Computerworld - Like technologies, some words have life spans. They are born, enter the mainstream and then fade into obsolescence. Research from the Olin Innovation Lab and AIIM Executive Leadership Summit posits that the word career is due for a major rethink.
The iconic "gold watch" career path, in which people stay with the same employer for their entire working lives, has become anachronistic.
In the Middle Ages, one never heard the word career. Clerics in their monasteries (the first estate), kings in their courts (the second estate), and commoners in their mud huts (the third estate) didn't discuss career options.
For the 700 years that followed, the annual per capita GDP for the place that would come to be known as Europe would stagnate between $400 and $550 (expressed in constant 1990 U.S. dollars). Your best bet was to pursue a career as king.
In much of early modern Europe, for most of recorded time, what one did occupationally (i.e., one's career) was essentially determined by birth. There was very little choice involved.
The modern concept of a career originated in the mid to late 19th century. The advent of the word career precisely coincides with the expansion of occupational choices. With improved agricultural methods, more food could be produced by fewer people, thereby allowing some subset of the people laboring in the fields to pursue other forms of employment. Technological innovations (like the steam engine) enabled new modes of production (e.g., factories) that expanded the work choices available.
In the Golden Age of Careers (1815-1968), executives believed they knew what needed to be known. Industrialists like Henry Ford instituted the scientific management principles of Frederick Taylor, mandating enforced standardization of methods and enforced adoption of the best implements and working conditions with an eye toward achieving the "one, best way of doing things."
The end result of this top-down "we know what we've got to know" conceit was, in just about every discipline and in almost every company that ever existed, a well-defined career path featuring a sequence of training, education and advancement via which an apprentice migrated to master (in the crafts and the arts) or a management trainee climbed the corporate ladder, perhaps reaching the CEO's office. Sizable vocational guidance, career development and skills acquisition industries grew up to help people understand the "rules of the game" and equip themselves accordingly.
That was then. But what does career mean in a world where the people at the top don't know what must be known? What does career mean when the rules of the game change daily?
The path to mastery can't take an entire career. IT workers have to "jack in" to hot skill sets. Many students no longer think in terms of "careers" or even "jobs" -- they think in terms of "gigs." At a high-prestige university, I recently witnessed a graduate student quite far along in his course of study corner a founding partner of a revered venture capital firm that is heavily invested in big data. He asked, "What does this mean for me? What should I be studying?"
We live in an age when the most important skill is the ability to acquire new skills. Human "upgrades" are well represented in the science fiction community. Your career success is a function of how successfully you keep yourself upgraded.
Thornton A. May is author of The New Know: Innovation Powered by Analytics and executive director of the IT Leadership Academy at Florida State College in Jacksonville. You can contact him at thorntonamay@aol.com or follow him on Twitter (@deanitla).
Next: Take control of your IT career
More Empowered IT Worker Stories
- Take control of your IT career
Land an IT job: Tips from recent hires- Spotlight key skills on your resume
- Find IT jobs in the cloud
- Opinion: Build relationships, and career goals follow
- Opinion: Why the word 'career' is obsolete
- Take control of your IT career
- Land an IT job: Tips from recent hires
- Spotlight key skills on your resume
- Find IT jobs in the cloud
- Opinion: Build relationships, and career goals follow
- Opinion: Why the word 'career' is obsolete
Read more about Management in Computerworld's Management Topic Center.
You are previewing premium content. 
Free Insider Guide