Two key features of economic development are specialization of labor and destruction of labor.
By separating production into simple, repetitive tasks, economic output can be increased and optimized to maximize returns to capital. Adam Smith said of specialization of labor, “The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.”
The corporate capitalist system is designed to create increasingly specialized roles and processes through which discrete tasks can be done by increasingly less discretion from an employee, thus requiring less skilled, or simply less, labor. Thus the individuals performing those roles must perpetually demonstrate their value to the organization, competing for additional work, lest they be subject to ‘reorganization.’ As corporations become larger, to compete for additional work, employees must further specialize to differentiate themselves from others who may have similar experience.
In turn, technological progress and capital investment can make those specialized roles redundant, or obsolete, also known as the creative destruction of labor.
The result is that employees are left in constant anxiety about proving their value while simultaneously becoming more defined by the specialized, narrower role they are currently performing, which is never fully safe from being made obsolete.
The concept of ‘career’ benefits the owners by making employees subservient despite these feelings. It shifts the burden of an economic structure designed to make labor redundant onto the shoulders of the individual worker. Employees must constantly gain ‘skills’ and ‘experience,’ locked in an arms race with fellow employees. These are skills and experience that benefit a corporation – they have no influence on one’s ability to lead a happy and fulfilling life. Yet the emphasis on ‘skills’ ensures that employees always define themselves in terms of their value to the corporation, and any discomfort or anxiety with that is considered a character defect.
In summary, careerism conveniently makes employees individually responsible for an economic system designed to make them less skilled and ultimately redundant.