Doing a Masters and having offices in the Innovation Centre (built to encourage innovative start up companies) the topic of setting up a business has been bandied around a lot over the past year and I’ve talked to various people about their ambitions to set up various companies for doing pretty much everything under the sun.
Throughout all these discussions, be they firm plans, already a reality or elaborate ideas dreamt up over a pint, someone has always raised the issue of ‘job security’.
They, whoever brings the point up, intends this as a negative thing – ‘working for a large company has much greater job security’ they say. But working for a large multi-national corporation I’ve witnessed job cuts due to the ‘current economic climate’ (call it what you will). The message comes through the ranks ‘you know this team of nine? well there are only six jobs from next month’ and a guys with kids, mortgages and 25years of company loyality under their belt are joining the dole queue.
Now I don’t know, having never run my own company, or even attempted to, whether its a good or bad time to ‘go-it-alone’, I don’t know all the trials and tribulations of the young start up but I do think that this sense of job security in large corporations is a false sense of security.
Ask yourself; wouldn’t you rather have some sort of control over the existence of your employment?
If your answer is no, were you the one that defended your employment using the ‘job security’ line in conversation? Are you likely to lose out if your large secure company hits bad times?
If your answer is yes, do you really want to do all that paperwork? Have all that responsibility? How about a nice secure 9-5 job?
