Too Long in One Place - Half Life Careers

Half-Life is the time it takes for radioactive material to lose half of its radioactivity. It's a little more complex than that , involving the transition of atomic particles, but it will serve as a blog definition.

The other important thing about half-life is that it is a long time. The numbers are really big. Just to make the point and if we take spent reactor fuel as an example, it will take around 6 million years for it to reach radioactivity levels that are the same as those found in the ambient environment. For the purists, I am using the European method of calculation and not the US one.

Put that into perspective with human history, where "homo - first attempt" has been around less than 3 million years and recorded history is even less than 6 thousand years.

So where do you put an individual on that timeline?

We have all heard of the notion that, if all the time since the origins of the Earth was expressed as a 24 hour clock, mankind would have arrived rather late on. And using that same approach and making a modern career 50 years (just to scare the Generation Y'ers and support the Hollanders), then an individual career lasts not very long at all!

How long? All correct answers submitted as comments below will show basic maths. All wrong ones will show lack of calculator skills. The fun will be seeing how many of us need multiple attempts.

Lets go just one step further to make my point. The average employee stays in their job for 4.4 years - meaning around 10 to 12 jobs in a career. For those born around the time I was, getting a job was about status and security. It seems those born between 1980 and 2000 will close to half that tenure and will seek experience in all its forms more than the material comforts my generation seemed to have sought. This behaviour is driven perhaps as much by a realisation that the safety nets once available to parents (health care etc) will not be available to them (so why bother to climb the conventional corporate ladder) as by their enjoying unprecedented access to a world of opportunities presented to them in an internet-enabled world.

Whilst such statistics often need to be taken with care, I have seen myself very different drivers emerging in those I have managed in the last 10 years. This Forbes article argues this is therefore a dangerous time for employers and offers advice to avoid the cliff and proffers some valuable guidance. Of the 3 "must do's" offered the one that resonates is the importance of listening and learning.

Companies locked into a culture may just find in their Generation Y hires the opportunity to break out of old ways. The basics of business seldom change but embracing new ways to do that business is one of the key ways to achieve success. These new ways and the next generation of consumers that provide them were likely born in the last 20 years.

One of the keys for companies is going to be how to make the most of these GenY employees as they "pass through" and that means creating a formalism to make this happen. But there's till some way to go! Enjoy the journey.