For my whole working life I thought that a full-time job was the highest point on the career pinnacle. Not any full-time job would qualify, of course -- it had to be something fun and responsible, where I would work among smart people and get paid well. When I started working thirty years ago, it was easier than it is now to reach that pinnacle. Now it's much harder, but in the meantime something even more important has changed.
Full-time employment in a responsible and high-paying position is not only harder to attain now than it was a few decades ago. A full-time position with one employer is also out of step with the way the work world is moving. All of us will change jobs during our careers, and some of us will change jobs many times.
In the new-millennium workplace, saying "I've worked for my employer for twenty years!" is not only an anomaly, it's close to a black mark on your resume.
When we stick around at one workplace for years, our muscles don't grow as fast, if they grow at all. We aren't confronted with the realities of the labor market in the same way we'll be if we are out in it, looking for work more often.
Full-time employment sounds like a warm bath, but it can actually be bad for your career. Here are five of the ways full-time employment can hurt you.
When you consult, contract or otherwise scramble for work, you stay very close to your clients' needs. In that talent ecosystem you learn what's keeping people up at night and what it's worth to them to make their problems go away.
When you work for a salary, you may be far removed from the clients whose needs fund your work.
You may perform tasks and work on projects that have no economic value at all, because those things happen in large organizations where fear is a major factor. As a career coach I've heard dozens of job-seekers say "Why was my project important to the company, you ask? You got me. I have no idea. My VP wanted it done, that's all I know."
You can't take that story, "I don't know why the project was important" and sell it to your next employer. They need to know why everything you've done in your career was worth doing and made somebody else money. If you can't make that direct connection for them, your resume loses value instantly.
That's why removal from the moshpit of buying and selling services is the first item on our list -- the biggest way that full-time employment can hurt you.
If you want to work full-time for one employer, you have to take steps to counteract that effect, and be able to answer these questions at any moment:
- Why does your employer pay you what they do to perform the work you do? ("Because that's their pay scale" is the wrong answer!)
- Where is your marketplace for your skills heading? What are clients and employers needing less of over time, and what are they needing more of?
- Apart from completing the work your manager assigns you, what can you to do grow your flame and become more competitive in the talent marketplace?
The second way full-time employment can hurt you is that your resume becomes stagnant when you do the same work for years. You don't have as many Dragon-Slaying Stories to tell as other people do - people who have varied their work and solved more problems than you have. It would make sense to prefer a steady full-time gig over short-term engagements if you knew you'd never have to look for work again.
It doesn't work that way. Unless you are working as a member of the Swiss Guard at the Vatican right now or are already over seventy, I can virtually guarantee that you'll be job-hunting again at some point. That future job search is more important to you economically than the raise you'll receive at your performance review this year.
So why is all your focus on the short-term raise instead of running your own career? The second way full-time work can hurt you is that when you stick with one employer, your Pain-Spotting and job-search muscles go flabby. That hurts you tremendously when you find yourself out in the talent marketplace the next time.
If you consult alongside your full-time job or your job search, your muscles will get stronger all the time. You'll start conversations about pain and pain relief naturally, the way consultants and entrepreneurs so. If you're working full-time right now, get a consulting business card and start your consulting practice in 2015! Your mojo will grow and you'll make more money.
If your employer has a no-moonlighting policy that would keep you from becoming a part-time consultant, they are slime people who don't deserve you. What human leadership team would ever want to keep their employees from getting a peek at the outside world? If you can't make a buck on the side, you might as well work in the company town and live in company housing the way workers did a hundred years ago. Leave those people behind in 2015!
The third way full-time employment can harm you is that as a full-time employee, your brain chemistry changes. You focus all of your attention on your current boss's needs and whims. That's not healthy. Your boss may be a mentor and a coach, or a person you couldn't learn anything from. I don't know your boss. He or she may be a visionary or a dolt.
As full-time employees we tend to tune out signals from the universe that would send us packing if our senses weren't dulled. We can waste years working in places where our flame could never grow. We tell ourselves "Well, at least it's a job" and go completely to sleep on our own careers -- which is to say, our own lives. What a tragedy!
The fourth way full-time employment can be damaging to your career is that in a full-time job (and lots of part-time jobs, too) we work inside a box. We have a job description. We stay inside that frame. We don't ask questions about other people's duties. We don't get altitude and look beyond our own cubicle. Everything that millions of years of human evolution gives us - instinct, pluck, curiosity and a desire to solve problems - goes out the window.
We delude ourselves that what happens beyond our cubicle walls doesn't matter.
Would you let your boss come over to your house and tear down the drywall you installed, and the new roof tiles you put in? Of course not! So why would you let your boss weaken and degrade your strategic abilities by allowing him or her to limit the things you think about and attend to? You wouldn't, if you're taking a long-term view.
The last way full-time employment hurts you is that it gives you a picture of yourself that isn't complete. We fall into the trap of believing that because our business card says "Inventory Analyst," therefore we are inventory analysts. We limit ourselves by doing that. We believe that we are whatever our boss tells us we are.
Your job title is a tiny slice of who you are. You won't find your path and your passion in this life by doing your job brilliantly -- there isn't enough challenge or creative force available there. You have to go outside to find it. You have to find your power source and plug into it.
You can keep your full-time job as long as you remember that you are so much more than whatever your business card says. Your boss is one person among seven billion on the planet, and not an important person in your life unless you decide that s/he rules your destiny. What a horrible decision that would be!
