At the time, I remember thinking that constantly looking for your next gig sounded like an exhausting way to make a living.  What about benefits?  Career Development?  Was this really a good thing?

What happened?  Well, in A/E, the closest we’ve come to the scenario above is outsourcing, and that happens pretty rarely in our market space.  I’d say that other industries are better suited to utilizing outsourcing for their benefit.

This doesn’t mean that there hasn’t been a change in the A/E consultant’s employment paradigm; The change has certainly occurred.   But unlike the scenario painted above, this change has been employee-driven.

Our industry generally hires talent for specific types of projects, with the inherent promise that we have a machine in place to continue to “feed” the employees as key projects pass.  While an individual performs a functional (technical) role, they are simultaneously gleaning skills in maneuvering the team, office, organization and market as a whole.   Functional skills and organizational skills represent two different axes on the career development chart.

As organizations have become flatter, and “corporate ladders” have shed rungs, employees have adapted the way that we perceive our careers.  Employment tenures are shorter, as in the contract-for-hire scenario, but professionals’ demand for diversified experiences is what is driving it.  We now look at each axis to find potential growth opportunity.

For example, Mike can bring his function skills – Highway-centric NEPA Planning — to a new employer where he will apply his expertise to passenger rail corridors.  The resulting experience serves to grow Mike’s functional domain.  Karen can move on to hold the same function in another organization – that of Manager of Traffic Engineering – yet fulfill an additional organization role of business development lead, an organizational role which was very competently covered within her last employer’s operation by someone else.

Career paths are now plotted in this fashion:  Employees set long term goals and look for a mix of experiences which add to the figurative toolbox necessary to achieve the goal(s).  Often, this means making the choice to change employers at each juncture, rather than wait out the inertia of a functioning organization which has no need to shake things up.

The fact is, companies don’t have the infrastructure they used to…the ladder is often very short (and broad), and you can’t ascend it in a direct fashion.  So, professionals have adapted.  No longer is your career defined by a ladder of increasing responsibility as you “climb” the corporate hierarchy, with an ever increasing technical or organizational domain in your purview.

Your value today, and your ability to contribute to any organization, is better defined by the parts in your greater body of work.   If we’ve ever spoken, you know I call this your professional toolbox, and in it you hold skills developed while fulfilling a number of different — often lateral — roles that are technical, organizational, and sales related.   Your objective in this modern-day game of life is to collect the right tools to provide you the foundation to reach your professional goal.

Often, the acquisition of these tools will require you to change companies and jobs.   From my view, this is the extent of “contract work” in the A/E consulting marketplace…where YOU, the employee, is in the driver seat.

This third tipping point, in my experience, is at least 90% accurate. I have been reticent to mention it because it is gender-specific to men, but upon reflection, it is too important not to bring to your attention.

Without a doubt, within AE consulting space, the pending or new arrival of a child into the family is a major contributor to job search behavior. I say this is gender-specific, because we gals are not dummies….we are inclined to “stay put” for the FMLA benefits. **

I am neither a psychologist nor a scientist, but if I had to boil it down to biology, I’d guess that this is some type of latent “provider gene” in action, the modern-day equivalent to stepping up the hunt for food to feed a growing family. It might be the first child, it might be a successive child, but when I find a candidate with a bun-in-the-family-oven, I know he has anxiety about advancing his career.

It’s not overt; he doesn’t recognize it as a factor at all. What is he thinking? If the family is considering becoming a traditional one-income household, his motivations are fairly obvious. However, this behavior occurs equally in families with two income earners. Is he thinking about braces, summer camp and college tuition so early?

I tell these blokes it’s a lousy time to be looking for a career move. So much of the world as they know it is about to change, why shake things up even more? But they don’t listen to me.

Male readers, look back on your own careers. What lifetime events were in play when you made certain job changes? I guarantee you will be able to correlate a job change, seeking a promotion or other career milestone with the pending or recent arrival of at least one child.

The feedback is the same whenever I share this tidbit of information with managers: they were not even aware of it when it was happening to THEM, and they quickly begin to catalog the life events of those recently hired and recently departed.  I smugly enjoy their epiphanies.

** Why the gents are not equally motivated by this perk is a whole other discussion that we can cover over a few glasses of wine, ladies.

I’ve tried it both ways, and my preference squarely rests on the side of working out the kinks before an offer is on the table. But does it work that way when a third party like myself is not involved? When I advocate this approach, am I asking for a marked departure from the usual offer process? How are negotiations handled in your consulting firm?

A written offer seems so final and official (it is) and perhaps this is why some firms prefer to make their offers on paper without a lot of discussion before hand. If yours is one of them, please explain (and you can do so anonymously) why it works for you. Is there some data “out there” which supports the notion that an individual is less likely to negotiate a written offer?

As a recruiter, I am trained to take care of the details before the offer arrives. Still so, it’s not always possible or preferable to do that. However, I’ve never had a first volley written offer accepted without some type of amendment. I tend to believe it’s naive for a firm to expect that a written offer will be accepted at face value. [Serious caveat: I am speaking of offers to experienced professionals, not entry level or junior level candidates].

What do you think?  If you’re in the candidate’s chair, how do you feel about this process?

However, there are a lot of individuals who are willing to look at a new opportunity. Why? The simple answer is “insurance.“ There are some really great people in our market who find themselves in a situation for which they have no recent benchmark: light backlog, delay of contract execution due to funding difficulties, watching peers lose their jobs, etc. These individuals are more receptive than ever to investigating opportunities, but that doesn’t mean when the dialogue culminates that they are willing to go anywhere.  

What is your firm doing to make sure they won’t?