Forget the ladder to success. Use the web, instead.
I’m not talking about the World Wide Web (to which you gain access via the Internet), but the one that U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich so often refers to in his speeches.
“Think of your career less as a ladder and more like a web,” he says about building a successful career. “Webs have a center but no top and a lot of paths that connect. Forget the climb. Smart workers move along webs, earning more from skills they have gained, not seniority.”
Reich’s web, as I visualize it, reaches out in several directions to help people learn and grow and to encompass new ideas and networks of contacts and friends.
Ladders are rigid, but webs are flexible, and with changes taking place so rapidly in the work world, employees who opt for the flexibility of a web will be far more valuable to employers than those who insist on trying to go onward and upward, a rung at a time.
It’s the perfect structure for the new labor force in which employees will move “not only from job to job but also from skill to skill,” according to Reich.
“Informed people no longer take steps on a ladder,” said Carl Fillichio, a Labor Department representative in Reich’s office. “Corporate flow charts look more like kaleidoscopes and less like pyramids. A web gives you many more paths to travel–paths that ultimately connect.”
Reich invented the accurate and humanistic term, “anxious generation” to describe today’s insecure workers, so if he says that a web is the better way to go, it probably is.
“There’s not a clear path to the top anymore,” said Robin Ryan, a Seattle career counselor and author of “60 Seconds and You’re Hired” (Impact, $9.95). “The way to get ahead is to learn all the skills available, to be responsive to all the options out there, to watch for opportunities and jump into them.”
Though what Ryan describes dovetails with Reich’s web theory, she has problems with it.
“His concept mainly applies to large companies, and that’s not where America works–95 percent of U.S. employees work in small businesses with fewer than 100 people,” said Ryan, a licensed career counselor who has been practicing for 18 years. “And, there still are some people who can go straight up, such as doctors and accountants.”
But she agrees with Reich’s admonition to acquire new skills.
“Learning all you can–in particular the skills that are hot, such as computer technology–is the way to advance your careers, because that’s what allows people to move into a better job,” Ryan said.
Songsri Klinkao knows how to spin the web–by hard work.
Klinkao manages Dao Thai restaurant in Chicago. It seats 150 people and has a staff of eight.
“I started out as a waitress in 1992,” said Klinkao, who immigrated to the U.S. from Bangkok in 1990 and attended Cochise Community College in Sierra Vista, Ariz.
“I did everything that has to be done, and I still do,” said Klinkao, who was promoted to assistant manager in 1993.
She still does everything: “I sweep the floor, make sure the restaurant is clean, check the washroom, treat the customers like friends, take the phone orders, check orders, do the cashier work, pack the carry-out orders and dish out the food,” she said. “I also clean off the dishes and glasses and run around when the waiters and waitresses are busy.”
Klinkao also comes in on her day off to fill in for people on vacation. “I don’t mind it, because I give it my all,” Klinkao said. “When you try to solve problems and learn by experience, you get the next job. And I know every corner of my job. I also know that whatever the next thing is that I do, I’ll make a success of it.”
That sounds to me like another good definition of Reich’s “web.”
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Send e-mail to ckleiman@tribune.com
