Documentum blogger Pie wrote a post entitled Documentum and ECM:A Career or a Job?,  which I found rather interesting. If he had written his entry in the 1970's, (when few, if any, of us were part of the workforce) I might have been in full agreement; but the world has changed quite a bit since then. The days when a single employer has a life-long or, even long-term, career to offer an individual are gone, gone, gone....

Why? Because the nature of business has changed. Employee payrolls are the major expense in a service economy and guess what happens when revenues fall? Jobs get cut in order to preserve a healthy bottom line. CEO's have to report to their shareholders.

Need an example? Talk to the folks who have been laid off from Wall Street- many of them got rave reviews and big bonuses just a few months before they were handed their pink slips; contrary to popular belief, it's not only the dead wood that gets cut. (And, in case you think that that ECM or Documentum workers are immune,  you're wrong, wrong, wrong.) If you think this happens only in the financial sector, you'd be wrong again. Consider the changing landscape in Life Sciences.

There are mergers and acquisitions to consider as well; when they occur, layoffs are nearly a given. Why? Because not only does 1+1 need to become greater than 2 when it comes to revenues; 1+1 needs to be less than 2 when it comes to costs. Efficiencies get developed and jobs get lost. Companies don't need two "A" players in the same slot; and, not only that, but politics play a huge role in deciding who stays and who goes.

Now, I don't mean to sound pessimistic about the employer/employee relationship because I am not. Employers add a great deal of value to their employees and employees return that value and then some. It's just that workers need to understand is the nature of At-will employment which in simple English says this: (I'm quoting myself from an article that ran in the NY Post in 2006):

"I (the company) use you (as long as I need you); and you (the employee) use me (as long as I pay you well, help you upgrade your portfolio of skills, and/or support your lifestyle choices). Either one of us can bail on the other, at any time, for any reason; and because we've stated it upfront there shouldn't be any hard feelings."

How is this different from being a contractor? In a client/contractor relationship it's presumed that ALL your customer cares about is what you can deliver, that it's a slam-bam-thank you ma'am sort of deal. That's why I think Pie called contracting a job. (But in my experience, this is rarely the case. The reason many companies hire contractors Vs. employees is budgeting. They'd like to hire an employee to do the job but the balance sheet won't allow for it; consultants/contractors are usually counted as expenses; employees are usually considered overhead.) 

That being said, maybe it's time to ask :What is a career anyway? Do employees have careers and contractors have jobs? I think not. I like Wikipedia's definition of career:

"A career is traditionally seen as a course of successive situations that make up a person's worklife."

In shorthand, a career is a series of jobs. Its building blocks can be a series of employee situations, contractor situations, or a combination of the two. There's no right or wrong way. The important thing is that you understand that the management of you career belongs to you and that it shouldn't be DEPENDENT on any specific employer OR technology.

If you'd like to know more about the topic, you can check out my article To Leave or Not to Leave in the NY Post; Cliff Hakim's book We Are All Self Employed, or Dan Pink's Free Agent Nation: The Future of Working for Yourself.