How to Beat Job Insecurity

Career Paths For The 21st Century

This book outlines many factors leading towards a more self-reliant form of career planning and the ways that enlightened companies are helping to ensure that their employees are given every opportunity to prepare for the next career move, often in a very different direction to their current work.

Jim Durcan is a partner in The Change House, a specialized management consultancy, and an associate at Ashridge Management College. He works as a consultant and developer specializing in organizational change and leadership.<br/>
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David Oates has written or co-authored eight management books. He contributes regularly to the national press and leading magazines.

The turbulent changes in corporate culture mean that upwardly mobile managers need more than ever to carve out their own career paths. They must take charge of their personal developement and training needs, because they are unlikely to spend more than a few years in any one company. They have to create, their own continuity of career progression, rather than relying on corporate HR Departments to chart the course for them. This book sets out many developments adversely impacting on career progression - including corporate structural change, cultural change, outsourcing, use of management consultants etc- and then deals with the practical steps that companies and career minded managers are taking to counteract them.

Jim Durcan

The Incredible Shrinking Company

Increasingly, companies are buying in from outside certain services and functions that would previously have been fulfilled by an internal department or employees. Companies no longer just outsource support functions, but also outsource critical areas of production or design. It lets companies focus on those activities where they have real competitive edge, and is increasingly being seen as an attractive alternative to downsizing or cost-cutting.<br/>
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Durcan and Oates provide a wide-ranging expert overview of outsourcing, aimed at managers and decision-makers who want to understand fully all the issues involved. How do companies define core and non-core activities? How do you find the best provider of an outsourced function? What are the pitfalls to avoid? How do you monitor the service provider? What is the impact on issues such as corporate security and confidentiality? The authors also consider how outsourcing is redefining the nature of corporations: if companies have minimal physical existence, but exist as a network of relationships and contracts, when should we speak of the 'virtual organisation'?

Jim Durcan

Books by Jim Durcan

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