Brock Kilbourne Business 1050-044 April 23, 14 E-Portfolio Toward a Career Resilient Workforce Through a collaborated effort from

Robert H. Waterman, Jr., Judith A. Waterman, and Betsy A. Collard, Toward a Career Resilient Workforce was created. These three individuals have played, and still play, an important role as directors and mangers of several different high level companies and have authored several books related to company management. Some of these companies include Career Management Group based out of San Mateo, California, and Career Action Center out of Palo Alto, California. Toward a Career Resilient Workforce is essentially a new covenant based around the old employee-employer relationship and much improved. It focuses on the role companies must play in providing their employees with advancement opportunities in a world were just one skill set cannot and will not guarantee future employment. Employees who want to expand their horizons and knowledge are better driven and highly productive. Employers must exploit this by allowing their internal workforce to move into the future with the company, rather then constantly looking for replacements. Enabling employees to excel allows the company to excel and allows for a more diverse workforce that is able to shift responsibilities around the board. The book was written in the United States of America and published in 1994. This was a monumental time for computer technologies and the advancements thereof. Internet, cellular, and software babies and giants alike were headed for an expansion like no other, an expansion still seen today. A new vision and style of management was exciting, scary, and necessary to help adjust to the fever that was the beginning of the digital age. The text is relevant to business today for a simple reason. It was created for the beginning of something huge, but its implementation would take years to perfect and adjust for specific applications. Today, in 2014, we can experience and see first hand the successes or failures of such a modified workforce structure. The old system, or covenant, had a longtime truth of promise of employment. As an employee, you were guaranteed a certain amount of pay, salary, and/or length of employment, usually by working one specific job or field. Even when hard times arise, there was a promise of severance to compensate for lost time and pay. In the new age market, the company is the focal priority. Minimizing cost to maximize profit it the go-to method, giving rise to downsizing, the process of cutting employees to cut labor cost. This new rise in lean-management means a new protocol to help laid-off employees with alternative work, counseling, or skills training. The modern worker must be buoyant and robust in order to endure in such fast paced, ever replaceable workforce. Continually seeking new skills to add to their docket gives them greater range throughout their field but also gives the company greater range as well. By encouraging and providing the support for such diversity allows a company to stay ahead of the changing trends in workforce skills and requirements. Happy and skilled employees lead to a successful and enduring employer. Where should this

encouragement come from? The top of course. It is important that along with the encouragement of the management, and willingness of the employee, the initial steps should be proposed and stressed by those at the very head of the company and continually emphasized. They are the head, and without the head, there is a lack of internal control. Now this new ideal of career resiliency is all well and good, but there are a few shortcuts in the modern systems that have reared up as easier and more cost effective, methods such as partnership and outsourcing have taken a stance as the effective route. It is clear to see that if this career-resilient method had taken a heavy hold on the American workforce, the firestorm of economic issues that America has experienced in the last decade would have been drastically reduced if not suppressed. The implementation of employee-employer relationships and a career-resilient workforce designed twenty years ago would have improved our economic climate, for the employee and the employer alike, spilling from the private sector to government agencies alike. The agendas created at the top of our leaderships that hold precedence, are old and outdated, causing more harm than good. There are successful strategies; career-resilient workforces are one of them. A standard method of implementation from government working with private sectors must be adopted at a high pace level to ensure the benefits are reaped by the nation as whole, not just the one percent.