Careers are shortening and lives are lengthening, how can we keep our careers going as long as we do?

"Career Crunch"...the 25 year career vs. the 100-year life, why is your career reaching an impasse just when you feel at the top of your game? How can you be on your way out, when you're still on your way up?

"Even before the Credit Crunch began in 2007, professionals in their mid-late forties were leaving their jobs and setting up as consultants, interims or non-executive directors.

It is the first time I have done a ‘blog’ book review, most of you will receive our monthly book reviews, but I considered this a very timely book, I spend my life talking to clients and candidates, so have a pretty good appreciation of the Interim and Permanent job market and I consider Helen Hallpike a successful business woman who co-founded a travel dot. com and sold the first laptops in the UK, apart from having extensive experience in technology led change, has really hit the nail on the head with this book. I have used some of her text in summary and her web site link is below.

Helen states that, far from successfully pursuing two, three or more sequential careers in one working life, or happily choosing to downscale to a less demanding ‘portfolio career’, as management theory has suggested, in reality the redundant professional cobbles together a role as the ‘odd-job-man’ of the white-collar workforce, constantly pitching for temporary assignments with companies which need experienced experts, but no longer want them permanently on their books. New laws to encourage even longer working lives are up against the new phenomenon of the twenty-five year career.

Across the globe, even in centrally-planned economies such as China, fit and healthy workers in their forties are being unceremoniously booted out by their employers. Commercial and demographic needs are pulling in different directions. In the workplace, specialist training, mostly of younger employees, is displacing generalist experience as the primary qualification for career advancement, and traditional management roles are becoming redundant as corporate hierarchies are flattened and streamlined by a combination of technological advances and global competition. Meanwhile, the workforce is propelled by two powerful demographic trends: firstly, increasing longevity, with older people increasingly able, and needing, to work; and secondly, a bulge of aspirational baby-boomers trying to squeeze into the remaining middle-management positions.

This book is written for businesspeople that are skilled, hard-working and adaptable, and need to earn a regular salary beyond the age of forty. In a global market of decreasing product and industry life cycles, and increasing sources of competition, this book takes a wry, detached look at the global business and demographic forces driving our emerging career patterns, with some pragmatic suggestions for what to do about it.

John Maynard Keynes famously joked about the division in Economics between the long term and the short term: “In the long term, we’re all dead”. The big problem today is - we’re not.

So will your career come to a halt before you do? Read on ...."

Are you an Over-Priced Pete or Jane?

Check him and her out, along with other career-changing concepts:

"Career Crunch!" is a book stuffed with new ideas. Our lives are getting longer, but our careers are getting shorter, and with over 10,000 centenarians already living in the UK today, we are starting to look for ways to extend our working lives and pay our pensions. Illustrated with graphs, diagrams and cartoons, the text uses comparisons from history and quotations from the latest research to analyse how demographic changes are combining with commercial factors to put managers increasingly at risk from redundancy, just when they feel at the top of their game.

This book exposes the ‘Employee life cycle’, which employers assume but never acknowledge. It introduces the ‘Value Gap’ between our salaries, which rise over time, and our employer's estimate of our worth, which does not.

The epitome of this problem is ‘Over-Priced Pete and Jane’, a rather expensive manager who has lost many of his/her hands-on skills and is unwittingly heading for redundancy. And individual career life cycles in an international business context, as entire industries rise, peak and fall in the ruthless global market-place.

We'd like to live longer ourselves, but what about our attitudes to other people’s new longer lives?

They mean dwindling pensions and a growing burden on the young. But the facts and figures are not So, what now? The candidate market falls into two camps currently, those who are innovative and constructive and strive to work in partnership with providers and recruitment intermediaries and those who are inflexible, 'moany and whingy,' blaming everyone but themselves and think the world owes them a living, also being inflexible on day rates/remuneration, not helpful in these times. We all need to draw a line. It's not where you started; it's where you are going that matters! Seize those pivotal moments. There has never been a better time-life's for living to the full and everything is to play for in the New World.

But you could buy the book and decide for yourself?

www.career-crunch.com

www.amazon.co.uk and www.amazon.com

ISBN 978-1-4457-6176-3