The Contingent Workforce

I came across an interesting quote that underscores my point in an earlier post about the need for people to be more proactive in managing their careers. The quote comes from a book entitled: Headhunters - Matchmaking in the Labor Market written by William Finlay & James Coverdill [two professors of Sociology at the University of Georgia]. The book itself is an academic study of the Executive Search industry. In the book the professors write, "A vice president for human resources at AT&T argued, as his company was preparing to lay off thousands of workers, that employees needed to abandon old-fashioned notions of job security: 'People need to look at themselves as self-employed, as vendors who come to this company to see their skills. In AT&T, we have to promote the whole concept of the workforce being contingent.' He went on to suggest that even the very concept of a 'job' was outdated and that employees needed to think of their careers in terms of 'projects' and 'fields of work', for the society was becoming one that was 'jobless but not workless'.
Sage advice indeed.