The Episodic Career Book Summary - The Episodic Career Book explained in key points

The Episodic Career summary

Name: The Episodic Career
Author: Farai Chideya

Farai Chideya

How To Thrive At Work in the Age of Disruption

Table of Contents

The Episodic Career
Summary of 8 key ideas

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What’s in it for me? A guide to surviving the contemporary labor market.

The pace of change is relentless in today’s world. From dating, to the way we eat, read and travel, innovation is the new normal. That’s a blessing when it comes to finding a new mate, picking a restaurant or getting a ride across town. Making a living, however, is a different story.

The job prospects of the average 25-year-old today are all but unrecognizable to someone who retired at the end of the twentieth century. Back then, things were pretty straightforward. You went to school, graduated, got a job with a firm and stayed there until the end of your career. Today, most folks switch jobs every few years and patch a career together out of gigs across multiple industries. This is the age of the “episodic career,” and it can be tough. If you want to keep up with the competition, let alone pull ahead, you have to be constantly switched on.

That takes its toll. Unsurprisingly, stress and anxiety are on the rise. So how do you thrive in such an unpredictable labor market? Well, that’s just what we’ll be exploring in these blinks.

Along the way, you’ll find out

why companies are less inclined to invest in employees’ skill sets;
how to negotiate your salary; and
what to do to fight discrimination in the workplace.

Stress is bad for your health and happiness, but you can get a handle on it right now.

It’s hard to imagine work without stress. When the author conducted a national survey in 2015, a full 61 percent of all participants said they had prioritized their job over their health and happiness at one time or another. That’s a problem.

Take it from internationally renowned stress expert Roberta Lee. While researching her 2009 book, The SuperStress Solution, Lee concluded that workplace stress was as bad for your health as smoking a pack of cigarettes a day.

The reason for that is simple – stress causes a spike in your cortisol levels. Now, in small doses, there’s nothing wrong with cortisol. In fact, this steroid hormone actually helps you process tense or dangerous situations. The constant overproduction of cortisol, however, weakens your immune system. That has all sorts of secondary effects, from osteoporosis to memory loss.

If that wasn’t bad enough, Nobel prize-winning doctor Elizabeth Blackburn has argued that stress also makes the body’s cells age faster. Luckily, plenty of simple strategies can help you get a handle on your stress levels, even if you can’t immediately quit your job.

Here’s the first tip – take breaks. Just five minutes away from your smartphone and email inbox can make all the difference to your day. Pick a quiet spot and spend five minutes there a few times each day. When you return to your desk, you’ll feel calmer, energized and more productive.

The other great stress-buster is exercise. Whether you choose to cycle to work or hit the gym after office hours is up to you, but it’s worth going the extra mile sometimes. Push yourself to the limit of exhaustion in a boot camp-style workout session, and you’ll gain a sense of deep relaxation.

Now that we’ve looked at how to beat stress, let’s turn to what causes it.

Employment has become harder to find, and disruptive innovation has created insecurity.

You’ve probably come across politicians angrily accusing the unemployed of being lazy, claiming the solution to life’s problems is to work harder. It’s an easy answer, but it often misses the mark. That’s because unemployment isn’t a matter of laziness.

The stats back that up. As the American Economic Policy Institute’s data shows, jobs have become a scarce commodity since the 2008 financial crisis. In April 2014, for example, there were 2.4 million positions available in the US. Sounds like a lot, right? Well, it does until you know how many folks were looking for a job that same month – 9.8 million.

The skills required for work are changing, and you have to take charge of your continuous education.

Employment has changed in recent decades. In the past, most folks got a job after graduating from school and then stayed with the same employer for the rest of their careers, slowly inching their way up the company ladder. Today, however, careers are episodic, and employees move from job to job in an increasingly fast-changing labor market.

The upshot? No one can afford to rest on their laurels. The pace of innovation is rapid, and workers in every economic sector are constantly trying to stay ahead of the competition. Take an example from the author’s career. Back in 1995, she learned how to use HTML to create websites for her news stories. That was a sound investment at the time – after all, lots of people were learning the coding language to give them an edge in the job market.

To navigate job crises, be honest with yourself and others.

Working life is full of struggles and difficulties. Some, like spats with your colleagues, are fairly trivial. Others, like losing your job, are much larger issues. In this blink, we’ll explore a couple of strategies you can use to make things easier when the going gets tough.

The key to navigating crises is to be honest with yourself. Take it from the author. After working in journalism for a number of years, she realized that her chosen career wasn’t working out. She didn’t like being called up at any time, day or night, and sent on an assignment.

Willpower is crucial in bouncing back to job happiness, and it’s never too late for a new start.

The author interviewed Kristine Danielle while researching this book. Kristine had a rough start in life and ended up addicted to drugs and working as a prostitute in Seattle. Her story makes you wonder how folks ever manage to turn things around and create a happy life for themselves.

The answer is deceptively simple – willpower.

To find a new job, reach out to distant contacts and be realistic about salary expectations.

Are you unemployed or unhappily employed? Don’t worry – it happens to everyone at one point or another, especially in such a fast-changing labor market. The key to getting out of this situation is to maximize the efficiency of your job search. Let’s find out how.

The best place to start is to reach out to distant contacts. Naturally, you’ll want your close friends on hand to give you emotional support. But when it comes to landing a new position, you’re better off casting a wider net. That means making the most of your acquaintances.

Be realistic about the effectiveness of online job searches and stay focused while looking for work.

There’s no doubt that online job listings on platforms like LinkedIn and Indeed are some of the most convenient ways to look for new positions – but how effective are they? In short, if you want a job, you might just have to leave the comfort of your own home.

Take it from Pastor Richard N. Bolles, the author of the 1970 guide to job seeking, What Color is Your Parachute. An instant classic, Bolles’ study has been updated every year since its publication. According to 2015 data included in one of those updates, online job searches only lead to a position in four percent of all cases. To put that in perspective, knocking on doors at small local companies had a 47 percent success rate. Employing a firm to do the legwork for you, by comparison, had a 28 percent success rate.

Discrimination is still prevalent in the workplace, but you can fight back.

As if the labor market weren’t tough enough, laws protecting employees against discrimination are also getting weaker. In 2013, for example, the US Supreme Court ruled that the law only recognized managerial discrimination if the offender had direct “supervisory power” over an employee. In other words, it’s only discrimination if the person has the power to fire you.

That’s an issue, especially as discrimination remains a common workplace problem. While researching her book, the author asked employees in a variety of fields if they had experienced discrimination at work. A full 31 percent of respondents said that they had. Even more troubling, 81 percent of those folks hadn’t reported the issue because they feared doing so would endanger their positions.

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What is The Episodic Career about?

The Episodic Career (2016) is a guide to the job market for the unemployed, unhappily employed and perennially stressed. Packed with actionable advice and tons of tips, these blinks will guide you through the inevitable setbacks of job-hunting and set you up for success.

Best quote from The Episodic Career

Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Dont lose faith.

—Farai Chideya

Who should read The Episodic Career?

Career counselors
Job hunters
Stressed employees

About the Author

Farai Chideya is a journalist, award-winning author and Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University. She is a regular contributor to the news outlet FiveThirtyEight and a frequent guest on TV and radio shows across the US.

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