Creating the Work You Love: A Guide to Finding Your Right Livelihood. Elaine JD Voci

reevaluate what we need to succeed and survive. What looks like chaos in the marketplace can actually be a good thing for your growth and reinvention of self if you are open to learning and willing to take responsibility for your own destiny.

      Resources :

      Visit www.glassdoor.com a website launched in 2008 that covers more than 120,000 companies worldwide and lets employees (anonymously) share valuable corporate cultural information about their organizations, including salary levels and details about the interview process job seekers are likely to encounter.

      Read The Shift: The Future of Work is Already Here by Lynda Gratton of the London Business School. She urges workers to keep upgrading skills and continually gain new expertise, a process she calls “serial mastery” in order to keep jumping from job to job in the future and taking responsibility for their own career progression.

      Read The Power of Pull by John Hagel and John Seely Brown to better understand how successful workers of the future will rely on peers for fresh new thinking, and for a sense of community.

      Essay, Chapter One: Education and Innovation

      “The world no longer cares about what you know; the world only cares about what you can do with what you know.”

      Tony Wagner,

      “Creating Innovators: The Making of

      Young People Who Will Change the World”

      Of all the things you can do to prepare for creating the work you love, one of the most basic is to be sure you have the amount and type of education you will need to compete and succeed. Employers across the United States will tell you that they have all kinds of jobs that require the same four things: knowledge of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). This is one reason why we have three million jobs open at any given time but around 8 percent unemployment!

      We are going through a perfect storm with a recession that has caused a sharp increase in unemployment and what writer Tom Friedman calls “A Great Inflection” – the merger of the information technology revolution with globalization. The combination of these forces has eliminated many good paying middle-skilled jobs and replaced them with decent wage high-skilled jobs. Each of these high-skilled jobs requires more skills and education and many of us are simply not ready.

      We have an ongoing cyclical unemployment problem in our country. It is being matched by a financial crisis, continued housing market problems, cutbacks by state and local governments, and inadequate fiscal stimulus efforts that many economists believe were short circuited and didn’t go far enough. We need a “race to the top” to incentivize businesses to embed workers in colleges and universities to teach, and universities to embed professors inside businesses to learn – so we can achieve a better match between schooling and job markets. We need to understand the upcoming Millennials better because they are the future workers of the world, and what motivates them, the values they hold and the work ethic they have – it all matters.

      One author (Tony Wagner in Creating Innovators) has identified seven skills needed for the future:

      1.Critical thinking and problem-solving; perseverance

      2.Collaboration across cultures and leading by influence

      3.Agility and adaptability; the willingness to take calculated risks, and to tolerate failures; a bias toward action to solve a problem rather than wait for someone else to step forward

      4.Initiative and entrepreneurial traits of self-determination, creativity and collaboration

      5.Access to and analysis of information; integrative thinking

      6.Effective oral and written communication

      7.Curiosity and imagination; asking good questions and a desire to better understand

      It is beyond the scope of this book to define how best to acquire and develop these skills; but there are some amazing books available to help you formulate a plan of action:

      That Used to Be Us: How American Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back, by Tom Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum

      Code Name Ginger: The Story Behind Segway and Dean Kamon’s Quest to Invent a New World by Steve Kemper

      Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change the World by Tony Wagner