My personal mission is to help the next generation of pharmacists understand that the world has changed and teach them the skills to thrive in this new world order. The reality is this: The employment paradigm in this country has changed dramatically in one generation. And you need to understand the impact of this change.
The paradigm shift
Here is what I mean. My parents, born in the 1920s, grew up in a time when getting a good education meant getting a better job. A better job led to a long career with a good company, ending up with a 40-year pin and a nice lifetime pension with healthcare benefits.
Fast forward to today, and the rules have changed. Few employers can even guarantee that they will still be in business in 10 tears let alone in 40. Virtually nobody works for one company their whole career. And virtually no one has a lifelong pension other than government employees. And retiree health benefits are a thing of the past. Medicare is the new normal.
The impact
The impact of this on all of us means that we are responsible for saving for our own retirement and making sure we have sufficient funds to outlive our needs. Not only that, but as companies downsize, merge and outsource there is a tendency for older (read higher-paid) workers to get displaced in favor of younger people. This occurs at precisely the same spot in their lives when they should be maximizing their retirement savings and suddenly they are earning less.
The ticking time bomb of the not too distant future is, "What is going to happen when all the 80-year-old baby boomers run out of 401k money?" The costs of this unfunded liability to our economy are unimaginable.
The key questions
For those of us in our early 60s the question that keeps us awake at night is, "Do I have my retirement securely funded, or will I be working until the day I die?"
The question you must find an answer to is, "What do I do that is so valuable that it will keep me employed no matter what the future holds?" And the truth is that each of us must find a good answer to that question. In order to do that, we must understand how to create value in the marketplace.
Unless you become a top influencer in your specialty, you may be putting your career and livelihood at risk. What I mean by that is, unless you can continually provide value to your customers, your employer, your employees, or yourself and your family, you will not get the rewards you deserve for your huge investment in your training.
The challenge in learning the professional business skills necessary to thrive is that people come from a wide variety of backgrounds. Some people have a strong entrepreneurial leaning, so they are naturally tuned to the information I talk about.
Other people consider themselves to be a little more introverted. Or perhaps they are a little more focused on clinical practice rather than business skills. Or they may not immediately understand why the skills I am talking about are critical in every workplace setting.
And then there are people who already own their own business who have taken the ownership plunge, but may be finding that it isn't working out as they had hoped.
What you must do
All I can say is that the key to your success is going to be learning to take care of yourself, learning to craft a unique brand around your best skill set, and learning to stop using old paradigms to guide your long-term planning.
