Careers are viewed as a thing of the past for many professions, and the 40 hour work week has limited interest along with hourly wages. A retail worker for example would like to make $150-$200 for a 4-6 hour shift, focus on in store pickup or small order deliveries, and have the store open only during certain hours for browsing. Something like 6-10 M, W, F.
Comments like these are not coming from supervisors, management groups, job developers, or economists but instead from the workers that see an accumulated list of workplace inefficiencies and lack of time prioritization in their shoppers.
A college degree in a profession that used to take 8-10 years to prepare for, now takes 1-2 years. Its unlikely that those workers will remain in their selected job role for 25 years. It is also likely, that while training for their current job role, they managed to add a few classes that will help them transition to a new job. These are classes for things that have been around for a long time, are starting to develop in the workplace, or are part of job training at most employers.
This is viewed as somewhere between awkward, extremely inefficient, an error in human development, or outright inhumane for a large portion of workers. However, they understand, that the person that has the money makes the rules and they better get to work on time if they want their bills paid.
This is not the outcome that people had in mind when developing workplaces, the 40 hour work week, college programs, and workplace training programs. Employers are often seen as having goals for the population such as providing a place to obtain clothes or somewhere to get food during an 8 hour shift or while out shopping for the whole weekend.
With these changes, workplaces have shifted goals to personal development and restructured workplaces so that turnover is a non-issue and background checks on work history are less important. This resulted in making a small adjustment to professional or workplace development and work-life balance. The goal during hiring being an assessment to complete tasks and remain in a job role for at least 6 months instead of interviewing, convincing, and explaining why they are the right person for the job.
If they will be gone in 6 months to 5 years, this becomes less important to employers. The conversation on loyalty shifts to risk management, and since many workers consider jail time, fines, or garnished wages a form of self harm, they are unlikely to steal or cause legal problems at work.
Considering there are nearly 70 years between the ages of 16 to 85 and that a career now lasts 5-6 years. Approximately 14 different job roles is the estimated number of roles in a lifetime for someone that stays the full length of time at their career. There is an assessment, that they will likely take no breaks in between jobs or the number of breaks will be very few or for a short period of time.
These jobs that workers are looking for are not expected to be jobs like retail worker, construction helper, or food server. Many of those jobs being voted for automation or for training high school students in the workplace. They are expected to be jobs like accountant, lawyer, doctor, engineer, and other jobs in between that may end up being a server or training supervisor at a construction site. For example, a retail worker in the short future may be an inventory specialist, an order handler, or an actual fashion consultant, tailor or seamstress taking measurements and making notes for the online order system. Restaurants will likely be run as small families and provide excellent service, with many fast food places now referred to as pickup cafeterias.
Employers trialing these new work dynamics through workplace training only, saw remarkable results. They experienced better than expected outcomes in a period of 2-3 years and looked favorably at the prospect of their employee leaving to find work in a different profession or to take a break from work for a short period of time.
The economic assessment being left out of the equation, led them to believe that they could have paid more for the service they obtained, and that their only concern was the worker being able to find another job having only worked for such a short period at their previous job. This introduces new economic contexts between workers expectations of a workplace or job market and the employers expectations on workplace performance.
In the United States, workers can begin looking for a job at 14 years old. Many students at age 10 to 14 have economic value and are able to contribute work to a project in small task intervals of for example 4 hours. This would normally pay more than allowance and they are not obligated to work a certain amount of hours per month. They work their way through tasks and a project manager or work supervisor arranges their tasks into an overall project for them to complete that has economic value. Many students are also able to enter into agreements with their parents to form an organization, and to keep track of their works value for them. This data will be reviewed by them later and as an economic assessment when they get older.
The type of projects they work on include building spreadsheets, building websites, modifying databases and input forms for use by other kids, and gathering and providing input on projects that are meant for kids to use and for themselves to grow into as they get older. While the parents aren't obligated to pay taxes for the money they receive from doing chores, it is desired that they will be allowed to pay their own taxes on money earned from the age of 10 instead of doing chores for a little extra money until the age of 14.
These kids will often have their high school diploma ready by the age of 14-16 and will be ready to start their first career or explore college online at around that age. They are open to jobs as office assistants, spreadsheet developers, legal research assistants, and bookkeeping and accounting assistants as their afterschool job or as their first job when they are done with high school.
By the age of 20, they may already be starting off, on their second career.
Most jobs have a set of tasks that are completed on an ongoing basis and business administration or management knows what the actual goals are. In modern hiring practice, there is often a risk assessment, a performance assessment, and a desirablity assesment. The local job developer may be asking that they apply to as many jobs that they can find and they dont actually want any of the jobs.
The workplace selection process often assesses interest, performance, and risk in making a worker selection. Most workers are expecting a policy, a supervisor to ask questions to, and a suggestion box for difficult situations they encounter.
In the administration office, the applications and selections are reviewed for meeting business goals, contributing to the community, and providing workplace development. This is planned as being an ongoing and permanent process in workplace selection into the future and is currently observable in the workplace search.
Published: 2025-10-25
Last Updated: 2025-10-25
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