Should I Sign That Noncompete?

It is a paradox of today’s job market that employers want ever-greater flexibility in their ability to shed workers but simultaneously want to reduce workers’ flexibility in seeking employment. Specifically, employers increasingly are imposing noncompetition agreements (“noncompetes”) that can seriously limit workers’ ability to find jobs elsewhere. According to a White House report (PDF), an estimated 30 million Americans, nearly one-fifth of the workforce, are bound by these agreements, and roughly 37 percent have been so bound at some time during their careers. Perhaps the agreements themselves have not proliferated but merely their enforcement. Whichever is the case, “The law firm Beck Reed Riden LLP found a 61 percent rise from 2002 to 2013 in the number of employees getting sued by former companies for breach of non-compete agreements.”

The White House looked into this matter out of concern that noncompetition agreements can hamper the economic recovery. “Non-competes can reduce workers’ ability to use job switching or the threat of job switching to negotiate for better conditions and higher wages, reflecting their value to employers. Furthermore, non-competes could result in unemployment if workers must leave a job and are unable to find a new job that meets the requirements of their non-compete contract. In addition to reducing job mobility and worker bargaining power, non-competes can negatively impact other companies by constricting the labor pool from which to hire. Non-competes may also prevent workers from launching new companies.”

In some states, most notably California, employment laws make noncompetition agreements essentially unenforceable.  It is thought that the absence of noncompetes is one of the factors that have contributed to the towering success of the Silicon Valley. Job-hopping is a normal part of career building in the tech industry there. In fact, job-hopping is one of the reasons that employers have traditionally tended to cluster together geographically with others in the same industry, even when access to natural resources or transportation infrastructure is not a factor. Think of New York for finance, Nashville for music, or Detroit for automobiles.

Noncompetes reduce the efficiency of these industry clusters. As a result, The New York Times reports that some states are trying to limit the reach of noncompetes in hopes of duplicating one of the factors of the Silicon Valley environment: “Hawaii banned noncompete agreements for technology jobs last year, while New Mexico passed a law prohibiting noncompetes for health care workers. And Oregon and Utah have limited the duration of noncompete arrangements.”

I live in New Jersey and have personal experience with this kind of shackling. In the late 1990s, my employer required that I sign a noncompetition agreement as a condition for receiving a raise. I complied, although it bound me not to compete for one year, and after a downsizing only a few years later, the agreement seriously limited my work as a consultant. The crowning irony was that only a few years after I began consulting, my old employer came back to me in need of my consulting services and presented me with a contract that contained another noncompetition agreement—this one binding me for two years.

I refused to sign it, and with no hesitation or bargaining, they struck that paragraph from the contract. Since then, I have been asked by another employer to sign a noncompete and have again refused, with no adverse consequences.

What should you do if an employer confronts you with a noncompetition agreement? First, you should investigate whether it is enforceable in your state and for your occupation. To be totally sure, you may want to consult a lawyer, but you can get useful preliminary information from a downloadable chart at the website of Beck Reed Ridin, LLP.

It’s usually a good idea to negotiate with your employer over the terms of the noncompete. If you’re lucky enough to have some bargaining power, such as a very desirable skill set, you may be able to convince the employer to strike the agreement entirely. If not, you may be able to get the employer to relax some of the terms. For example, you may suggest altering the agreement to restrict you only in a certain geographic area or only from working for certain employers. You may be able to reduce the duration of the restriction. You may get the employer to accept wording based on the conditions of your future separation—for example, that the restriction will apply only if you quit, not if you are terminated.

Be sure to examine the fine print of any noncompetition clause. (Again, a lawyer may be helpful.) For example, some agreements include the onerous requirement that the ex-employee will have to pay any legal fees that the employer incurs as part of enforcing the agreement. Such additional burdens may also be negotiable before you sign.

Understand that one reason employers like to impose noncompetition agreements is that they fear you will carry company secrets to a competing organization. It is reasonable for the employer to ask you to sign a nondisclosure or confidentiality agreement with wording that is separate from noncompetition.

A Three-Angle View on Your Career

When you think about how to improve your career, it helps to view it from several different angles. I find it useful to employ the approach called tagmemics. Please let me define this term for you before it scares you away, and then you’ll start to see its usefulness.

The idea of tagmemics is that any unit of human experience can be viewed in three forms: as a particle, as a wave, and as a field. This approach was originated by a linguist, Kenneth Pike, so it may or may not be very sound as physics, but I find it very useful for achieving insights into ideas such as the one I’m discussing here: improving your career.

First, let’s look at your career as a particle—as a static entity. To do that, you need to move away from the word career (which implies development over time) and focus instead on the word job. (If you’re still in school, consider that your job.) Ask yourself these questions about your job as it is right now:

• Does your job have a title that you’re happy with?
• During the workday, do you find the work tasks interesting and engaging, or do they involve knowledge or tasks that don’t interest you?
• Are your skills a good match for the job, or do you feel overwhelmed (or unchallenged)?
• Is the stress level one that is comfortable to you?
• Are you satisfied with the physical requirements of your job?
• Is the amount of structure in your job too loose or too confining?
• Do you enjoy the level of creativity in your work?
• At the end of a typical workday, do you have a feeling of satisfaction?
• Do you have a way of assessing your work and therefore taking pride in what you have accomplished?
• When you’re not working, is your job providing a sufficiently comfortable lifestyle and amount of leisure?

If some of your answers indicate a situation that is not totally satisfactory, this may be an indication that you need to make some changes to your job. But first, you need to consider the wave and field perspectives on your career.

Your career is a wave in that it is a dynamic process. It is unfolding over time; it has a past and a future. Here are some questions that reflect on this dynamic nature:

• Over the course of time—whether it’s a day or a year of work—does your job offer a level of variety in tasks, locations, or people that you find satisfactory?
• Do you make career choices by planning, by seizing opportunities, or by following the path of least resistance?
• Are your past career preparation and experiences a good match for your present job, or would they be a better match for something else?
• Does your job provide opportunities for advancement?
• Are you knowledgeable about future developments in your career field and the job opportunities (or threats to job security) that they will create?
• What have you done or are willing to do to prepare for these job opportunities or to counteract any threats?
• Will your career allow you to deal adequately with future changes in your lifestyle, such as marriage, child-rearing, or retirement?
• If you’re still in school, will you be able to get through the program?

Your answers to this second set of questions (wave-based) may help you plan for ways to remedy shortcomings revealed by your answers to the first set (particle-based). But you should also consider the field aspect of your career, which has implications for both your current situation and your plans.

Your career is a field in that it involves relationships. It occurs in a spatial and interpersonal context. Answer these questions:

• Is your job allowing you to live in a community that satisfies you?
• How do you feel about your workday commute and the amount of travel?
• Do you enjoy the physical setting of your work?
• How comfortable are you with your boss, your co-workers, and members of the public whom you deal with?
• Are you satisfied with the job’s ratio of solitary work to working with or dealing with other people?
• Do you desire more or fewer opportunities for leadership in your job?
• Are you knowledgeable about your industry, not just your job?
• Do you have credentials that have value in your industry (or another industry)?
• Are you known to people in your industry (or another industry) and, if not, do you know how to make yourself known?
• Do you feel good about the extent to which your work contributes to the well-being of other people, of animals, or of the natural environment?
• Do you worry about the possible impact of an on-the-job error on your organization or on other people?
• Does your work create stress between you and your family or community?
• Are you satisfied with the level of prestige that your work confers on you?

If you have read this far, I hope that you understand that you usually need to consider all three aspects of your career to solve any problems that you have detected in it. For example, if your work is too stressful (a particle issue), you need to think about what is causing this stress. It might be another particle issue, such as the necessity of following a restrictive rulebook, but it could also be a wave issue, such as a feeling of being in a dead-end job or worry about future threats to job security. It could also be a field issue, such as concern about making decisions that could bankrupt your employer or the perception that your long hours at work are making you lose touch with your family.

When you evaluate a possible change to your career, be sure to consider the change from the perspectives of all three aspects. For example, if you decide to get a degree or certification to improve your future employability (which you may think of as a wave-related change because it happens over time), consider the particle issues that this will raise, such as how well your skills and aptitudes will match the demands of the program. Consider also such wave issues as how the program’s demands on your time will affect your family relationships or how you can leverage your new credentials to achieve greater recognition in your industry.

Your career affects so many aspects of your life that you need to be multidimensional in your thinking when you assess your satisfaction or make plans for improving your situation. Tagmemics can provide a structure to help you expand your thinking.

Is “Breaking Bad” a Skill?

This blog was inspired by the very last episode of the popular television drama “Breaking Bad” [spoiler alert!]. Walter White, once a milquetoast chemistry teacher and now a ruthless drug baron, confesses to his wife that he did not persist in his life of crime for his purported reason, which was to acquire a nest egg for his family to live on after his death. “I did it for me. I liked it. I was good at it. And I was really—I was alive.” Setting aside the matter of his enjoyment—which, in career development, would fall into the category of interest—let’s consider what it means to be good at crime. Is criminality a skill?

If we consider what it means for criminality to be a career—which means setting aside crimes of passion—we see it takes several forms. It includes such illegal pursuits as armed robbery, counterfeiting, selling illegal drugs, confidence rackets, and identity theft, among others. However, it also includes crimes that some people commit as part of what otherwise would be a law-abiding career—for example, securities traders using insider information or oligarchs conspiring to strangle competition.

Both kinds of criminals need to be skilled at the particular type of crime that they commit. For example, the counterfeiter has to be good at producing a realistic imitation of genuine currency. The drug dealer needs to be good at making connections with buyers. The identity thief needs to have skills with computers or with some other way of obtaining personal information about victims. These skills therefore are highly specific to each kind of criminal enterprise. White-collar lawbreakers need to have the skills that establish them in the law-abiding careers from which they veer into criminality—again, highly specific skills that can’t be summarized as a skill at criminality.

All kinds of career criminals also need to be skilled at escaping detection by the authorities. Here again, the skills are specific: The counterfeiter has to be skilled at passing funny money in ways that will escape notice, at least in the short term. The drug dealer needs to know how to operate stealthily. The securities trader who makes a killing based on insider information has to be skilled at manipulating the source of information to keep quiet. Any of these criminals might also corrupt law enforcement by using interpersonal skills, in addition to bribes.

Although these various criminals have highly diverse skills, one skill that many criminals have in common is the ability to use violence. Violence can help the criminal escape detection—silencing potential informers by threats, mayhem, or extermination. It can also fend off competition and theft. After all, someone who, like Walter White, is earning money from a criminal enterprise cannot expect the law enforcement authorities to protect his assets. Other outlaws understand this and will victimize the criminal who does not defend himself and his loot. White-collar criminals are mostly unlikely to resort to violence, but it is one skill that cuts across a broad swath of criminals.

However, even violence is not a single skill. One criminal may be talented at personally using a gun or fists, whereas another may be skilled at identifying and recruiting thugs. (That is Walter White’s strong suit.)

The skill that perhaps is to be found most universally among criminals is the ability to live with themselves, knowing what crimes they have committed. True, some criminals don’t need this skill because they are sociopaths, without empathy and incapable of feeling guilt for their actions. But criminologists say that these people are rare. Most criminals understand that they are doing wrong and have to deal with that understanding.

Generally, they adopt defense mechanisms: I’m doing this for my family (that’s Walter White’s). I’m doing this because society has conspired against me and I’ll never succeed in the straight world. I’m doing this to sustain a great company that employs thousands of people. I give a lot of money to widows and orphans. I get a lot of respect (from some people). One more big score, and then I’ll retire and go straight. Everybody does it.

Ultimately, this skill amounts to an ability to rationalize. Or you might call it hypocrisy, which Francois de La Rochefoucauld called “the homage vice pays to virtue.” It’s not a skill to be proud of; criminality is not something to be proud of. It is often regarded as a weakness, but I maintain that it functions like a skill to the extent that it allows people to pursue one kind of career: crime.

New Wage Figures Reveal Trends of the Past Two Years

The BLS has just released the May 2013 estimates for wages in 800+ occupations. I thought it would be interesting to see which occupations showed the greatest and smallest increases in pay compared to previous years.

I decided that the best way to smooth out errors and focus on large trends would be to look at groups of occupations rather than detailed occupations and to look at the difference over two years rather than one year.

Here’s what I found:

Occupational Group	May 2011	May  2013	Change
Healthcare Support Occupations	$25,140	$26,080	3.7%
Computer and Mathematical Occupations	$75,080	$77,860	3.7%
Architecture and Engineering Occupations	$72,070	$74,530	3.4%
Business and Financial Operations Occupations	$61,700	$63,800	3.4%
Management Occupations	$92,880	$95,600	2.9%
Healthcare Practitioners and Technical Occupations	$59,570	$61,120	2.6%
Life, Physical, and Social Science Occupations	$59,330	$60,860	2.6%
Office and Administrative Support Occupations	$31,250	$32,010	2.4%
Community and Social Service Occupations	$39,880	$40,810	2.3%
Arts, Design, Entertainment, Sports, and Media Occupations	$43,640	$44,610	2.2%
Construction and Extraction Occupations	$39,820	$40,670	2.1%
Installation, Maintenance, and Repair Occupations	$40,600	$41,440	2.1%
Production Occupations	$30,670	$31,250	1.9%
All Occupations	$34,460	$35,080	1.8%
Building and Grounds Cleaning and Maintenance Occupations	$22,620	$22,970	1.5%
Personal Care and Service Occupations	$20,730	$21,010	1.4%
Sales and Related Occupations	$24,840	$25,160	1.3%
Transportation and Material Moving Occupations	$28,760	$29,100	1.2%
Legal Occupations	$75,470	$76,100	0.8%
Food Preparation and Serving Related Occupations	$18,900	$19,020	0.6%
Education, Training, and Library Occupations	$46,060	$46,140	0.2%
Protective Service Occupations	$36,740	$36,770	0.1%
Farming, Fishing, and Forestry Occupations	$19,460	$19,380	-0.4%
Teachers, Postsecondary	$64,592	$62,920	-2.6%

Perhaps the most powerful takeaway from this table is that wages are growing fastest among the STEM occupations—science, technology, engineering, and math.

Some occupations that will account for numerous job openings—notably the Building and Grounds Cleaning and Maintenance Occupations; the Personal Care and Service Occupations; and the Food Preparation and Serving Related Occupations—have experience slower-than-average wage growth. Yesterday’s Senate defeat of the bill to raise the minimum wage—a disgraceful defiance of overwhelming popular support—only reinforces this trend.

It’s interesting to note that three groups of blue-collar occupations have experienced slightly faster-than-average wage growth: Construction and Extraction Occupations; Installation, Maintenance, and Repair Occupations; and Production Occupations. These occupations require higher levels of skill than the wage-stagnant occupations in the previous paragraph. Production Occupations, in particular, have seen increased skill requirements as the low-skill workers in this field have been replaced by either robots or offshore workers.

Yes, but what about Postsecondary Teachers? Surely they require high levels of skill, not to mention high-level educational credentials, yet their wages actually lost ground over this two-year period. This downturn in annual wages reflects the fact that colleges and universities are increasingly using adjunct teachers. These temporary or part-time workers are paid on a different scale from tenured or permanent faculty.

Employment Trends for Engineers

As the “E” in “STEM,” engineering is an important field of knowledge that is vital to the American economy. I thought it would be interesting to see how employment in this field was affected during recent years of recession and recovery, so I created the following graph (from BLS figures):

My main takeaway from this chart is that employment in engineering occupations tends to be reasonably stable. Apart from the 2007–2008 employment decline of 26 percent for aerospace engineers, only one occupation saw a double-digit decline between any two years: the 12 percent 2008–2009 decline for computer hardware engineers. On the other hand, these occupations did not show great growth over this period either—with the exception of petroleum engineers, which grew by 127 percent. Their average growth over the 2007–2012 period is only 3 percent, if you remove petroleum engineers.

Although employment in the occupations changed within relatively modest boundaries, the fluctuations show quite distinct paths. Employment for most of them bottomed out in 2010, evidently the delayed result of the recession as employers ran out of rainy-day funds and needed to lay off workers.

Here’s another chart, with the same set of occupations, showing projected employment growth between 2012 and 2022:

Petroleum engineers is the standout occupation here, again. The recent upward slope of civil engineers resembles that of many of the other specializations, but the growth of this occupation really takes off in the decade ahead. The Occupational Outlook Handbook reports, “As infrastructure continues to age, civil engineers will be needed to manage projects to rebuild bridges, repair roads, and upgrade levees and dams. Moreover, a growing population means that new water systems will be required while the aging, existing water systems must be maintained to reduce or eliminate leaks of drinkable water.” By comparison, the projected growth for mechanical and industrial engineers is modest.

Over the course of a career, engineers tend to find advancement by going into management (for example, project management) rather than by becoming increasingly specialized. Employers often are reluctant to increase the pay of seasoned engineers when they can hire young graduates of engineering schools who are conversant with the latest technologies. Sales engineering is another potential route for career development, especially for those who have good people skills and are not averse to frequent travel. Technical writing is another possibility, but it is much less lucrative.

Fame and Skill Go Together

A few days ago, The New York Times ran an op-ed piece called “The Geography of Fame.” It was written by an economist, Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, who used Wikipedia as a database and extracted the birthplaces—specifically, the counties of birth—of more than 150,000 Americans who are listed in the online encyclopedia. He combined this data set with figures on the number of births in each county and computed, for each county in the United States, the odds that a baby boomer born there would become notable enough to be listed on Wikipedia. He limited his study to baby boomers, those born between 1946 and 1964, in order to allow his subjects a full lifetime in which to achieve notability.

His most striking finding was that the counties that produced the highest density of Wikipedia personages tended to encompass college towns. For example, among the top 13 were the counties that are home to the Universities of Iowa, Michigan, Missouri, Wisconsin, and Florida, as well as the counties of Tompkins, NY (home of Cornell) and Mercer, NJ (home of Princeton). The second most significant attribute of counties that produce famous people was the presence of a very large city. (All of these cities, such as Boston, New York, and Washington, also are the sites of universities.)

These two findings were remarkably similar to what I discovered when I did an analysis of the metropolitan areas where high-skill jobs are particularly concentrated. (I reported on my findings in my blog of August 10, 2011.) For example, here are the top 10 metropolitan areas with a high density of occupations requiring a high level of communication skills:

1. Durham, NC
2. Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV
3. Trenton-Ewing, NJ
4. San Jose–Sunnyvale–Santa Clara, CA
5. Boston-Cambridge-Quincy, MA-NH
6. Hartford–West Hartford–East Hartford, CT
7. Gainesville, FL
8. Bridgeport-Stamford-Norwalk, CT
9. San Francisco–Oakland–Fremont, CA
10. Rochester, MN

Most of these are college towns, and several are very large cities.

I also found that many metro areas came up repeatedly when I looked at different skills. For the nine skills that I looked at, Boston-Cambridge-Quincy, MA-NH appeared on seven of the top-20 lists. The metro area where I live, Trenton-Ewing, NJ (home of Princeton), appears on five of the nine lists, as does New Haven, CT, the home of Yale.

One factor that Stephens-Davidowitz noted but that I missed was the influence of immigrants. You may not be surprised to find that college towns and metropolises attract many immigrants, but the economist also found that when two counties with similar populations and college attendance are compared, the county with the higher concentration of immigrants tends to produce more notable Americans. Having immigrant parentage, he discovered, also increases your chances of elevation to Wikipedia.

Now, I’ll admit that there is no easy way to determine the skill level of the people profiled on Wikipedia. But I’m sure you’ll agree that most of them did not achieve their fame purely by luck. And this supposition is borne out by the fact that the same environments that produce famous people are also home to the highest-skill jobs.

Don’t Let Schooling Interfere with Your Education

I owe Mark Twain the title of this week’s blog. His career makes an interesting case study and attests to the wisdom of his dictum, because the famous writer had little formal education. He never went to college but instead apprenticed as a printer. While working as a typesetter, he took up writing as an avocation, contributing humorous articles to a newspaper owned by his brother. He learned his next occupation, Mississippi riverboat pilot, again through on-the-job training, but eventually the Civil War put an end to most civilian traffic on the river. Next, taking advantage of his brother’s appointment as secretary to the governor of Nevada Territory, he spent a couple of years pushing papers in government offices.

After failing in his attempt to strike it rich as a miner (later detailed in Roughing It), he fell back on journalism in Virginia City. Then, while working as a journalist in San Francisco, he published his first big commercial success, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” and over the following years he evolved from a journalist with a knack for travelogue writing to the novelist who now ranks among America’s greatest. He had a parallel career as a lecturer that grew out of his travel writing. He also pursued an avocation as an inventor, perhaps an outgrowth of the technical skills he had learned in his boyhood, but he had only mixed success. As an investor, he was particularly inept and at one point had to declare bankruptcy.

Nowadays, a career path like this would be hard to follow. Nevertheless, we can learn certain important lessons from it.

First, many skills can be learned informally, perhaps through leisure-time pursuits, and these can later be the basis of a career change. Although formal educational credentials (and the technical skills they represent) are more important now than ever before, employers often express frustration at being unable to find job candidates who have the right soft skills. Therefore, although I recognize the importance of a college degree, I urge young people to round out their college educations with activities that will cultivate soft skills. These may be part-time jobs, internships, student organizations, or volunteer activities. Probably the most important characteristic to look for in these extracurricular activities is collaborative work, because it builds people skills and communication skills that are rarely central to academic coursework. This is the core of the message in the title of this week’s blog.

Second, be ready to take advantage of unexpected opportunities. Growing up in a small riverfront town, Mark Twain became aware of the opportunities that being a riverboat pilot offered for high pay and the chance to escape small-town life. But when that livelihood dried up, he was ready to use a personal connection to shift to a new occupation that led him to unanticipated career opportunities. These did not always work out, but because Twain had a fund of skills and the resilience to recover from setbacks, he eventually found his way to his main claim to fame. He was able to reinvent himself several times. In fact, he even reinvented his name from Samuel Clemens to Mark Twain.

Finally, if you change from one industry to another (whether willingly or from necessity), try to find ways to use your accumulated fund of knowledge in your new field. Mark Twain based his jumping frog story on an anecdote he heard while working as a miner in Nevada. He drew on his riverboat experience when he wrote Life on the Mississippi and Huckleberry Finn, and the mechanical knowledge he acquired as a printer’s apprentice figures in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.

Few can achieve the immortal fame of Mark Twain, but we all can benefit from emulating the traits that allowed him to grow and advance from his initial job as a small-town printer: a constant love of learning, alertness to opportunities, resilience, and the resourcefulness to exploit what he had already learned.