Changing Times

How has the year started for you.?

Are you dreading your mandate targets this year?  Are you waiting to get your bonus so you can quit?  Are you loving your position and are excited about the business prospects for 2015?

Whatever it is, I wish the best for you for a happy 2015.

More Canadians tend to say that they enjoyed their industry's more 10 years ago.  Maybe competition was easier, maybe their customers were more captive, maybe their company was not so financially focused in every activity they conducted.  Whatever the reason, it tends to be the sentiment.

One thing that is omnipresent now more than in the past, is the desire for people to change industries and to try something new. It is refreshing and it almost feels like it is an awakening for some people, as they get a better handle on who they are, and what it is that is not making them happy.

It is sometimes unfortunate that this is also coming at a time where it is still difficult to make an industry change when companies have very little appetite to accept industry outsiders or have any desire in training new employees.

The progressive industries will continue to be the ones that take chances on people who bring a different skill set, and the stagnant industries will be the ones that continue to recirculate the same people and ideas.

Anyone who compares their job to theirs from 5 years ago is often blown away by how different the environment is now.  Global competition is so strong that there are no points in the year when people are allowed to "mail in their job".  I love the quote, "it's not so much that the hard times are coming, but more that the soft times have left."

The good news is that technology is closing the gap of this hurdle for many.

Everything is changing but it will not all be bad news. The retail landscape is changing with Target and the inevitable with Sears, but we are also seeing many innovative and small batch manufacturing coming back to Canada and the creation of many smaller innovative companies providing products and services.

A respected executive I interviewed last week compared what is happening right now to what North America experienced in the 1950's.  New products and services are exploding, not on a large format scale but in a great many small companies.  There is almost a redistribution of types of jobs that has matched the redistribution of wealth.

Technology has now allowed companies to form a lot more quickly with less capital, so there is reason to be excited about the future.  Technology will also allow for niche industries to form which will take advantage of some peoples industry knowledge, but give them technology to tweak their background that allows then to tweak their background and allow for someone to completely reposition themselves.  Loyalty, crm marketing and online payment businesses are technology areas that are now hiring people who have specific industry relationships (consumer goods, retail, manufacturing, importing), but then convert those people into technology employees and thus allow them to build themselves a longer shelf life. 

This allows people to make an easier transition from industries that no longer give them the charge that they need to get up in the morning.

It is not all doom and gloom.

Farewell,

Mike