Adaptability

The economy has been in a state of depression and recession for a few years now, and unemployment rates are going up in Finland. This has sparked a lot of discussion and disgruntled people have voiced their feelings about quite many different things. People still seem to be surprised by the fact that in the private sector public companies will act in a radical fashion and attempt to adapt to changing situations by laying off parts of the workforce. It's called adaptability; if the landscape is changing, you either adapt or you die. It's unfortunate, but that's how the game works. Unfortunately, however, it seems that in some cases companies maybe should exercise a bit of moderation as the actions have sometimes been rash at best and purely idiotic at worst.

Nonetheless, the companies will attempt to function in the best interest of their owners, or so the theory goes. But these times are well to demonstrate, yet again, that individual people must also be able to adapt to changing situations. I somehow get a feeling that too many people are stuck inside a box and when things abruptly change, they are unable to transform themselves. What this past decade or two have shown is that the world is becoming increasingly dynamic, as opposed to the more traditional stable landscape in which you sought work positions from which you would retire from. So it is up to the employee to demonstrate flexibility and adaptability by being able to jump from one career to the next, even across different disciplines and industries. But ultimately I feel that the key point is to have the skills to actively renew and retrain oneself to be able to go up against new challenges.

On a slightly different note, I have also gotten a feeling by following some discussions surrounding the Finnish welfare system that the system is in fact slightly flawed and does not really encourage entrepreneurship and active job seeking as much as it could. A friend of mine recently listed himself as unemployed, and being a non-native he was interested in using this pause in his career to learn more Finnish in order to increase his attractiveness in the job market. Unfortunately, however, it seems that there are some situations in which he will lose his unemployment benefits if he begins to take language courses. Apparently the system would, at worst, classify him as a student and then strip him of his benefits. This is not only silly, but also very counterproductive. Overall it seems that the system will very often make its victims very passive. I have some thoughts on how the system could be reformed (and overall I feel that reforms will need to be revolutionary rather than evolutionary, as the system is very much broken), but I fear that I will have to leave them for another blog post. But feel free to pull my sleeve if you want to talk about these issues, for they are very interesting.