People are not stupid. The vast majority of those who are interested in running their own business know that it is not a passport to instant wealth, that it demands a huge amount of time, that there are serious risks of failure and that it can be very stressful. So why the interest?

I think that first and foremost it is about autonomy. The idea of being in control of one’s own destiny is attractive, and is reinforced by an educational and social system which places an emphasis on personal responsibility. Of course business owners are not wholly in control, they are subject to the demands of the market, they are generally answerable to customers, banks and the tax authorities, to name but a few. But underlying all this is the sense that we are doing something of our own making, that we are responsible for our own decisions, that success or failure will be the result of our own work and will benefit us, not someone else.

Of course most people ultimately decide not to set up their own business. But the appeal of being in control lingers and needs to be addressed. A desire to be in control which is not fulfilled can lead to serious disillusionment, or worse. Which is why it is so important for anyone smitten by the self-employment bug to make sure that whatever they do, they remain in control of their career.

It is perfectly possible to work in an employed role and yet be in control of one’s career. Indeed, this is the ideal state. It means being clear about our ambitions and goals, having a plan for achieving them and ensuring that the plan is put into practice. Taking control of one’s employed career is a realistic alternative for the majority of people who consider, but decide against, running their own business. It is not difficult, it just requires structured planning.

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To a Western mind the idea of taking a seven year old boy away from his family and implanting him into a lifelong career not of his choosing and from which he cannot withdraw is an  anathema.  Many of us would see it is as an even greater denial of human rights than an arranged marriage. But many people who are in arranged marriages swear by them; of those I know not one has ever said that they regret it.

Childhood apprentices have a long history, although not necessarily a happy one. We only have to read Dickens to see what they could be like. And because we live in a much more protective society these days we are unlikely to see a return to a time when seven year olds are taken into a live-in apprenticeship.

But, if we are to believe the pundits, we may well be entering an age of austerity. And if so we are likely to see the curtailing of many of the choices that we have grown used to. Chief amongst these will be career choices. Just as many of our great grandparents had no choice other than to work in the local factory or mine, so too we may find that our careers are mapped out for us by circumstance, rather than by positive selection on our part.

This is a worrying scenario, and particularly for career professionals who believe that everyone is entitled to work in a career in which they believe and which they enjoy. Of course we will not go back to the sixteen century. But if our future choices are to be limited, the more we can try to take control of our careers now, the better. We need to keep our careers under review; to create, and frequently revisit, a structured career plan. That will ensure that we retain as much career satisfaction as is realistic.

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The Westminster village, as the media refer to the locus of British government, is a small and tightly connected community. The staff who applied for temporary contracts were, in the main, hoping to build a career in politics or the civil service. Few of them wanted to be MPs. They wanted the back room jobs, a lifetime career, not subject to the vagaries of the electorate.

But careers in the political support sector require heavy maintenance. It is not just enough to be good at your job and hope that you will be picked out for promotion. It is an aggressive world, the jobs are glamorous but the competition is intense. Good, constant networking is essential, those who are going to succeed need to make themselves visible and they dare not be shy of their achievements.

Needless to say, many of those who will be leaving the campaign teams over the next few weeks and months will not manage to create a career for themselves in Westminster. Many of them, having seen what it is like at first hand will have decided they do not even want to. Others will not have networked effectively enough, or will have failed to make their mark in other ways.

But the good news is that working on a campaign team is excellent fodder for the CV. It impresses people, it is a conversation point, it sets one ahead of the game when it comes for applying for jobs. Working on a campaign team can be tough and intensive work. But whether it is part of a long term career strategy or merely an interlude in a different type of career, it is well worth the time put in.

There will be another election in a few years. Those who are interested in working in the campaign teams should start networking now.

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After all, we are all born with innate potential, we have free choice, we live in a world in which education is accessible and technology empowering. So why should we not all be able to live our dream? Why is the idea of living a dream so unrealistic that most of us would simply scoff at the idea rather than taking it seriously? Is it because our dreams are unrealistic? Or is it maybe because we don’t know how to dream?

Living a dream means doing something we are passionate about and doing it well. But the word ‘passionate’ has become one of the most misused terms in the English vocabulary. I remember seeing a CV sent by a former lawyer who was applying for a job in internet marketing, a subject she had no experience in. She wrote in her CV that she was ‘passionate about internet marketing’. Of course she wasn’t, it was just that English was not her first language and she had seen the word passionate misused so many times that she did not know what it really meant.

To live the dream one has to have the dream. And to have the dream one has to have things to care about, to believe in, to be an advocate for. One needs imagination to dream. And unfortunately, for most of us, our lives are structured in such a way as to constrict our imaginations. Our educational system encourages us to specialise to such a degree that the most creative part of our curriculum is spent at kindergarten. Gradually our focus narrows until, in our late teens and twenties we focus almost exclusively on a single subject or vocation. What chance of the dream in such a scenario?

Of course there is little that can be done quickly about this. There are some interesting conversations going on about the future of work, the meaning of careers, about lifestyle choices and work-life flexibility. But these are embryonic conversations and change, if it comes at all, will come slowly. In the meantime most of are likely to live, not a dream, but a compromise, in which we try to find a job we enjoy to some to degree, which takes also takes care of our economic and social needs.

Of course some people have dreams, Amy Williams is one of them. But for most of us, living the dream is not the problem. The real problem is having the dream in the first place.

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 The norm these days is to change one’s job every few years, whilst to stay for thirty years is considered a form of institutionalisation. But why should this be? Why not stay for thirty years if you enjoy the job and the job enjoys you? I am not suggesting that we go back to an age in which labour mobility was non-existent and many people suffered in whatever job they could find. But why have the advantages of labour mobility also led us to say that a job is no longer for life?

The answer I think lies in security and loyalty. Many of us would choose to stay in the job we enjoy for our entire career, if we could be sure that that the job was secure. What worries us is the fear of redundancy, of being thrown out into a hostile labour market of which we have no experience. I think that an analysis of the trends that led to the shorter job tenures we see today would show that the process was employer led; that it was not until companies began to implement shorter term recruitment and retention polices that employees started to think about making more frequent job changes as a means of taking control of, and progressing, their careers.

But this doesn’t mean that it is a bad thing to stay in a job for a lifetime if it is the right job. Like everything else, our attitudes to our jobs reflect the attitudes of wider society. And because the fashion today is to make frequent job changes, many people feel obliged to without really wanting to. Change job as frequently as you like if it is the right thing for you and will allow you to progress and develop faster. But don’t do just because it is the conventional thing to do.

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It is a similar story to what is happening in the media industries. I have written about it before. Thousands of talented young people with good media degrees, desperate to work in film, TV and journalism, scraping around for short term contracts, working a few days a month, earning peanuts, eventually giving up.

And why? Because the funding is not available for creatives to make a success of their careers. If they want to work at a high level they have to go to North America, Europe and the emerging economies- which is where many of them end up. There is just no opportunity here.

Our economy is entering a new phase. We can no longer rely on the financial services sector to underpin it. We need new industries, new jobs. There is talk of a revival in manufacturing but for that to stand any chance the pound will have to remain low, oil high and labour markets elsewhere in the world inefficient. Meanwhile we have our own home grown talent here, a dearth of competition elsewhere in the world, and only a lack of funding stopping us from exploiting it.

Anybody who lived in London in the 1960s as I did will know that creative waves only last a short time. The moment has to be seized. We have a moment right now, and we are not seizing it. Politicians and entrepreneurs take note.

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As we come out of recession, and wave goodbye to an economy underpinned by the financial sector, economists and politicians are weighing up how growth will be powered in the future. And all the smart money is on manufacturing.

Although it is only a few short years since UK factories were closing and manufactured goods were being sourced from the Far East, it is beginning to feel like a lifetime ago. The high cost of transporting goods from the other side of the world, together with the low pound which makes our exports competitive are fuelling a manufacturing boom the like of which we have not seen for decades.1,200 Industrial jobs were gained last week and 700 the week before. We are used to seeing job losses, not job gains, in the Industrial sector.

But if manufacturing is going through a renaissance, it will not look in the future like it did in the past. It is unlikely that there will be a rash of giant new factories opening, with large, unionised workforces. We have moved on from that. We are far less class conscious than in the past and we all want jobs that we care about and that we believe in. The future of manufacturing will almost certainly lie in small workshops and tight, committed workforces all pulling together. It is an encouraging thought. I saw the future yesterday.

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Teleworking, or working from home, solves the weather problem. Conditions outside matter little when all you have to do is walk from your bedroom to your office. And we are told that teleworking is the future, that increasingly people will be based at home, making the most of technology, saving on transport and office costs, and contributing to the greening of the planet.

But is it for everybody? Even if distance working is effective for the company, will it be effective for every employee?

For some people teleworking brings real benefits. It allows greater flexibility in working times, saves the aggravation of commuting and allows them to spend more time with their families. But the downside is a possible sense of isolation, particularly if the rest of the team area in an office elsewhere and you are at home alone. People working alone often find it harder to be motivated; they need the buzz of a collegiate atmosphere. And then of course there is the line manager who has never really come to terms with teleworking, who thinks that all those who work at home are shirking and treats them as such.

Like all career decisions, teleworking is a matter of personal preference and choice. One should not go into it without thinking it through. Is your working style self driven or collegiate? Is it important to have other people around or are you more effective on your own? Do you want to spend much of your life within the same four walls, or would you prefer to get out and about?

Teleworking may well be the future. But we will not all have identical futures. If you are offered the opportunity, make sure it is the right thing for you.

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Of the leading economic indicators, although unemployment is still rising it is doing so at a much slower rate, suggesting that it will soon level off and ultimately increase. The housing market seems to be improving which is always a good sign.

But there is still plenty of bad news out there. Significantly, it looks as if shops will have a bad Christmas season. This is important because, although the cause of the recession lies in the financial sector it was the downturn in consumer spending that changed things from a credit crunch to a recession. The idea was that by lowering mortgage and interest rates, so that we all had more disposable income, consumer spending would increase and the economy would be saved. Instead we all chose to save and repay debt. Consumer confidence remains low and is still decreasing.

The end of a recession is the time when many small companies fail, usually more than during the depths of the downturn itself. So even if we are coming out of recession the picture is not rosy.  

All in all, the prospects for the labour market in the first part of 2010 remain shaky. So it is important to persevere with a defensive career management strategy. Set realistic career goals and a strategy for achieving them. Keep your CV up to date, Make sure your networks are active and if you are job hunting, make as much use of your contacts as you can. If you feel that you have got as much from your network as you can hope to, then you need to expand it. It is not easy but it is the best you can do.

Things will get better. But perhaps not as quickly as we expected.

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Of course it doesn’t really matter when unemployment was highest if you are one of the millions without a job. But it does matter in terms of looking forward. Because the 1980s recession ended and youth unemployment returned to its normal levels. It took 25 years before it peaked again at today’s level.

This  should provide hope for those who are unemployed that things will improve. Talk of a lost generation of young people without jobs is almost certainly exaggerated. But there is nevertheless a real danger that when things do pick up, young people, desperate for a job, will grab the first opportunity they can. They will not be in a position, economically, to make structured, carefully thought out career choices. We may not have a lost generation of unemployed young people. But we may well have yet another generation of people who work in jobs to which they are not well suited.

Which would be a great shame for the evolution of society. Over the past decade or so there has been a far greater awareness amongst the working population that it is not just to their economic and personal advantage to work in a job they will enjoy, but also to their employers’, and to society at large. A fulfilled, motivated workforce leads to a productive, successful society.

The awareness that it is imperative to find a job you enjoy has led to a boom in people turning to career professionals to help them make a mid-life career change. And the hope has been that future generations would not have to wait until their thirties or forties to benefit from contemporary career management methodologies, but that these services would be available to them before they started work. So that they could embark on their career knowing what they wanted to do, and how they could do it.

The fact that high youth unemployment will force them to take whatever job they can, as soon as it becomes available, may have put paid to all that. Instead of a lost generation we may well have yet another unhappy, demotivated one. And I am not sure which is worse.

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