For the last century there, has been a generational progression of success; each generation has continued to be better off than the last. Generation Y is going to be the first to not follow that progression. We are not going to be better off than our parents were.
Seth Godin, also known as “America’s Greatest Marketer” said it best—that for the last eighty years, “good people could make above-average pay for average work, and it ended.”
It used to be common that people who had only graduated from high school–or not even–could get jobs in factories and work for salaries of 60,000-100,000 dollars a year. Now, factories are paying less and jobs are fewer and farther between. Also, the jobs themselves are no longer stable.
Godin continued, “20,000 men at Ford Motor Company lost their job on one day… so don’t tell me stability is stable, ‘cause it’s not.” Toronto Mayor Rob Ford has expressed that too, saying, ‘jobs for life’ is no longer going to be an option.
Things were different for Gen X. My father graduated from college in 1976, and within a year he was working for the Ontario Provincial Police making $14,000 a year, equivalent to today’s $30,000. He paid into a pension plan and in his last year of work made more than $80,000. He’s now retired with a $50,000 annual pension.
But today, even college graduates are lucky if they find jobs in their field within a year of graduating. As for myself—I’ll be lucky if I’m making more than $20,000 in my first year of work after graduating from journalism school.
The tradition of career progression, passed down to us by our parents, is no longer relevant, and the age of job stability is over. As we learned two years ago, this generation’s ‘average worker’ will have seven careers in their lifetime. However, no ‘average worker’ can expect to make above-average pay anymore.
So what’s the alternative? To be an above-average worker, and more importantly, take any opportunity that is handed to you.
There’s a scene in the movie The Ref, where Denis Leary’s character says, “I gotta turn on the TV every day and see kids like you on these talk shows. You’ve got everything, you’ve got opportunities up the ass, and you sit around and you bitch and you moan because things didn’t go your way.”
The Internet is the first step to succeeding. “This revolutionary connection engine that we’re all living with says that if you can figure out how to do something interesting, or unique, or noteworthy, people will find you and pay you extra,” says Godin.
So the choice we each have to make is whether we want to ‘race to the top’ and try to do something exceptional, or ‘race to the bottom’ and therefore have less stability and less money.
Of course there are always going to be jobs that have to get done. There are always going to be factory workers, and there are always going to be cab drivers, and there are always going to be pizza deliverers. Somebody has to do these jobs, but it doesn’t have to be you.
