an early question is who are you and what do you do? In other words, what's your job?

Did you know that the concept of a job is relatively new? It started with the Industrial Revolution when people were needed to work in factories. People worked 10 - 16 hour days to keep them running around the clock. Before that, work was passed down and job 'openings' created when tradespeople didn't have kids to pass their work on to.

Child labor was dominant as kids could fit in places that adults couldn't. And they couldn't organize into unions or fight for protections. In 1900 18% of American workers were under 16 years old.

While it's not precisely known when the notion of a job was created, Max Weber, a German sociologist credited with influencing modern Western society, defined the basic characteristics including defined responsibilities and division of labor.

Sergio Caredda, on how work became a job writes:

“1. The worker did not own the tools to perform their work anymore. These now belonged to the entrepreneur. It was a novelty, which developed in parallel with the new meanings that private property was taking across the economic and social discourses.

2. The worker did not own the result of their work, because, through a process fragmentation, he would only see a portion of the process, and not the end results.

3. The worker would apply external instructions and learn a process, not apply their Mastery. The reductionist approach moved away from a holistic competence approach and delved into the idea of solely developing specific atomic skills. As such, the worker would also not own their competence anymore.”

Henry Ford is often credited with the creation of the 40 hour work week and 8 hour work day although it came out of the labor movement in 1842 by Boston ship carpenters.

Henry's premise is that people should have free time to become consumers which would then spur economic growth:

"Leisure is an indispensable ingredient in a growing consumer market because working people need to have enough free time to find uses for consumer products, including automobiles."

Believe or not, hunter and gatherers worked much less than us as it was all about sustenance (Not that I relish the thought of being a hunter and gatherer and have serious FOMO over missing out on the Kardashians).

So you have Henry to blame for Black Friday sales. Okay, that might be a stretch. And if not Henry, someone else would have sparked consumerism, but you get the gist.

It wasn't until 1938 with the Fair Labor Standards Act when the minimum wage was established, child labor banned and overtime required beyond 40 hours. Massachusetts initiated the first minimum wage in 1912.

Sergio continues later on how with the concept of the job we got the concept of being employed and unemployed. This had impacts on society:

“Education Systems have been carefully designed to develop adequate amounts of workers, split by speciality, through carefully engineered processes built on the assumption of matching personal traits and capabilities to needed skills and experiences. Creativity and self-expression have become an exception. If you think this is a residual of some decades ago, think about the narrative of focusing on STEM studies.

Social Welfare has been designed to protect the unemployed and bring them to any work as quickly as possible. Not only, but this discourse has also created a narrative whereby you get instructed, you work, you contribute to the society, and you then get time off paid by the state through a retirement system.

Everything gets consumerized because consumers are the driving force behind the economic engine that keeps all of this afloat.”

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The job interview turns 100 in '21

In 1917, Robert Woodworth developed the first personality test for PTSD during World War 1. It has since been the basis for those used in the workplace.

Our dear friend Thomas Edison, king of the lightbulb moments, created the first job interview with a written test to evaluate candidates in 1921. So that's 100 years of job interviews!

Now consider how jobs have evolved since then. After World War 2 it was common to work at a company for your career and leave with the coveted gold watch.

The 80s sparked the leveraged buyouts, outsourcing and a drive for efficiency leading to the insecurity we have today. Yet there's also the notion that a lot of our jobs are bureaucratic bullshit created to give reason for managers to manage and people to have money to spend on things and stuff.

Many jobs may feel like one is just a cog in a wheel, not sure whether the work is making a meaningful contribution. Years ago when I was an Art Director at Warn Industries, a manufacturer of off road accessories, I recall walking on the factory floor and watching the repetitive processes in manufacturing hubs that definitely looked strikingly cog like. Yet it was a vital function for the company.

Not having a purpose or feeling like your work has any impact is demoralizing. Few of us just want to work for the weekend. I sure don't. Don't get me wrong, I relish my weekends and time off, but that doesn't mean I don't want to work. And I suspect most people want to as well. We just like to complain about work because there is so much bureaucracy, politics and indecision in typical corporate life. You'll find very few giraffes at the office if you know what I mean.

While the 'job' as we know it has been around for little more than 150 years or so, it's easy to assume that's how things always are and will be. Consider how much as changed in the last 30 years since the Internet hit hyperdrive.

While it's true that robots and software have replaced many of the jobs of yore. And continue to encroach now on white collar territory, there are still very human and complex skills technology has yet to replace. One area is customization and Mercedes is replacing some robots with humans because customization, in high demand, is more cost effective with real people than real bots according to a report on job evolution by Deloitte.

Aside from new jobs that didn't exist 10 years ago, technology has broken the constraints on how and when we work. Until the pandemic, it may not have been so obvious. Now you have the gig economy and freelancing (which clearly has its downside with a lack of benefits and social safety nets here in the U.S.). There's crowdsourcing, digital nomads and gamification of work in tech enabled by platforms that allow you to market your services easier than ever. On the flip side, there's more competition than ever and thus intense downward price pressure to the detriment of those that live in more expensive cities.

A company has many more options for filling positions with an ability to mix and match based on demand, no longer tethered to geography. This means they can maximize their efficiencies further by sourcing freelancers or reducing benefit costs. The obvious downside is the individual employee has even less security than before. We have yet to experience the impacts of AI.

Alluring as this flexibility is, companies now need to manage timezone variances and find that working with people not emotionally invested in their company can make it harder to grow. There is still no substitute for working or meeting face to face. At least I haven't seen it.

While job security is non existent, as I shared last week, you have total power to invest in yourself. No matter what a company says - or you say - all of us have an agenda and self interests we need to protect.

As an individual you can work:

• full time for a company
• full time and hustle on the side
• part time for a company and part time in side hustles
• self employed in your own business selling products and/or services
• freelance and contract
• through crowdsourcing
• as an entrepreneur (the tools of titans are accessible to you now)

Employment is more of a two-way street now than it was in the past. The gatekeepers, while ever present and using technology to screen most out of their system, you have more control over how you earn than ever before. The catch is that you have to be more intentional than ever in order to realize your potential.

To keep ahead of technology making your job obsolete, you need to embrace lifelong learning and reinvention. Not just because jobs are changing faster, but longer lifespans are extending our working lives. https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/focus/technology-and-the-future-of-work/evolution-of-work-seven-new-realities.html

According to Ellen Ruppel Shell, our productivity has increased nearly six times faster than our wages.

Key skills you can’t go wrong to focus on include:

• Emotional Intelligence and communication skills
• Critical thinking
• Mental elasticity
• Creativity and Art

And of course, stay current with technology trends - you may not need to be bleeding edge, but you need to stay up on the tools of business.

A glaring example of this was a former VP who had an assistant most of his career was laid off. But still needed to work. In 2005 we needed someone do do some database updates in Excel and he came from a temp agency. He didn't know how to open up Word or Excel. Or find email on a computer. After three days we had to part ways.

Business Insider recently came out with their list of top 30 highest paying jobs of the future. The top five are:

1. Software developers and software quality assurance analysts and testers
2. Registered nurses
3. General and operations managers
4. Financial managers
5. Medical and health services managers

I was relieved to see marketing managers at 29 on the list ;)

Keep in mind, this is just a list of jobs. It’s generic and you need to dig deeper to find your jam. You need to meet at the corner of job and competence. Look for the opportunities between the opportunity.

Or as I heard Shaan Puri once put it, "when people are looking for gold, supply the shovels."