A common stressor facing many workers today is the security of their jobs. A basic strategy for reducing your stress about job security is to distinguish yourself from the pack, making preparations for that day when you’re not employed by others. In his book, Job Shift, William Bridges discusses one of the curious realities of our time. He says, “What is disappearing today is not just a certain number of jobs or jobs in certain industries or in one country – or even jobs in the developed world as a whole. What is disappearing is the very thing itself: the job.”

In The End of Work, author Jeremy Rifkin observes that global unemployment is at the highest level since the Great Depression. Worldwide, more than 800 million people are unemployed or underemployed. “Millions of new entrants into the workforce will also find themselves without jobs, many of them victims of a high-technology revolution that is replacing human beings with machines in virtually every industry.”

Bridges argues that the job is a social artifact. It’s so “deeply embedded in our consciousness that most of us have forgotten it’s artificiality or the fact that most societies since the beginning of time have done fine without jobs.” What he’s saying is that the notion of growing up, going to college and getting a job has largely been a temporary phenomenon in a rather fleeting era. Jobs are not part of nature. He makes a distinction which is rather fascinating. In the world before the 19th century, Bridges says, “People did not have jobs; they did jobs.”

If sometime in the future you do not have a “job,” what will your options be? Obviously, you can start your own business. You can become a consultant, in some cases a consultant back to the organization that previously employed you, or to similar organizations. Begin to acquire an awareness of what you’ll need to do to prosper in an era in which a job may no longer be an option.

What steps might be involved to accommodate such a future scenario?

• Perhaps you need to set up some space in a corner of your home as a rudimentary home office.
• Perhaps you need to take a course on marketing, finance, record keeping, or entrepreneurism.
• Certainly, at the top of your list would be talking to others who have gone the “self-employment” route to see how they generate income and integrate the job with what they do with the rest of their life.

Bridges says that more and more people are working within organizations as full-time employees, but under arrangements “too fluid and idiosyncratic to be called jobs.” He interviewed Teresa Stowell, a software design engineer at Microsoft. “You won’t last long at Microsoft if you’re job is just a job,” she noted. People at Microsoft work at any time and all the time, with no one keeping track of their hours but everyone watching their output.

Workers are not accountable to conventional managers, but rather to project teams. A person might be a member of one or more project teams. These teams, in turn, are subsets of larger groups. Individuals within each team are always given a bit more challenge than they can accomplish on their own, and hence constant collaboration is the rule of the day.

In Bridges’ study of American corporations, he found that organizations already know that the old rules are gone, but are loath to be forthright in disseminating the new ways of working that are coming into focus. Here are the rules, as he sees them:

The Unspoken Rules of Employment Today

• Everyone is a contingent worker, not only the part-time and contract workers. Everyone’s employment is contingent on the results that the organization can achieve.
• Workers need to regard themselves as people whose value to the organization has to be demonstrated in each successive situation in which they’re engaged.
• Workers need to develop an approach to their work and a way of managing their own careers that is more like that of an external supplier than a traditional employee.
• The wise company will work with these new style workers collaboratively to make the relationship as mutually beneficial as possible.
• Workers have to act like people in business for themselves (this strikes me as the key to the whole arrangement) by maintaining a plan for long-term career development, and taking responsibility for health insurance, retirement funds, and negotiating compensation arrangements.
• Workers have to be able to switch their focus rapidly from one task to another, to work with people of different training and different mind sets.
• Workers need to be ready to shift from project to project, and perhaps from organization to organization.

These unwritten, emerging “rules” in themselves may be a little stressful, but as I stated at the outset, you’re far better off firmly rooting yourself in the reality of what you’re up against, than pretending that this isn’t occurring. Some career professionals only understand these dynamics once they leave their present situation. The problem is acute the longer they’ve been at their present employment, as they have never had to confront the new reality.

If you find yourself in a new employment situation, take heart. As you develop a particular expertise, and your previous organization or others begin to rely on your capabilities, you can charge a premium per hour for your services. You may end up making more than you did, working less. Perhaps not.

The ability to structure your life in more supportive, balanced ways, however, means you’ll be able to earn an income, and have a life. And that’s a lot more than what tens of millions of people are experiencing crawling along superhighways every morning on their way into the big city.

Armed with your computer, copier, printer, scanner, and on-line services you may well be able to carve out a niche for yourself, the kind that you’ve always wanted. You can reduce your commuting time down to nothing, maintain a decent income, and have a life.