Get Career Fit, 2nd Edition

Foreword

The great challenge of the modern workforce isn’t so much finding work, although that can indeed prove difficult for the young and the non-skilled workers. It is steering a way along a tricky pathway that presents many twists and turns along the way.

Work was a straightforward concept in the twentieth century. Everyone was scooped up by the globalisation of the great manufacturing companies both in Australia and abroad. There were jobs aplenty. All you had to do was learn the rules, put your head down, and work day-in and day-out for the whole of your working career.

And that is precisely what many workers did for their entire working lives, whether it was for a car manufacturer or for a professional services firm. It was a process that delivered prosperity but it also set up expectations about how work should be, and that needs to be unravelled by workers in a post manufacturing world.

In Get Career Fit author Michelle Gibbings shines a light on the way forward for workers in the twenty-first century. Gone or going are the great global manufacturers. Long gone is the idea of working in one job for the entirety of your working life. Now in are bold new concepts like digital disruption, globalisation, mechanisation, artificial intelligence and, perhaps most powerful of all, the desire for personal growth and development.

Working on an assembly line might have delivered an assured job from an early age but, gosh, it wasn’t exactly a personally fulfilling use of time. ...