Taylor Pearson
The End of Jobs
ISBN: 978-1-61961-336-2
Are we at the “end of jobs?” Most people’s first reaction is probably fear or dismay. Unfortunately, jobs that seemed like sure bets in the world pre-corona aren’t anymore. Entrepreneurship is the key to surviving this unpredictable world. Thankfully for all of us, entrepreneurship has become more accessible to those all around the world over the last few decades. As other books that I’ve reviewed have mentioned, the tools to build a business have become cheaper, faster, and available to anyone, anywhere. The democratization of entrepreneurship is here, just in time for the new world in which we find ourselves.
Since entrepreneurship is available now to so many people, how do you make yourself stand out? Pearson discusses “the long-tail effect” – a way to make yourself irreplaceable. Just as the Internet allows more people to access more opportunities, it also allows you to find out where the greatest opportunities are with just a little bit of work. Those “long-tail” opportunities are fringe cases that many times require special skills or knowledge to do: everything from working with specialized materials, to mastering an obscure programming language, to the ability to apply a specific subset of knowledge to a major problem.
Long-tail careers in the new economy are the opposite of the old economy, where non-specialized laborers and some semi-specialized professionals could find “short-tail” work anywhere – the “cogs in a machine” scenario, where one person is easily swapped out for another in any location, based on profit margins. As we’ve seen over the last 30-40 years, and especially since the beginning of 2020, the old economy is dead. The “safe” job is gone, even in professional fields. Education and training is not enough to survive, and the days of school-to-career movement is gone.
Pearson covers a number of strategies to be part of the new, “long-tail” economy. While education is still important in the scheme of things, it can be both formal and informal. Formal education is a starting point, but so many people have access to all levels of formal education, so you need to set yourself apart by going beyond the classroom and teaching yourself skills to find your place in the long tail. This is best illustrated in the student loan crisis, where many with specialized formal education find themselves working in jobs to scrape together an income, completely under-utilizing that high-dollar formal degree.
Like many other books I’ve reviewed in this series on my blog, there’s a fair amount of what I like to call “entrebro-execuspeak” in the writing – short sentences, short paragraphs, and a lot of optimistic cliches. There are a lot of the usual business book buzzwords, which is pretty standard for the genre. It’s meant to be digested quickly – none of the books in this section of the bookstore are meant to be headscratchers. The book is a great read on a train or a business flight, when you don’t have to be fully engaged, but still want something to pass the time. I read this cover to cover on a cross-country flight, and it was a nice distraction while traveling.
Overall, 8/10, would recommend for those who need a bit of motivation in this unpredictable time. If anything, this is the best time to follow the advice in this book and look for your place in the long tail. Like the recession in 2008-2009, entrepreneurship is the key to pulling the United States and the world out of an economic tailspin. Understanding that the old, safe economy is long gone is the first step to embracing entrepreneurship, and Pearson does a great job illustrating the opportunity available right now to people who are willing to look.