Are You Ready for Change in Your Work? Take This Test

The new year is always a good time to take stock of past, present, and future. Law professor Miriam Cherry offers this useful chart to track macro-level changes in how our work in changing, largely due to technology but also social forces.

I’ve summarized these trends to help you figure out if—or whether— your work is changing or could change. To make this useful, I suggest two quick types of questions. First, run down the list and try to classify how your work is structured. Second, run the list again but think about whether or how your work could move in the direction of “digital” or “crowdwork.” I’ll share my results below.

Features of Job                 Industrial                            Digital             Crowdwork

Training                            Employer-Specific            General              None

Structure of Tasks           Jobs, Narrow Projects       Broad Project    Micro Tasks

Location of Work            Employer’s Office            Varies (Home)   Online

Duration of Work            Employee’s Lifetime       Weeks, Months   Hours, Minutes

Decision-Making             Hierarchical Supervision  Peer Group        Auto Management

Authority Relations        Top-Down, Rules              Discretion         Auto Management

Security                             Tied to Job                         Employability   None

Pay                                     Longevity-linked              Market-based    Piece rate

Career Benefits                 Lifetime Tenure               Training             Flex scheduling

Promises by Employer    Promotion                          Networks          Your own boss

***

My work as a tenured professor is strictly industrial but it can change and likely will change. Already, the location of my work is changing with the advent of my online course. In time, my course could be crowdsourced to a group of casually organized online labor and employment lawyers who interact with students on selected topics. This type of change would be a detriment to my employment, and would create a different learning experience for my students—likely more practical, along the lines of “how-to-do-this-subject” (I cover this aspect, too) rather than broader thinking about what these cases and laws mean and how they are changing. It would greatly lower the cost of a professional degree, but possibly degrade the value of a diploma.