average

Recently, I wrote about networking strategies that can help advance your career, and that got me to wondering what a “typical” career looks like these days. How have careers been affected by the Great Recession? Are people able to stay in a job and retire if they love it, or is the job market more chaotic than that? And what does it say about you either way? For instance, are there certain features of someone’s resume that might identify them as a baby boomer, Gen X, or millennial? Could that even pose an advantage or disadvantage for them?

Lifetime Careers and Pensions Have Gone the Way of the Dodo

People often fall prey to the “rosy retrospection” bias or fallacy, where they have a tendency to remember the past as being better than it actually was. So while your parents’ or grandparents’ generation would likely have said differently at the time, if you ask folks today about those past decades, they would tell you that it was a stable time when it wasn’t too hard to stay with one employer for all or the majority of their careers and retire with a fat pension.

Whether or not that was actually people’s lived experience, it is generally acknowledged that the retirement outlook for 20-somethings today is quite different. It is expected now that individuals will hold numerous jobs throughout their lifetimes. In fact, people may have not only different jobs, but different careers over the course of their working years.