Hall (Careers In and Out of Organizations) promotes the idea that the emerging career involves pursuing one's own "path with a heart," it is driven by the person, and it can be subject to frequent changes in shape and direction. He views this as different from the traditional model, where career choice was a single event or a terminal process started by making a decision about career in one's late teens or early twenties.
Early in the creation of EverFile I thought a lot about the idea that people experienced "inflection points" where something (external event or internal epiphany) caused them to react, take stock, re-package and re-present themselves. My view was that EverFile, the personal tool, would be there to help them not only deal with the inflection point but prosper from the resulting new database and outputs they would develop.
It seems that the experience of a 22-year-old who is about to graduate from college is quite different from a 5- or 10-year work veteran who needs to react to a lay-off, leave a horrible boss, deal with job boredom, or address the need for a lifestyle change.
This leads to a question about where knowledge nomads actually come from. Recent articles suggest that burned out high performers, those dealing with life-changing family events, or those who lose jobs have reached personal inflection points and may see the possibility to become knowledge nomads.
Is there a fundamental assumption arising at his point in the history of work (at least in developed nations) that most graduating students about to enter the workforce are essentially knowledge nomads -- whether they know it or not, because that's the way society is going to expect or force them to act?
Comments