21/09/2013 – Home Work – Githendra Weerasinghe

Question 1 –

How does 20th century trends/changes effect careers?

Careers change over time, the trends and characteristic of a certain career during the 19th century would be completely different to the same careers characteristic in the 20th century. This is because careers just like life forms evolve through time. Be it new programs or systems being introduced or automation of certain aspects of a career. Careers are constantly changing to improve and to become more efficient over time, so that the least and easiest amount of work can be put in to obtain a certain outcome. Human beings are finding better and more efficient ways to make their work easier and to obtain the best results out of the least amount of work needed. Therefore certain trends or changes have affected careers in the 20th century. Some of these trends and the effects on careers are listed below.

Welfare state, and many countries adopting full employment policies – With this change in policy employees were given full time employment and majority of the people were able to have a secure and stable job. This provided families with stable incomes and most people were able to plan ahead knowing that they had a secure job and could rely on that job for providing them with a regular income.

Organisations and companies becoming larger and more prominent as a known entity – This boom in the size of certain companies and the fact that these companies were going to be in existence for decades increased the number of loyalty based careers. An individual who worked for a certain company for years were able to gradually advance their careers in these companies and were able to secure promotions and loyalty based perks while working for that company or organisation.

The economic state of a country becoming more market-oriented – This change started to cause fluctuations in the employment rate and the economic sate of a country. Higher unemployment rates were seen, and careers became more reliant on the economic cycle. If the country was under a good economic period more jobs with better pay were seen but if the economic state was bad more jobs were lost and people had to choose careers with less pay.

Organisations started to restructure to be able to be more efficient and work at low-cost – This meant that there were more layoffs and unanticipated transfers as factories became automated and jobs were being taken over by computers and robots. This gave rice to career destabilization.

As society aged – greater the longevity of careers – With the dawn of the 20th century people kept working past the age of 65 as they had no choice with the failing economy and greater expenditure and costs on families. Parents had to keep working past the expected age of retirement as they had to keep supporting their families.

Emancipation of women into the work force and households obtaining two incomes – This was an immense change in the nature of careers and the history of careers. With the addition of women into the work force there was a larger labour pool and the traditional all male occupations were minor. This meant that families could be more secure with their income as they were able to rake in two incomes rather than the traditional single income.

How have these affected the nature of careers?

Careers are constantly evolving as I have mentioned earlier. The nature of careers has drastically changed with time. Efficiency became the most important factor for organisations, companies and businesses. Technological advancements have replaced many jobs and some jobs such as barrel making have disappeared. Gender segregation was also a defining factor with men securing the more responsible and physically hard jobs while women were better suited for easier jobs such as sewing and light labour work in factories. At one stage full employment and loyalty based jobs made families more stable and provided them with a steady income and with education becoming universal and a necessity more intelligent and skilled individuals were sort out. But this was only short lived as companies realised that minimizing long term labour costs would not only protect them but also make them more efficient. Therefore companies started to higher contractors and temporary work was more sort after. This meant that careers had to become more specialised and better skilled individuals were needed. Globalisation also played a big part in changing the nature of careers as more and more companies started to outsource work to other countries and regions. This was due to the fact that these companies could obtain the same quality and amount of work from employees from other places for a lot less expenditure and costs. For example call centres were largely outsourced to India as companies got the same quality of call operators for a fraction of the costs. Therefore as explained the nature of careers changed drastically over the 20th century period due to these many factors.