It's the best job security advice there is:
Be indispensable.
Well, sure—but what does that look like in practice?
In my 10 years of work, I've seen the advice enacted in many ways.
There was the business administrator who held company finances so close that they couldn't take more than a week off without serious trouble. (How would we issue paychecks?!) Sure, that person was indispensable...but was it a good thing? Not in the long run—they were eventually let go.
I knew someone else who detoured from their professional career into IT support. They made the move at a good time—right as the trough of the 2008 recession hit the market. When picking and choosing employees to let go, it made sense to keep the person who kept the servers running. But fast forward many years later, the company looked to them for leadership on next steps with technology and support...but they weren't prepared. It seemed a surprise to everyone that this prior sense of indispensability had just...evaporated.
These stories worry me, though in different ways.
The first person offers a cautionary tale: don't be a bottleneck. It's an unhealthy organization that vests too much power in a single person (or small group of people)—people know this instinctively, and we don't like it. "Who died and made you king?" We tend to not feel this way about company presidents, experts, and other leadership positions. But those who build and attend to little fiefdoms or knowledge or power within the organization? Really annoying.
The second person offers a different lesson: never forget that knowledge is not forever. It would be nice if the power of knowledge never degraded...but, boy, does it. This, in a nutshell, is the story of technology and the workplace.
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