(and not my own)
I've sometimes wondered about the job security of some of those weird pseudo-careers, the kind which are rampant at my place of work. They're constantly developing new, specialized teams to work on new initiatives - you'll get an email that such-and-such was just "promoted to the position of "SVP Customer Creation" or "Executive Director of 'Sharing Memories'" WTF?
What happens when that initiative dries up and your job no longer exists? What's out there for you with a silly resume like that? I suppose, folks in that sort of world just have an instinctual ability glom on to whatever the next hot thing is. But I couldn't live like that.
And I wonder how much longer it is for the world.
In these times where, suddenly, so much in Wall Street and the financial world is beginning to become exposed for the charade it actually is; and we may be facing a world where we return to the nuts and bolts of what it actually takes to make the world go round - I wonder what the future holds for those folks whose expertise is in - really - nothing?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
6 comments:
I see that at my job, althhough I think it's the exception. I keep my fingers crossed every so often, and remind myself my departments been around for almost 90 years.
My job sort of straddles the divide between "real" and "not real." I'm a geographer, and that's real. And I know how to make maps. And that's real. But the stuff I'm making maps of? Not real.
I think those ridiculous job descriptions are mostly gilding the lily, as it were. They do jobs that in the past had names with less hyperbole.
SVP Customer Creation is a marketing guy, or a salesman, or some horrible hybrid of both.
Not sure about the "Sharing Memories" thinking - that's really pushing the envelope on bs.
What we should all hope shakes out of this current fiscal catastrophe is the lessening urge for people to earn MBA's. These are the people that society is finding the nichiest of niches for. There is a more or less static level of competence possible in any society, and you can have too many people with a particular educational specialization. At some point you've stopped separating the wheat from the chaff and you're figuring out how to employ the chaff. The chaff may be generally bad, but maybe there is some area where they excel, like calling people on the phone and harassing them relentlessly until they do/buy whatever it is they want.
But when times are tight, more good general purpose employees are better than an army of weird specialists.
We're going to need a lot more people willing and able to lay sod on rooftops.
And guys like me to tell them where to put it.
On NPR yesterday, they interviewed a guy who said that if he knew they'd be putting a cap on CEO salaries, he would have just gone into acting.
This pretty much sums up how I see the MBA degree... for most, it's a fast-track way to bypass experience on their way to managing, with the prize of exorbitant, inflated payouts.
Post a Comment