A new Model
The chances are that many, if not most, individual Members of T&E came out of paid employment with one or more medium to large companies or the public sector. You enjoyed the trappings of regular work – a monthly payslip, pension scheme membership. Perhaps you also had the `perks’ of a car, private healthcare insurance, maybe even an array of options in a` pick-and-mix’ salary swap scheme. In short you have spent your working life in what I am calling “The Traditional Model”.
No don’t take this as pessimistic but it is unlikely you will return to that place. There will, of course, be exceptions and to those individuals I offer every best wish for good luck and success.
For the rest of us, I believe we need to create a New Model. In essence, we need to think, and be, more flexible. We need to offer our services perhaps on a contract work basis. We have to be prepared to take temporary or part-time work or maybe think in terms of periodic engagement.
If this sounds like `working for yourself’ then that is what it is, and remember no-one else will if you don’t. I hear you say”But I am not an entrepreneur! If I had been, I would have been the employer not the employee in that traditional model.” Fair comment. Again with some exceptions, perhaps more than I imagine, most of you are not going to go out and start some truly new business. But, if the traditional model has gone, our new model is going to be entrepreneurial almost by definition.
As it happens I believe intelligent people have creative potential and you may have more ideas in you than you realise. On your own you may not have the full resources to see them through — financial, human, technical — but together with others who is to say what is possible?
Even supposing you are devoid of inspiration, there are plenty of other sources for those enterprising ideas. To begin with there are other Members. Then public agencies, private businesses, charities, think-tanks and many others always have identified, currently unfulfilled requirements. T&E aims to provide a conduit through which such bodies, or individuals, can make known their needs or thoughts in a confidential way that can be picked up by appropriate individual or groups of Members.
The first thing, therefore, is to start thinking “New Model”. In some ways it is not new at all; a small percent of the economy already works this way. Many businesses, cahrities and other agents already outsource or take in contractors and interims.
Thinking ahead, we may need some new thinking from Government, maybe changes to employment and other law to recognise that as we grow older we approach work in a different way. Rules established for a workforce assumed to be homogenous and, in truth, written for the Traditional Model may need revisiting. But that is for another time and we are already thinking about it at T&E.
Meanwhile get on board. The more members we have, the greater the oppotunities we may discover and the louder our voice will be.
Vic Leader
08/04/ 2011
