Why do some people go from one job to a better job, and other people are in a constant career death spiral?  These are the people you know who are  moving each time to a smaller company with less compensation, down the ladder, sometimes slowly, sometimes in one huge plunges.

How can you keep the career death spiral from being your personal story?

You See Career Death Spirals All Around You Because of the Nature, Pace, and Cadence of Employment.  I interviewed an intelligent-young professional a few months ago who is in his late-30’s who is in this career death spiral.  He is a well-educated engineer with great social skills and he’s working for a top tech company — he and his wife had been laid off a total of 9 times in two years between them, with children, mortgages, and credit cards of holidays past. Having some knowledge of the company he’s working for, I’d say he is likely to get laid off again in the near future.

How do you Maintain Steady Income–You Stay Employed?  What would people really be making a year if they averaged the in gaps in their income?  Most of us find that maintaining a steady income is a huge challenge in the 21st Century. There are long intervals and gaps in employment “when projects end.”  It’s not just true for salaried people, but for people with high net-worth’s with serious cash-flow crunches. 

Career Path–It’s More like Climbing into the Car, Strapping on Your Helmet, and Becoming a Driver. Staying employed, finding the career and job that gets you up in the morning is a race that gets faster and more challenging every day. It’s something like a race car driver.  Getting the car is kind of like the education part.  Learning the skill to drive it somewhat parallels your internship and early career. Managing a career is tricky and treacherous. It’s not easy to win. You’re hurtling around the track at 200+ mph and you have the dual goal of winning and not crashing into another car.

Managing Your Career When You’re Successfully Employed. We all agree that the time to manage a successful career is when you’re successfully employed. The worst time to manage your career is when you’re looking “for a new opportunity.” All too often delusion sets in like concrete in the process of hardening the moment they tell us they love us and we’re hired. Then it’s projects, meetings, and emails 24/7. Who has the time to think about anything else but tomorrow?

There Isn’t an Employer Who Won’t Dump You — You’re Not Powerless If You Have a Plan. Writers so totally bore me when they say that employers don’t guarantee long-term employment. Wowee, Powee! Now that’s an idea sure to go viral! That employers will dump you without warning on the basis of a plan hatched up yesterday to eliminate your function and save a bundle has been the standing truth of most of the last three decades. There are a few employers who are loyal, but they can’t save you when tornadoes of change rip through.

Here’s the truth:

1.  If who you are is the job you do–what you do–you’ll lose job after job until you get to an age that you’ll be virtually unemployable for a good job. Cruel, isn’t it? In the ’50’s, men who repaired televisions for a living made enough money to send their children to college. There are no such people today. The jobs of the 90’s are no longer around. What you do will go away sooner than you think. You’re a programmer? Your job will be done by some version of Google software and you won’t be needed.

2.   Maintaining your thinking and knowledge agility is more important even than your technical and social skills. If you don’t want to end up as an un-recyclable corporate throw away, start by reading websites to know who is in your industry. How do they make money, who are their competitors, where must your company go to survive? If you’re not doing that, you will always be a highly expendable.

3.  Tell me plainly what you’ll do for me. You must be specific.  Don’t tell me about how intelligent and skilled you are.  I wouldn’t be talking to you if you weren’t.  It has be specific, “Your time to service clients is driving your costs through the roof.  I’ll help you significantly drive down that cost.”  Never go to an interview without being able to articulate what you’ll do to make a difference in the organization’s bottom line.

If I hire you full time, I’ll invest at least $250,000 in you the first year, taking into account wages, office space, training you, and managing you. Please don’t tell me you know specific things or do specific things. I know that already. In order for me to hire you, I’m going to state the problem I have. If you’re in banking, how do we streamline the process and get new customers?

4.  Paint me a picture of what you’ll do when you enter the doors of my business every day.  Don’t dazzle me with technical concepts. Tell me in short clear sentences what you can do. There are more jobs that are going unfilled than ever before. There is so much competition, but those who compete are the weakest I’ve ever seen. All you have to do is tell people what you can do — then deliver the goods and do it consistently — while continuing to refresh your knowledge, thinking skills and network, and there will be no significant crashes in your career. Drivers, start your engines!