9B: Episode 7: 'Have we lost the idea of a vocation?'

'What even is a career anymore?' Have we lost the idea of vocation?

Hear our leadership team discuss the importance of business being more than just profit. Have businesses in general, moved away from being about and for their people? 

This business and BS is hashed over a beer, a bourbon, and a Boulevardier cocktail by our three bombastic, bloviating blokes in Bryan, TX — the 9B’s.

Work with us  Fidelis Creative Agency 

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:02

Welcome everybody to 9B podcast. Today's episode is What Even Is a Career Anymore. And uh the 9B stands for a beer, a bourbon, a boulevardier, right? Business and BS from three bloviating bombastic bros in Bryan, Texas. So there's your nine B's. So What Even Is a Career Anymore, I have I want to open with uh my father, who is in his late 70s, has only ever had one career. And I think that that's pretty uh abnormal as some of the statistics are going to show us. How many careers did your father have? Not jobs, but careers. Oh, one. One. Okay. That's shocking. Because the baby boomer generation uh they were estimated to have three to four careers over a lifetime. Okay. So let me just read this and open, kind of frame it out a little. American Gen Z workers, so those born from 1997 to 2012, are projected to make an average of six career changes over their lifetimes. This reflects broader trends of increased job mobility due to technological shifts, gig economy growth, and evolving work priorities like flexibility and fulfillment. These projections draw from sources including the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and extrapolated for Gen Z's expected 40 to 45 year long careers. For context, baby boomers average three to four careers. We have evidence of, you know, just one. My dad just won.

SPEAKER_01 1:51

So we share a dad. We do. Oh, right, right, yeah. Yeah, that's why he didn't ask me. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:57

That's right. Baby boomers, uh, three to four careers over their lifetime, Gen X four, so that's me and you. Millennials four to five, and Gen Z five to seven, they're averaging six. So this is there's a distinction here also between a career and a job. So the job tenure averages are uh eight plus years for the boomers, five-year averages per job position for Gen X, 2.8 for millennials, and just 2.2 years in a job for Gen Z. So this estimate assumes a career as a distinct field or industry shift, not just job changes within the same role.

SPEAKER_00 2:42

So Gen Alpha's gonna be in a job for like a year? Yeah. On average.

SPEAKER_02 2:47

Six, eight months.

SPEAKER_00 2:47

Six to eight months.

SPEAKER_01 2:48

Yes. Man, my commitment issues are flaring right now. I'm like even just hearing that, I get a little itchy. So we should be the doctor for something.

SPEAKER_00 2:58

We should take care of that thing.

SPEAKER_02 3:00

So all of this presupposes this sort of linear trajectory, and they're just kind of extrapolating out what they think this is going to look like. But in an AI world, I mean all butts are off. Yeah. Right? You can't you can't even do that anymore. But then I was thinking to myself, you have had two careers, right? At least. Okay. And I've had two, and you've just had one.

SPEAKER_01 3:29

I've been doing this.

SPEAKER_02 3:30

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 3:31

But this is like within this, I I would say it's like three careers.

SPEAKER_02 3:36

Of running the creative agency. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 3:38

Yeah. I mean, managing people is way different than when we started, and branding and marketing is way different than where I started. So yeah. This is kind of this has kind of, you know, answered my uh my wonderlust, my itch, right, to leave. Because I just change.

SPEAKER_02 3:58

Because there's different versions and iterations of your role within a company, but also then just what even the company is offering to the market.

SPEAKER_01 4:06

Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Would you say, I mean, is it fair to say? Is it fair to say that this is like a a post-career America? Yeah. Like, is that even a thing? Are careers even a thing?

SPEAKER_00 4:21

That's actually the that's actually the title of our episode today.

SPEAKER_01 4:24

I tied that in. Yeah. Nice. But is it? I mean, I'm kind of actually looking at you for an answer, do you think?

SPEAKER_02 4:30

I don't know. I I really don't know.

SPEAKER_00 4:33

So how are we distinguishing between career and job? What's what let's like the define our terms? Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 4:40

A career is a distinct field or industry. So I've been in broadcasting. I've been in, you know, publishing. It's categorical. Yeah, it's the category. That's a career. And they're saying you're gonna have Gen Z will have roughly six of those.

SPEAKER_00 4:57

So I've been in secondary education. I've been in But it's been education. Academia. Been in nonprofit. Yeah. Now in So three. Marketing. Okay, three.

SPEAKER_01 5:11

Or creative services. Yeah. There's man, something about that is just so sad to me.

SPEAKER_02 5:16

Why?

SPEAKER_01 5:17

Um There's a there's a thing in financial world that they they call uh these events of like death, divorce, whatever they call them like transfer, wealth transfer events. There's something like that that happens at career shift. You you build up years worth of knowledge and experience and care. And yeah, you you hit low points, you hit the slog, but if you just jump, you lose all that. So are you uh approaching that?

SPEAKER_02 5:51

That's a presumption from the organizational standpoint, like you lose all that organizational memory?

SPEAKER_01 5:56

Yeah, okay. Organizational memory, but also like just from the human side of like um and I know that you carry your life experiences with you. I mean, your your uh past in history and in writing and in academia has been so useful, like you've carried that with you. Um so but but ultimately I I I guess I just see people not iterating, not progressing those industries as much. Like kind of the idea of, and we've talked about this before, but we used to build cathedrals. It's like, man, what what it takes people doing long-term things to build great things.

SPEAKER_02 6:43

I understand the argument from the institutional knowledge lost, but also you're bringing in in these transfers, you're bringing in a whole range of skills and experiences that you didn't have otherwise when you bring in new, and also you port out of them a whole range of things that you couldn't probably have gotten in that field. So in some ways it's kind of enriching.

SPEAKER_01 7:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 7:10

Um, I think I think about I did almost 10 years in education, and almost all or a good chunk of the skills that were necessary for that when I brought them into brand and marketing were huge. Like uh communicating really important things to an audience that doesn't care.

SPEAKER_01 7:34

Right.

SPEAKER_02 7:34

I mean, teaching Shakespeare to 17-year-old boys, that's some of the most important stuff in the world, they care the least, and so you have to be very creative about how you communicate that. That was like an actual skill set that came in. Uh, writing, uh, training young people, encouraging, seeing developments, being able to offer criticism that doesn't sound like devastating criticism, honestly.

SPEAKER_01 8:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 8:01

There's there's so many things that came through the education pathway that made this position so much better for me.

SPEAKER_01 8:08

Yeah, yeah, no doubt.

SPEAKER_02 8:10

And then it's so much stuff that I've learned in here that I mean, I'm coming up on 10 years in May. Yeah. You know, so see you later. I don't know. I don't know where I'm headed to. That was the announcement. Okay. That's how he does it. Feels like 10 years are these good breaks.

SPEAKER_01 8:27

Yeah. Every decade you just turn a page. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I that's a really great point about it, it is how you bring in new uh new life to an a to an organization. Uh there's still something about like, I guess I'm now kind of thinking from the owner side of things. Uh part of the challenge is to build an environment, build a what commonly is referred to as a culture that is so uh it just has these like moments of remembering who everybody is, and it's like it knows its environment. You you move people out of that, you bring in new people. It's so difficult to build any sort of place like that. And so I from the owner side of things, I'm like, man, I would love people, and we we've been very fortunate to have a lot of people stay around and build families and do that sort of thing. But man, we've also had uh interns, beautiful, wonderful people come in and then leave. And every time that happens, uh it always feels like there's a little bit of something lost, something like, oh man, we invested and I think uh what part of this story also is I don't know the exact history of it, but part of this story is the demise of the the pension as the golden parachute or the reward at the end of the career well.

SPEAKER_02 10:06

Explain what a pension is to a younger audience who may never have even heard of such a thing.

SPEAKER_00 10:11

Yeah, the idea was that if you stayed with a company for 25 or 30 years, there was gonna be this really nice retirement package at the end that was gonna pay you some percentage of your annual salary every year for the rest of your life or at least another twenty years or something like that, some medical benefits, dental, things like that, uh a life insurance policy from the company. It was kind of corporate welfare, is what some academics have called it, American historians have called it.

SPEAKER_02 10:43

But um And it also created a sense of allegiance on the part of the worker. Hi, hi, I've been with Hewlett Packard. Hewlett-Packard for, you know, 31 years.

SPEAKER_00 10:53

Yeah, and I don't know the I I think the exact history of what went away first, the pension or the company loyalty, and the just a much more dynamic job market in the late late 20, you know, kind of the end of the 20th century is when you started to see the the demise of the the pension. Um but there's just there's not those structural pieces in place to hold people to a job anymore.

SPEAKER_02 11:26

Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 11:27

And so people are much more they they they see themselves as much more um with a right to just go out and chase the best situation possible for themselves.

SPEAKER_02 11:42

Yeah. Yeah. Because there's not an allegiance to any organization because the organization has no real allegiance to me. Yeah. Right. So it's kind of mutually reinforcing and it creates a transition, transitory kind of environment. I was going to say what it reveals is that we've lost one concept entirely, the idea of a vocation. Because a vocation, you know, that the root there is voce, which is voice, which is um, I heard a voice calling me to a thing. And maybe that's a religious vocation, or it could be in healthcare, or it could be whatever. And it was a way that people really perceive their jobs and employment as a form of worship. Like, um, you know, I felt like I heard a voice that I was supposed to give my life to education, and there was meaning, deep meaning into that. And now it's like, no, uh, you know, the job market being what it is, I think I can leverage whatever skill I have to get into whatever, fill in the blank manufacturing. Um, so that we're like, we've lost that idea of a vocation almost entirely.

SPEAKER_00 12:58

Yeah. And I I wonder if the the computer revolution of the like late 70s, early 80s going through corporate America, if that had anything to do with the demise of long service um professionals in corporations, because the the institutional knowledge and the the the the hit the knowledge of this is how we do things here at Hewlett Packard, and these are our processes, and it started to not matter as much as the as the innovative uh young guns coming into the company who who knew this this new technology and how it was going to disrupt, and and it did disrupt so many corporations. Yeah. And there started to be less of a privilege on hey, you've been with the company and you know how we do things and we depend on you, and it's hey, this is the new generation that's coming in with these new approaches.

SPEAKER_02 13:58

When you think about that, like from where we are and moving toward mid-century point of this century, it's like maybe people not only are they not organizationally committed or even an idea of a vocation, uh, but it's like I'm a total freelance gun for hire. I know how to build the AI stacks and integrate, and so I'm really an at-will hire gun, hire hire me to do this plug and play into your organization. And I'm in 15 organizations. Right now, the rise of like the fractional CFO, the fractional this, the fractional that, it's kind of exactly what I'm describing. We're we've already particalized down to I'm just this really good widget and I can be applied to your organization.

SPEAKER_01 14:47

Everybody and everything is a hired gun, right? So have either of you guys seen a uh fully dedicated people excited to work, to go to work organization? Is that I mean, part of my thinking here is like the institutions, those corporations that were able to afford pensions, um, you know, GE and Hewlett-Packard and all those, that's not the thing anymore. I mean, offshore labor, uh, fragmented out industries. Uh I'm curious, is there is there anywhere that you can actively look and say, oh, people are excited to go to work in the morning? Like, have y'all seen that? That's a great question. I've I've only seen it on a micro level. Small business. People are excited to go to work. I'm excited to go to work and see you in the mornings. Because of who you're looking across the table at. Because these are my people, right? Um and I don't know. Uh I I've seen I've seen quite a bit of that in small business. I don't know about in large business.

SPEAKER_02 15:57

Yeah, I don't know how that scales.

SPEAKER_01 16:00

What about those days that I forget to, you know. Even then. Even then. Yes. I I have a friend who works at uh at Amazon, and it it's like high turnover, high cutthroat, high politics.

SPEAKER_02 16:17

It's definitely a plug-and-play kind of Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 16:20

And uh he's been there for quite a while and still rents. Because he's like, I don't know. I don't know when this is over.

SPEAKER_02 16:28

The day they decide I'm redundant, yeah, I'm out.

SPEAKER_01 16:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 16:32

Yeah, it what this makes me think of is how I counsel, you know, young professionals and my sons and daughters is like if you really are just a combination of skills that you can list on a piece of paper, how are you routing them?

SPEAKER_01 16:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 16:53

Aside from you have to be entrepreneurial because you're probably gonna have to go build the thing if you want something like stability.

SPEAKER_01 17:02

Uh I mean, I I just do that. I don't do the aside from that. That is the play. It's hey, you have to be completely competent in a variety of ways. And uh Which means you have to be good at learning. And you have to essentially be a generalist at life. And um you gotta pivot. You can't take hits as like the end of the conversation. You just gotta keep moving. Which is a lot.

SPEAKER_02 17:33

This is a nightmare scenario for somebody who has um a high need for structure, uh, who wants a safety security kind of job where I just go in, I just do the things, and I do the things for eight years. Um as opposed to no, you come in and possibly every four months you have to figure out some other new ability set.

SPEAKER_01 17:58

Yeah. I was watching a uh uh conversation with a guy who is a lineman who just like puts up uh electrical poles and everything, and uh he got fired on Thursday, hired again on Monday by a different company, and that's happened like four or five times, and it's just the nope, getting fired now is just part of it. And that's just part of the psychology.

SPEAKER_02 18:21

So that also means that you shouldn't feel one way or the other about he didn't feel one way or the other about anything.

SPEAKER_01 18:27

Like, I don't know, I get an extra day off this week. It was kind of his mentality. Yeah. But he was making good money and kept making it.

SPEAKER_02 18:37

Yeah, gun for hire. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 18:39

I mean, I think this plays havoc with uh family formation though, too. Oh yeah, totally. How do young people 30 somethings even build a life? Already previous generations. I mean, I remember when I was late 20s, early 30s. You have that feeling of am I ready to settle down? Do I have enough scratch set aside? Do I have enough of a of a nest egg set aside to to do this thing? So how do you how do you get to that point in this day and age? Um Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 19:21

I mean the question then is like, can I actually provide for a family? And I know if I get married, then a family's in route. Am I ever gonna be able to provide stability? Right. Yeah. Which, apart from a faith in something beyond yourself, it would really be you know impossible. Maybe even wouldn't be advising it. But I think it's that's actually where people who have um, you know, a spiritual life and are connected to God actually have a distinct advantage, which is I'm I'm willing to roll the dice and be ambitious and go and hard charge, believing that in my acts of obedience and faithfulness there's going to be always just enough road ahead.

SPEAKER_01 20:09

I have some provision.

SPEAKER_02 20:10

There's there's two steps where I can't see more than two steps, but that's okay. Like but if you don't have that, it's a terrifying thought.

SPEAKER_01 20:20

Yeah. So get that? That's the advice.

SPEAKER_02 20:23

Sure. Sure. Well, okay. Uh so we're just crossed 20 minutes there. Any other thoughts about this, this shift? Did it like make you think of anything specific that you're going to be instructing your kids in?

SPEAKER_01 20:36

Uh well, I I would be instructing other entrepreneurs, other business owners in this, which is I think if any of that solid stability, good culture is going to come back, it's going to be because your businesses are doing well and they're able to provide something. Like, even thinking through pensions, it's because somebody somewhere was like, you know, we should probably take care of our old guys. We should probably do that. That seems like the right and good thing to do. And so I guess my encouragement is to entrepreneurs to build good businesses because it means more than your bottom line. It means more than just whatever you get to take home. You do this because there's people, and those people matter.

SPEAKER_02 21:22

I had one last thought, which is if you think that you're going to take this leap of getting married, starting a family, doing it early, um, not only does it require this faith mechanism, but also your community becomes like 10x more important than maybe it was when you could just go and give yourself to Hewlett Packard. Like your network of people who knows, oh, Thaddeus is phenomenal at these things, or I've seen him at work over here, that becomes far more critical than ever.

SPEAKER_01 21:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 21:57

Which is kind of an unforeseen benefit of this that that people and small communities matter more. Yep. Yeah, that's true. And that you are also looking for where could I put him? Like if this guy, if Bill becomes unemployed, well I've got a network of a few hundred people and I know what he's great at, I should have him talk to Eric.

SPEAKER_01 22:20

Right. Right. Yeah, that's good. That's a good closer.

SPEAKER_00 22:25

Nope. And do companies even think anymore about long-term loyalty? I mean what is the horizon on on that question?

SPEAKER_02 22:37

I don't think they do.

SPEAKER_00 22:38

I think they give lip service to building loyalty and building culture, but are they really doing something on the magnitude of not calling for the recreation of a pension?

SPEAKER_02 22:51

I don't think that that's realistic, but a long-term do you think that there's that there's some executive team sitting in some suite on a conference table and they're sitting there thinking about how did but how does this impact young workers and their ability to for family formation? You think that that's like a thing that they're having that they're going to whiteboard?

SPEAKER_00 23:12

I wish they were.

SPEAKER_01 23:13

I wish they were too but I don't think our society would be so much better if they were right. Man we okay we just watched uh National Lampoons Christmas vacation and there's the moment where yeah the Christmas bonus fiasco right and cousin Eddie goes out and kidnaps the boss who had who had cut for the bottom line uh uh uh what's the main character's name? Chevy Chase's character is uh whatever's can't remember yeah uh but he has this like Clark Griswold Clark Griswold so the boss has this like come to realization about what he did to deserve getting kidnapped by cousin Eddie and the realization hits him first with his own conscience but then his wife reinforces it and is like you think you didn't and he's like I was thinking about it and then the cop jumps in so now we're talking about small communities this cop jumps in and is like that's low man I wouldn't I you know and the he starts berating him and the boss is like I changed my mind I changed my mind and so there's there is this like um moral capitalism is the thing you hear about there is at these organizations it's full of people people it when they're divorced from their own morals and their own consciences that's where things get real dicey. The idea that a company has an obligation to its people I think people have to take responsibility to say the company is not a thing. I am the company I have an obligation to people I think I think people hide behind the company and the tax entity and the LLC and it's like you're the company you're a person be the person. Make the call make the call lead the thing it's gonna hurt it's okay people need you to do it.

SPEAKER_02 25:14

That's good and scene