What Color Is Your Parachute 2018 by Richard N. Bolles copy

independent contractors or as temp workers, and this figure is predicted to
rise to 50% during the next six years. Employers in the IT industry, in
particular, are increasingly hiring someone just until a project is
completed, rather than permanently hiring that person. Even in industries
where people are hired allegedly for longer periods, employers are much
more ready to cut the size of their workforce just as soon as things start to
even begin to look bad. You thought you were being hired for a number of
years, they said that, they meant that, but then fortunes change and
suddenly you’re back out on the street, job-hunting once again.
4. The Way Jobs Are Done Is Changing Dramatically
“Almost two-thirds of American households earn less money today than
they did in 2002.” That was the scary opening to an article in the
Washington Post on March 6, 2015. 6 You want the worst-paying jobs
these days? Oh, there are lots of lists. They include such jobs as food
service workers, farm workers, cashiers, maids and housekeepers, nannies
and child-care workers, nursing home and psychiatric ward workers,
textile and laundry workers, parking lot attendants, etc.
Let’s dig deeper. Economists say that a decent middle-class job these
days should be a stable, dependable job that pays between $40,000 and
$80,000, annually. The jobs that used to pay that were manufacturing jobs.
Now the fields that do are: finance (as in Wall Street), corporate jobs,
sales, and above all else, healthcare. (It is expected the health sector will
offer 21.8 million jobs by 2024. Why? Well, one reason is: more and more
people are living longer and dealing with the maladies of aging.)
Of greater importance is not that certain jobs are vanishing, while some
jobs are flourishing, but that all jobs are being reimagined. The ability of
each of us to survive in this new world depends on our understanding how
the world, especially the world of work, is being reimagined. Things that
never used to be connected are increasingly being reimagined as
connected. This reimagining of our world as hyperconnected is not going
to be implemented…some day, down the road. It is being implemented
now. In fact, this has given rise to a whole new field called “The Internet
of Things” or IoT for short—a term first coined in 1999 by Kevin Ashton.
To quote one expert, the premise of The Internet of Things is that “all
things, including every physical object, can be connected—making those
objects intelligent, programmable and capable of interacting with