Bruce Helmer and Peg Webb

Even before the pandemic took hold in the U.S. in March 2020, the world of work had been changing dramatically.

Structural shifts such as work-from-home (WFH), hybrid work, and the rise of gig work were already profoundly affecting relationships between employers and employees. Americans are changing jobs in increasing numbers, many doing so because they demand a new social contract with their employers.

Changing demographics only part of the story

Baby boomers, who have long had an outsized impact on the U.S. labor market, have been retiring in record numbers, although the trend may be shifting somewhat post-pandemic. Boomers had fewer children than their parents, so there are fewer Gen Xers and millennials to replace them.

Worker shortages, longer life expectancies, the need to make ends meet, or recently enacted financial incentives to work longer are encouraging some boomers to put off retirement and work later into their 60s and 70s.

Paychecks play a key role, too. Recent data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics report that inflation-adjusted earnings for the youngest boomers (those born between 1957 and 1964) have flatlined over the past 20 years — after this cohort had already turned 45. If the past is prologue, we should take careful note that salaries for this group increased the quickest between the ages of 18 and 24, when hourly wages went up an average of 6.5% per year. After that, the earnings growth rate slowed between the ages of 25 to 34 (+3.3% per year) and from ages 35 to 44 (+1.8% per year).

There is reason to believe that the high salaries of today’s younger workers could follow a similar pattern, causing a large percentage to seek multiple job opportunities before reaching mid-career to optimize their earnings.

Job hopping is a growing trend

Gen Zers and younger millennials are job-hopping more frequently to increase their salary and skills earlier in their careers. Although it’s always been a red flag for employers, job-hopping is now the top concern for more than three out of four hiring managers, according to HR consulting firm Robert Half.

Optimism over employment prospects led 22% of workers age 20 and older to spend a year or less in their jobs in 2022, according to the Employee Benefit Research Institute, a nonpartisan D.C.-based think tank, and about 33% spent two years or less at their jobs. Perhaps more notable is the fact that 74% of 18-to 26-year-olds and 62% of 27- to 42-year-olds were searching for a new job or planned to search in the next six months, according to the Half study. A combined whopping 49% of American workers of all ages planned to look for a new job as of Q3/Q4 2023, extending a trend that started during the COVID-19 pandemic.

So, what’s driving this relentless desire for greener pastures among employees? Is it something more fundamental than higher pay and better benefits?

Evolving relationships

Some employment experts say one reason for the spike in job-hopping is an erosion of the social contract between companies and employees. The thinking is that repeated, recession-related layoffs have in some cases led to “right-sizing” in anticipation of an economic downturn. But this interpretation masks an important point: Today’s employers are less concerned about having access to talent than about motivating and keeping workers happy. Well-being and professional development are top-of-mind for both employees and hiring managers.

According to Robert Half, the three top motivations for U.S. workers to find new employment opportunities today include higher salaries (55%), better benefits and perks (38%), and remote work options (28%). But we also found an interesting trend that confirms how workers’ needs have evolved: According to global human capital firm Mercer, workers increasingly say they want to work “with” a company not “for” a company. Aligning work with personal values is a powerful motivator for employees, and employers who adapt well to employees’ changing needs are better positioned to win the war on talent.

So, as Mercer’s research bears out, for much of the 20th century there was a “Loyalty” contract between employees and employers, whereby employers met basic needs such as steady pay, benefits, and job security in exchange for employees’ commitment that often lasted their entire careers. Then, pre-pandemic, the social contract evolved to be more focused on an “Engagement” contract, where employees’ psychological needs for achievement, camaraderie, and equity rewards were exchanged for employee contributions and effort. The new chapter of work is being organized around the “Lifestyle” contract, whereby employees’ needs for healthier physical, mental, emotional, and financial well-being are being met by employers who are seeking sustainable business performance.

We’re already seeing significant shifts in employees’ financial and well-being concerns. Three in four workers say that last year’s high inflation and market volatility have increased their stress levels, according to Mercer’s Inside Employees’ Minds survey (2022). Covering monthly expenses was the No. 1 concern of workers in 2022, up from No. 9 in 2021, and the ability to retire moved from No. 5 to No. 2. For the first time, personal debt moved into the top 10. It should surprise no one, then, how a rise in awareness of work-life boundaries has permeated American business culture: The No. 1 action that employees are looking for is a “reduced workload” and a rejection of “hustle culture.”

What lies ahead?

The evolution toward a Lifestyle social contract raises lots of questions with no clear answers (and we haven’t even raised the specter of AI’s anticipated impact on the world of work):

• Are workers who seek greater work-life balance as productive or as likely to be considered for promotion and career advancement?

• Will they meet their goals for retiring on their terms?

• Are employers realistic in their demands for workers to return to the office?

• Should employers adopt the new lifestyle contract to ensure that workers reward them with loyalty, commitment, and retention?

What we can say with confidence is that creating a resilient, comprehensive financial plan helps give you better control over, and confidence in, your career decisions. By managing day-to-day finances, preparing for the unexpected, getting on track to meet long-term goals, and thinking about what will give you the freedom to make choices in life that matter the most to you, you set yourself up to survive and thrive — whatever the world of work looks like in the future.

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The opinions voiced in this material are for general information only and are not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual.

Bruce Helmer and Peg Webb are financial advisers at Wealth Enhancement Group and co-hosts of “Your Money” on WCCO 830 AM on Sunday mornings. Email Bruce and Peg at yourmoney@wealthenhancement.com. Securities offered through LPL Financial, member FINRA/SIPC. Advisory services offered through Wealth Enhancement Advisory Services, LLC, a registered investment advisor. Wealth Enhancement Group and Wealth Enhancement Advisory Services are separate entities from LPL Financial.

 

We’re living through an era of collapsing paradigms. The conceptual frames that many people use to organize their understanding of the world are crashing and burning upon contact with Middle Eastern reality.

Woke-ism

The first paradigm that failed this month was critical race theory or woke-ism.

Yascha Mounk has a good history of this body of thought in his outstanding book “The Identity Trap.” But as it applies to the Middle East, the relevant ideas in this paradigm are these: International conflicts can be seen through a prism of American identity categories like race. In any situation, there are evil people who are colonizer/oppressors and good people who are colonized/oppressed. It’s not necessary to know about the particular facts about any global conflict, because of intersectionality: All struggles are part of the same struggle between the oppressors and the oppressed.

This paradigm shapes how many on the campus left saw the Hamas terror attacks and were thus pushed into a series of ridiculous postures. A group of highly educated American progressives cheered on Hamas as anti-colonialist freedom fighters, even though Hamas is a theocratic, genocidal terrorist force that oppresses LGBTQ people and revels in the massacres of innocents. These campus activists showed little compassion for Israeli men and women who were murdered at a music festival because they were perceived as “settlers” and hence worthy of extermination. Many progressives called for an immediate cease-fire, denying Israel the right to defend itself, which is enshrined in international law — as if Nigeria should have declared a cease-fire the day after Boko Haram kidnapped 276 girls in 2014.

American universities exist to give students the conceptual tools to understand the world. It appears that at many universities, students are instead being fed simplistic ideological categories that blind them to reality.

Pogromism

The second paradigm that fell apart this month was what you might call “pogromism.”

This is the belief, common in Jewish communities around the world, that you can draw a straight line from the many antisemitic massacres in ancient history, through the pogroms of the 19th century, through the Holocaust and up to the Hamas massacres of today. In this paradigm, antisemitism is the key factor at work, and Jews are the innocent victims of perennial group hate.

The paradigm has some truth to it but is simplistic. In fact, Israel is a regional superpower, not a marginalized victim group. Israeli indifference to conditions in the territories has contributed to today’s horrible reality. The Middle East conflict is best seen as a struggle between two peoples who have to live together, not as a black-and-white conflict between victims and Nazis.

The two-state paradigm

The third conceptual paradigm under threat is the one I have generally used to organize how I see the Middle East conflict: the two-state paradigm.

This paradigm is based on the notion that this conflict will end when there are two states with two peoples living side by side. People like me see events in the Middle East as tactical moves each side is taking to secure the best eventual outcome for themselves.

After this month’s events, several assumptions underlying this worldview seem shaky: that most people on each side will eventually come to accept the legitimacy of the other’s existence, that Palestinian leaders would rather devote their budgets to economic development than perpetual genocidal holy war, that the cause of peace is advanced when Israel withdraws from Palestinian territories, that Hamas can be contained until a negotiated settlement is achieved, and that extremists on both sides will eventually be marginalized so that peacemakers can do their work.

Those of us who see the conflict through this two-state framing may be relying on lenses that distort our vision, so we see the sort of Middle East that existed two decades ago, not the one that exists today.

The worldview that has been buttressed by this month’s events is unfortunately the one I find loathsome. You can call it authoritarian nihilism, which binds Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and other strongmen: that we live in a dog-eat-dog world; life is a competition to grab what you can; power is what matters; morality, decency, gentleness, and international norms are luxuries we cannot afford because our enemies are out to destroy us; and we need to be led by ruthless amoralists to take on the ruthless amoralists who seek to take us down.

I don’t want to live amid that barbarism, so I’m hoping the Biden administration will do two things that will keep the faint hopes of peace and basic decency alive. The first is to help Israel reestablish deterrence. In the Middle East, peace happens when Israel is perceived as strong and permanent and the United States has its back.

Second, I’m hoping the U.S. encourages Arab nations to work with the Palestinians to build a government that can rule the Gaza Strip after Hamas is dismantled. (Robert Satloff, Dennis Ross and David Makovsky of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy have sketched out how this would work.)

Some events alter the models we use to perceive reality, and the events of Oct. 7 fit that category. It feels as if we’re teetering between universalist worldviews that recognize our common humanity and tribal worldviews in which others are just animals to be annihilated. What Israel does next will influence what worldview prevails in the 21st century.

David Brooks writes a column for the New York Times.

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Street construction in St. Paul features concrete islands being built on Fairview Avenue between Montreal and Randolph avenues. Maybe between Edgcumbe Road and Randolph. Hard to say. The Fairview project has been underway since about 1956, it seems, and it’s been difficult to get a picture of whatever the vision might be.

The fellows could be hard at work in other parts of the city, too. Islands might be the new fad.

The islands appear to be architectural affectations that serve only to remind motorists that they are unwanted. Perhaps they are intended to be calming. We seem to elect people who, if they even own a car, do so reluctantly and apparently believe that motoring is a wild exercise fraught with anxiety and danger. So, they fuss and jimmy with perfectly good streets and create, to induce calming, bump-outs, more bike lanes and islands, which only increase blood pressure.

Perhaps the islands are meant to be sanctuaries for pedestrians. Maybe pedestrians are now supposed to cross streets in two stages. Make it to an island. Wait. Make it the rest of the way.

Meanwhile, motorists who used to be able to cross Fairview and stay on the same street now have to turn, find an island-free opening and resume their journey with some extra driving.

Gee, but they just don’t like internal combustion engines and have done a bang-up job of demonizing them. It came by email the other day that St. Paul is going to have a sustainability celebration at Dual Citizen Brewery on Raymond Avenue at 6 p.m. Nov. 13. Council member Mitra Jalali is the featured guest. Directions were offered to the brewery for those attending by bicycle, bus or light rail.

But not by car. The snub had to be intentional.

I suppose going to a sustainability celebration by car is like wearing white socks with a suit. You’d stand out. Well, the biking season is about over. And the buses and trains use loads of fossil fuels. Somehow, that gets excused by our collectivist overseers. The event will conclude with “a big announcement.” We can only imagine.

Most of the people I know, lifelong St. Paul residents, maintain their car, keep their house in repair, cut the grass and shovel the walk. And these same people, the taxpayers, wish the city council would stick to the basics of running the city and stop dreaming up ways to change our lives. They just created new zoning regulations, for example, that actually frown on single-family housing in favor of squeezing as many people onto a block as possible.

Once we all live as renters in triplexes, rooming houses and apartment blocks, they imagine public transportation will become an inevitability and they will have successfully gotten rid of the private automobile.

Needing or wanting a car should not result in admonition. And we’ll learn to live with islands. It’s just the way things are going, the streets will be designed like miniature golf courses. We’ll have to drive through the windmill to reach the island.

Joe Soucheray’s email address is jsoucheray@pioneerpress.com. Soucheray’s “Garage Logic” podcast can be heard at garagelogic.com.

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Amy Lindgren

“Send me your materials.”

Résumé? Curriculum vitae? Biography? What should executive-level candidates forward when recruiters make this request? Lesson one for executive job search: In this situation feel free to reply, “What do you prefer?”

For the moment, the most adaptable and widely used document is your résumé, so that’s a good place to start. Once you have that organized, you can improve your LinkedIn profile, draft a one-page bio, and consider whether a CV is needed. Here are some tips to help you get prepared.

Résumés for the C-Suite

If you’re focused on a C-suite position, that is, a leadership position with the word “chief” in the title, your résumé needs to promote your “C” qualities. For example, CFOs (chief financial officer) are long past the days of entering financial data or developing quarterly reports. Those skills are assumed but unlikely to be used — which means they don’t need to be highlighted.

If a CFO isn’t going to showcase accounting skills and a CTO (chief technology officer) isn’t going to brag about software packages, what are they going to describe instead?

Leadership. Plain and simple, executives are hired to lead. They must also know their discipline, of course, but they’re unlikely to be hired based on that knowledge alone. To position yourself as an executive or high-level director, follow these résumé strategies:

1. Lead with an Executive Summary: Also called a Professional Profile, this short synopsis provides your leadership experience and related training while setting the tone for the résumé.

2. Highlight key leadership skills: Some categories might include: Strategic planning, change management, diversity and inclusion, financial oversight, team building, and communication. Think about your own leadership skills, and then create a résumé category to call them out with some detail provided.

3. Demonstrate expertise in your discipline and industry: Back to our CFO or CTO example — what are they specifically good at in their disciplines or industries? Examples could include corporate tax strategies, mergers, cyber security, etc. Either candidate might be well-versed in an industry, such as hospitality or retail. Create another résumé category to capture these points, making it easier for employers and recruiters to see your strengths.

4. Keep job descriptions short: Focus on numbers and high-level projects rather than daily tasks. For example, “Led 30+ accounting team members in preparing / reviewing financials for six corporate acquisitions over two years, totaling $3.6B in value.” The goal is to provide a scope of your capabilities, not an exhaustive litany of the steps involved.

5. Consider a Projects section: If our CTO masterminded an enterprisewide technology changeover, that might merit its own paragraph. Consider major projects you led to see if any fit this concept.

6. Include community engagement: Have you led fundraising committees or served on a nonprofit board? Perhaps you helped your house of worship improve their building with a new kitchen. The higher the level of your community involvement, the more important it is to include on your résumé.

Is a CV needed?

In most fields, that answer will be no. The CV, or curriculum vitae, is a traditional tool used by physicians, academics, attorneys and others with letters after their names (MD, PhD, etc.). It’s generally used when moving from one “like” position to the next — from being a doctor in one hospital to being a doctor in another hospital, for example. But if this doctor is now applying to be a hospital executive, the hiring committee might be calling for a CV. If so, the best strategy is to modify the traditional CV format with some of the elements used for executive résumés.

What about LinkedIn?

Yes, you need a LinkedIn profile. It’s one of the first places recruiters will check, either on a blind search for candidates, or as part of their due diligence after receiving your résumé. One strategy is to modify your LinkedIn as a mirror of your résumé, by including elements from your leadership and expertise categories in the About section of the LinkedIn profile.

And a bio too?

Maybe, and maybe not. An executive bio can be useful in your candidate package, describing you with more warmth and personality than your other materials can do. It’s usually just a few paragraphs with a photo, but it needs to feel professional to be effective.

Now that you know more about the materials used in executive job search, you can get started on creating yours. For more background on executive job search, check my columns from the last two weeks on strategies for identifying and finding high-level roles. Next week we’ll complete the series with leadership books that have crossed my desk recently.

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Amy Lindgren owns a career consulting firm in St. Paul. She can be reached at alindgren@prototypecareerservice.com.