#14 Unique Value on the Job Market

Every person has unique value to offer on the job market based on their life experiences, skills, and personality.

Or do they?

What really matters on the job market? What does job market mean?

It’s called job market for a reason — it’s impersonal.

Value on the job market is defined by the role and whether a person can fill that role effectively and consistently. Different combinations of life experiences, skills, and personality may equate to the same value, but each of these experiences is not a unique value to this market, nor does society take into account these combinations in considering its health.

What does matter when assessing whether a society is healthy? The country’s GDP, the overall health of the population, life expectancy, infant mortality for starters.

These parameters are measured at the level of the masses, not individuals. Collectively, the roles of the economy and job market that would result in favorable conditions regarding these parameters would be created and filled over and over again.

And they have.

Industrialization, necessitated by population growth, has made the job market a mass market, and each industrial revolution has reformed the distribution of jobs on the market.

Population growth and longer life expectancy across the world has produced the need for more people in jobs considered hard to attain — such as those requiring higher degrees, higher technical training, or both. Higher demand has created higher supply. Medical and legal professionals are now mass-produced, perhaps at lower throughput than accountants, bank tellers, school teachers, and automotive repair professionals, mass-produced nonetheless.

Many argue that these points were true in the previous generation, the generation seeking employment after finishing college in the 1960s through 90s and staying in those roles possibly for decades. Many argue that, with the world changing as fast as it has, becoming a VUCA world — that is, volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous, that this is no longer the era of employment and stability, that it is now the era where more people than ever do contract-based or freelancing work, and therefore we are all fighting to stand out and therefore to express our unique value on online profiles and social media.

It is also the era where those of us who do seek and find employment will need to upskill within 6 months of beginning said employment. In that case, the combination of the previous experience combined with the new skills we have yet to know that we need gained either through hustling as a free agent or reskilling on the job or somewhere in between — all of this creates unique value.

It may be unique and it may be value. Is it unique value?

Unique value would mean that each person can offer something to the role that no one else can.

That’s unlikely.

Have you ever needed to work with a tax preparer, accountant, notary, lawyer, or financial planner? Have you ever needed someone to repair your computer, home cabinets, plumbing, electrical system, or internet? Have you ever needed someone to design your business card, website, clothes, plan an event, vacation, nails, or hair? Have you ever seen a doctor or bought produce from a farmer?

Some of these roles, like internet technologist, have existed as long as the technology existed. Some of these, like accountants and farmers, have existed in some form as long as civilization has dictated the need for organized ways to produce food and exchange goods.

Regardless, when you need someone in one of these roles, you find one.

This is the job market. The job market will add new roles, carry some through the generations as long as there is humanity, and drop from the market those roles for which there are no longer buyers. Every role that experiences a vacancy while remaining part of the job market soon gets filled by another individual or absorbed across individuals with overlapping roles, and every new role worth creating should be important enough to outlast the working years of the individual who created it. The job market will transform to fulfill society’s needs, thereby we will all transform to keep up with it. The job market is agnostic to the unique value of individuals.

—

This is Day #14 of Don’t Break the Chain, a master writing course by Cole Schafer.

Today’s prompt: Tell something that you believe in your heart of hearts to be true. Then tell yourself why you’re wrong.