My point was that when an accountant takes the path to IT (for example), it’s not a wholesale change in the same respect of an accountant who becomes a doctor.

To change to some other knowledge intensive jobs (e.g. accounting to medicine) later in the working life requires, as Andrew N notes, massive upheaval, and so in that sense there is that “career trap” that you mention. However the less intensive change (accountant to IT) may be less so.

“Tertiary education providers offer qualifications not as lifelong durables but as products with a limited shelf-life,”

I think this is something we can generally agree with.

Accounting is a knowledge-intensive area: the accountant who goes into management consulting or IT, using their accounting skills and mindset, has nonetheless changed careers. So too the nurse who becomes a phrmaceutical sales rep, or the schoolteacher who does corporate training as part of an HR role.

The increasing number of law graduates has led to a lower proportion of them practicing as lawyers. Law-firm partners with a pass Bachelor of Laws decades old determine the careers of Masters graduates with better marks and a wider scope of education.

Tertiary education providers offer qualifications not as lifelong durables but as products with a limited shelf-life, designed to propel you into the next stage of your career and available for upgrade when that qualification too fades.

Knowledge-intensive jobs are not career traps, quite the opposite. High-paying knowledge-intensive jobs minimise the risk inherent in changing careers.

Brett - I think that’s right, but as knowledge-intensive jobs become a larger proportion of the total, aggregate career mobility would go down even with no change among other groups.

With the exception of grandfathered conditions, cradle to the grave conditions generally aren’t offered anymore: defined benefit super plans etc generally don’t exist (again, except for the grandfathered conditions).

Most effective HR departments are still looking at ways to keep their best people, but I think it’s generally understood that even in well run organisations (from a HR perspective), attrition is going to happen, and so policies are built with that in mind.

Taking the statement:

“There is one reason to think that it might be lower, which is that as the number of knowledge intensive high-skill jobs increases, so do the disincentives for starting again in a different career

That may well be true in truly knowledge intensive arenas, however, I would suggest that it’s relevent only to those areas and not generally applicable.

In the period from World War II until about twenty years ago the Australian economy demanded workers with a higher level of skill, which required more formal education and tended to result in specialised skills and defined markets for those skills. Workers, having come out of the Depression (whre the jack-of-all-trades was best placed to take advantage of scarce opportunities - this period was probably the apogee of this quality), tended to see security in specialisation. Union membership peaked during this period as workers in a long-term relationship with a particular trade or industry identified their interests with the union within that trade/industry.

Those who see the modern era as a period of decline from the certainties of the postwar heights should recognise that it was a highly unusual period of history, whose confluence of highly particular circumstances has now passed.

A case could be made that women have always been multi-career workers. Motherhood requires a variety of skills in itself, and women have assumed much of the work in their husbands’/fathers’ businesses for which they have traditionally received little credit.

Over the past twenty years the Australian economy has reverted to its natural state in demanding jacks-of all-trades. The difference is that the nature of those trades has changed; rather than low-skilled rural employment, the demand is for higher-skill work which requires workers to undergo training and retraining, often at their own expense. Union membership is in sharp decline. Their role in training is largely limited to safety, not in facilitating the upward mobility that comes from retraining (especially if it takes the trainee outside the union’s trade/industry, which would be against their interests). Longterm employees are regarded with suspicion as to a quality highly prized these days: their ability to be flexible.

But I should have thought of the experiences of my ancestors (years idly spent in the State Library exhaustively tracing the family trees) because it’s surprising how much those people moved about (sailboats!) and how many different things they did. Not quite sure how I came to be descended from such confident risk-takers.

As you suggest, there may be a point at which workers have in effect changed careers, but the large sunk cost in initial qualifications and job experience means that the incentives are strongly for building on an existing career rather than making a large leap.

It’s pretty clear that further uni qualifications will be a larger part of this than in the past, but not the 3 or 4 year u/grad degrees that are normally the foundation of a career. So while the uni sources quoted above are probably mistaken in suggesting that multiple careers are more common than in the past, they would be correct in saying that further study is a more important part of career development than it once was.