The crisis, some experts say, is also reviving the concept of human capital: Adam Smith’s notion of the inherent value of the education, training and experience we each acquire over a working life. But that capital is no longer constituted simply of its traditional components — a good school, a good degree, many years of experience in a particular field.
“What employers want from their work-force now,” said Angela Carter of Sheffield University’s Institute of Work Psychology, “is employability and skills. Work is becoming more complex.”
So the employees who will survive the current recession best, Carter believes, are those who succeed in escaping what she calls the “occupational work silo”: people who think in terms of what they can do across an organization, rather than what they have done in their job to date.
“We’re in a really interesting power balance at the moment,” she said. “Employers want more for less, and employees want more control. It’s all about you as a worker taking control; if you’ve got what an organization wants, you can find yourself in a very good position.”
A recession-appropriate CV, Carter says, should not be a bald list of qualifications and experiences, but “all about your skills. It should be: ‘This is what I can do, I solved this problem last year’, not, ‘I’ve got this qualification and I’ve been with that company for 15 years.’ If you’re an extraordinary communicator, a manager who can talk both to the board and to your team, that’s what people want to know.”
Carter, who was made redundant from the UK health service in 1993, suggests the ideal working pattern to see off the recession is, in theory at least, to avoid having all your eggs in one work basket by becoming what she calls a “portfolio worker,” so that no one employer has the power to put you on the dole.
“Although that’s not for everyone,” she said. “It all depends on your stability needs: some people need stability a lot more than others, and will seek it where they can find it.”
Whatever our response at work to the deepening recession, it is still true to say that many of us are better placed to deal with its consequences than our counterparts of 20 or more years ago.
According to Peter Totterdell of the Institute of Work Psychology in Sheffield, northern England, “People have less expectation of lifelong employment from a single organization than two decades ago, and may be more used to crafting their own career paths by jumping between employers. New technology also means that people have more tools at their disposal for examining alternative paths, for making new contacts.”
If you are lucky enough to be wondering what your job really means to you these days, however, it’s probably best, given the choice, not to try finding out just now.
For those made redundant in a recession, Totterdell concludes, the problems are “just the same as those identified a couple of decades ago: loss of daily structure, loss of purpose, loss of important relationships. For many, unemployment will be a very new experience. They will not have the necessary networks to help them navigate it.”
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