Job nomad

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A job nomad is an employed person who jumps from one job to the next, not only from place to place, but often across the borders of states and continents.

Two types of job nomads

Wirtschaftswoche magazine differentiates between two types of job nomads:

  1. People who do not strive for a “chimney career” in a company, but look for new employers and clients like a “modern I-AG ” or who work entirely or at least in phases as self-employed;
  2. those who “have no choice but to become job nomads”.

The job nomad as a representative of a performance elite

Highly qualified job nomads are popular in the modern economy because they are flexible and mobile and often have higher skills than stationary long-term employees of a company. Young employees who are geographically independent and interested in international experience often also replace expatriates who leave their country of origin for some time in order to then lead a stationary life.

In 2010, trend researcher Sven Gábor Jánszky predicted for 2020 that there will then be many “patchworkers” who are not interested in “becoming strongly attached to a company. You come for an attractive project, stay for two years of development and move on. In 2020, highly specialized experts will jump from company to company every two years, lead innovation projects there and then move on again. They become job nomads who know that they are coveted and expensive. This creates major challenges for companies in recruiting and retaining these specialists, in managing corporate knowledge and in motivating these managers. "

Since this type of job nomad is paid relatively high, according to Jánszky, an "After Employment Marketing" ensures that the best employees are "magnetically" repelled and that job nomads are given a new task outside of the company that they leave when it is " most beautiful [sic!] ”.

Business flat-sharing communities at the locations of the companies for which the job nomads work temporarily are tailored to the needs of project workers.

Brigitte Hild shows the dark side of the way of life of a highly qualified job nomad: “Anyone who reorganizes their life in a new city without or far from their partner, must shoulder professional and cultural challenges alone. There is no one for whom an early evening is worthwhile. No one who carries the ups and downs of the initial phase in a new environment, takes on the home furnishings or ensures social contacts. Traditional contact exchanges such as schools abroad or international kindergartens also fall flat for singles. Many of them rush into work all the more doggedly; their careers become the sole purpose of their lives. As long as that doesn't exceed one's strength, everything is fine, but in the long run the one-sided lifestyle of many career-conscious young managers will take revenge through a veritable burnout . "

Highly qualified job nomads are also protected by the International Convention for the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families . This convention covers them as migrant workers , to whom the characteristics 2f (“project-related worker”), 2g (“worker approved for a specific occupation”) or 2h (“self-employed person”) of Art. 2 of the convention apply.

The job nomad as a marginal figure in the economy and society

Berthold Vogel at the 2016 Sociology Congress in Bamberg

Berthold Vogel, project manager at the Hamburg Institute for Social Research , sees the job nomads as a person who is constantly threatened with social decline due to the precariousness of their living situation: According to him, job nomads know themselves “well in the peripheral areas of the labor market [...]. That doesn't mean they're okay. Although they have developed certain skills that make their role as cross-border commuters easier, they see themselves under constant pressure and find themselves in a permanently tight financial situation. The job nomads know how to help each other in dealing with the authorities, but they often have to take state help in order to be able to make a living. They receive information about job opportunities through their social contacts, but this jumping from job to job also solidifies their marginal position. Many fighters can be found here who by no means correspond to the public resentment of passivity fed by the welfare state. You are socially very flexible and show a high level of competence to cope with the requirements of complicated labor markets. We encounter very different social and professional milieus among the job nomads. The spectrum spans unskilled workers and academics. In terms of labor market and employment policy, they are of course often a difficult case. They like to evade official employment offers and are reluctant to be “worked on” therapeutically and pedagogically; one often has the impression that they can best cope on their own, although they often complain about being on their own. "

In the USA, the type described by Vogel is referred to as belonging to a " gig economy " (a gig is an appearance on stage for which the actor is paid, who then has to take care of what he gets his next income with). “The typical gig worker drives for Uber or its competitor Lyft, brings ready meals to the door of the apartment, transports documents on his two-wheeler, looks after people in need of care or walks dogs.” Contrary to widespread prejudice, the “gig economy” in the USA in 2019 affects only one person Fraction, namely 0.5 percent, of the employed. Apart from that, there have always been such forms of life there. After the “ Great Depression ” from 2007, a large number of Americans occupied regular jobs in the following upswing, although “economists […] [had] predicted that more and more people would roam like cowboys, sometimes with this rancher, sometimes with that rancher would drift. "

reception

Some authors see life as a job nomad positively: "Why job hoppers are happier than so-called 'stuck' is easy to explain: Those who frequently gain experience in different jobs or companies acquire some soft skills in the course of their career that others only develop with great difficulty such as social competence - this is how job hoppers get to know the most diverse types of colleagues or customers and have to get along with them. Familiarization with constantly changing work environments trains comprehension and intelligence. With every new job, the learning curve is very high at the beginning, but the longer someone holds the position, the fewer new things are added and the motivation drops. [...] All of these factors lead to a happier working life for job hoppers. And if a man or woman is actually dissatisfied with a job - simply switch to a new one! "

Horst Opaschowski, on the other hand, doubts that there are voluntary job nomads: “The job nomad supposedly no longer wants to have a home and is constantly moving - from Hamburg to Dresden, from there to New York and then back to Madrid. He's always chasing the jobs. Not only does he have the partner in his life period, he also has a period job. […] [I] n reality it is different: what the employees really want are regular working conditions. ”In fact, until 2012 the average length of stay an employee spent in a German company barely changed. It is constant at an average of ten years. In the USA, too, the observable behavior of those in employment suggests that the majority appreciate permanent jobs with social security.

Journalists assess the situation differently, not always scientifically, but differently: “Self-employed people, especially freelancers and small commercial entrepreneurs, have opted for a kind of job nomadism, so to speak, of their own free will. For them it is normal from the start to constantly strive for further and new sources of income and to have a certain uncertainty about their financial future. You have taken the entrepreneur's risk. [...] As a rule, employees are forced to get involved in job nomadism, and thus involuntarily. If the labor market situation for employees were more positive and if the specter of permanent unemployment weren't constantly hovering over them, the proportion of voluntary employee job nomads would certainly be higher. "

It is also not necessarily beneficial for a career if the employer changes every two years or more. Many HR managers want flexible employees, but at the same time they often attribute a lack of loyalty to their current employer to those who change jobs more than every three to five years. A very frequent change, which is sometimes associated with bogus self-employment , is known in the Anglo-Saxon region as the gig economy . A survey by the McKinsey Global Institute of 8,000 participants from the USA, Great Britain, Germany, Sweden, France and Spain found that 30% of those surveyed are self-employed that they had not chosen voluntarily.

statistics

Empirical studies show that the willingness to move far away from the place of growing up for professional reasons is limited across Europe: According to a survey carried out in 2004, 86 percent of all German employees did not want to work abroad. According to this survey, the proportion of those who are willing to do so among the residents of countries in the European Union was 17 percent. Many Germans even feel uncomfortable when they are supposed to leave the room in which "their" dialect is spoken for a longer period of time, when they speak High German for work or when they use the usual formulations there after moving to another part of Germany (e . "Grüß Gott!") Should use. The Research Center Deutscher Sprachatlas sums it up: "Even within a geographical proximity, people on average seem unwilling to move into a culturally unfamiliar environment." This thesis is confirmed by a survey carried out in 2013, according to which 77 percent of all respondents in Germany said they would never have changed their place of residence for a new job.

A study on members of Generation Y published in the magazine Capital shows that in Germany the "frequent changers" among the employed university graduates earn on average more than 10,000 € a year less than the "few changers".

literature

  • Holger Floeting, Dietrich Henckel: Job nomads, black workers and Arab pizza bakers: “futures” of urban labor markets. In: German journal for municipal sciences . II / 2003 (2003), pp. 59-84.
  • Manfred Garhammer: About job hoppers and job nomads - time institutions and insecurity in the late modern world of work. In: Thomas S. Eberle, Achim Brosziewski, Christoph Maeder (eds.): Modern times . UVK-Verlag, 2001.
  • Rüdiger Klatt, Kerstin Nölle: Can job nomads do more? Competence profiles of employees with discontinuous employment trajectories - results of an online survey of employees in the media / IT industry. In: New Employment Biographies and Career Biographical Discontinuity . Schneider, Hohengehren 2006, pp. 134–161.
  • Peter Plöger: Job collectors, job nomads and professional artists: learned a lot and gained nothing? The paradox of the new world of work . Carl Hanser Verlag, 2010.

See also

Web links

References and comments

  1. ^ Jens Tönnesmann: Job nomads: restless specialists and managers. Wirtschaftswoche . September 24, 2011, accessed July 10, 2015
  2. ↑ Annamaria Rucktäschel: Job nomads - desired subjects of the economy. Federal Agency for Political Education . April 24, 2006, accessed July 8, 2015
  3. ↑ Sven Gábor Jánszky: The future of the world of work in 2020: Value workers, patchwork identities and HR management in fluid companies. Deutsche Gesellschaft für Personalführung eV , 2010, p. 6 (23), accessed on July 8, 2015
  4. ↑ Brigitte Hild: Young, dynamic, on the move - modern job nomads ( Memento from July 4, 2015 in the Internet Archive ). Personal.Manager International 02/2006, accessed on July 8, 2015
  5. ^ Sven Gabor Jánszky: A life like a patchwork quilt. 2b AHEAD ThinkTank . 2010, p. 6, accessed July 8, 2015
  6. ^ Anne Kunz, Hannes Vogel: Business flat share: The new flat share romance of the modern job nomads. Wirtschaftswoche . April 23, 2010, accessed July 9, 2015
  7. ↑ Institute for Human Rights: International Convention for the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families of December 18, 1990. Accessed July 9, 2015
  8. ^ Berthold Vogel: Prekarität und Prekariat - Signal words of new social inequalities. In: From Politics and Contemporary History . July 30, 2008, accessed July 9, 2015
  9. ↑ Josef Joffe: The myth of the cheap jobs. zeit.de. 16th January 2019
  10. ↑ Claudia Bergner: Do job hoppers have a happier working life? HRweb. November 9, 2010
  11. ↑ Working in a crisis: are you already alive or are you still turning your bike? Süddeutsche Zeitung . May 17, 2010, accessed July 8, 2015
  12. ↑ Katharina Wagner: Staying supple. Time. Supplement Campus 2/2012, accessed on July 10, 2015
  13. ↑ Josef Joffe: The myth of the cheap jobs. zeit.de. 16th January 2019
  14. ↑ Gundula Englisch reports in her book about the example of Arnsberg , a town with around 75,000 inhabitants. However, this is an isolated case that cannot be easily transferred to other cities or regions. Source: Job nomads: how we work, live and love , Campus-Verlag 2001, p. 192 ff.
  15. ^ Gunnar Werner: Jobnomade: The unemployed and the application lottery. Hanover 2006, accessed on July 9, 2015
  16. ↑ Katharina Wagner: Staying supple. Time. Supplement Campus 2/2012, accessed on July 10, 2015
  17. ^ Exploding myths about the gig economy. Retrieved September 12, 2019 .
  18. ^ Daniel Zwick: Modern work nomads: The restless. Mirror online. July 14, 2004, accessed July 19, 2015
  19. ↑ Dialect speakers are persistent. Linguists and economists study mobility . Philipps University of Marburg. Research Center for the German Language Atlas. February 15, 2010. Retrieved July 19, 2015
  20. ↑ Miriam Hoffmeyer: Dialect at work? Reinschter Bogmischt. Süddeutsche Zeitung . November 2, 2014, accessed July 19, 2015
  21. ↑ Impulse Medien GmbH: More and more professional nomads in Germany. January 2, 2013, accessed July 19, 2015
  22. ↑ Loyalty pays off . In: Capital , edition 11/2015, p. 68