Resume Digest Blog

Do you go to work in order to survive and pay off the bills or because you are fulfilled in your vocation? For many, job satisfaction has gone out the window but there is a sense where you get the job that you deserve. Let me explain.

As labour inevitably becomes a commodity you have two choices: you can become a bureaucrat who enforces the rules or you can be an artist who is creative at solving problems.

There is enormous pressure from the corporate mindset to avoid risks and tow the party line. The rule book has been refined to perfection and you have heard it said: "We have always done it like this before. Our methods have served us well all this time. Don't try to fix something that's not broken..."

An artist on the other hand doesn't mind rocking the boat for a good outcome. It is someone who believes in what they do and find satisfaction and fulfilment by going the extra mile. They like not just to do their work but to do it well and in an elegant way. They are experts at problem solving - the sort of problems that the rule book never thought of... They are the guys who don't mind breaking a few eggs to make an omelette. If everybody else has become a cog they are the ones who know where lubrication is badly needed.

If you are the boss of an artist in your organisation you can become jealous or you can see the benefit of a subordinate that makes your department look good.

Artists are those who can see over the business horizon and are prepared to try several things just in case one idea might work.

Bureaucrats will enforce the status-quo and spread rumours to stifle any creative attempt at making the corporate machine more adaptable in its environment. They have zero imagination, cannot handle risk but can only repeat what they have been trained to do all along.

In a start-up everybody is an artist. In a large conglomerate the majority are bureaucrats obeying the rules while a handful of artists are kept out of sight for their own protection. They come up with solutions that only someone on the shop floor with a different mindset could dream of.

If deep down you know that you are the artist-type you will have a hard time during the recruitment process. People will love to hear of your achievements but they will screen out anybody who doesn't fit the corporate mould.

What once happened to blue collar jobs is now happening to white collar jobs: The Commodification of the labour market.

By hiring drones who follow instructions factory owners can drive their labour costs to a bare minimum. We have seen so many manufacturing jobs fly overseas and we are delighted to import from these people what we used to produce ourselves. Some people call it progress. Progress for who?

Here comes the call-centre. An entire office floor of cubicles with in each a computer screen to read the script to the customer, a telephone headset to yap all day to strangers you never get to see and a mirror to remind you to keep smiling...

Yes - wake-up to it office jobs are now a commodity. There will always be someone else to take your place and undercut your pay.

By providing a script, a rule book, a procedures manual (whatever you want to call it) bosses are declaring that you are not allowed to think for yourself. You are not expected to show initiative or demonstrate problem solving skills - all you are expected to do is turn up on time and stay there for the duration of a day's work.

You have become a cog in somebody else's marketing machine. Everything that could be tried has been tried. Outbound automated telemarketing messages were the ire of homeowners who got interrupted at meal time by obnoxious appeals.

Failing that, we had the craze of calls from India to induce us to take up a new credit card or swap our telephone plan.

In the face of all this, it seems that average jobs are disappearing fast. You can either get undercut by a plethora of cheap labour eager to take your place. Or you can make yourself indispensable by providing initiative in a workplace where they didn't get around putting everything in the rule book yet. (They might actually ask you to pour all your knowledge into the rule book and then turn around and make you redundant...)

You think this is too far fetched? I worked in the IT industry as a contractor and the Indian effect was astounding in cutting down our hourly rates. The permanent staffers had a unique technique to hang on to their jobs: procrastination by obstruction. Under the cover of security of information they erected barrier after barrier of passwords and network access so that newcomers could waste an entire day's work by simply being unable to get to the data they needed to perform their task.