PERSONAL COLUMN

Getting out of the groove

JOHN ROWAN WILSON

That judge who recently decided to check in his wig and make a new career for himself in the City will have struck an answering chord in the breasts of innumerable frustrated middle-aged men. It must have been plain to them, as it was to me, that he wasn't chasing after more money, as some of the papers suggested. He was simply fed up with his job and wanted to have a shot at something else.

And why not? A most natural desire, which only seems eccentric because of a disastrous convention which has far too long dominated our society. This is the dreary assumption that the cobbler should stick to his last and that we are all best employed spending our lives doing the same old thing over and over again.

Nothing could be more absurd. In fact, the more able a man is, the more essential it is for him to change his job in middle age. Twenty years should be an absolute maxi- mum period for concentration on one form of work. Beyond that point, boredom sets in. If this applies to the law, which is a far more lively and varied occupation than most, it applies even more acutely to jobs contain- ing a large element of routine. A man is too old at forty, not because his abilities have declined in any way, but because his effici- ency has been destroyed by staleness.

It is true that he has gained something in the way of experience, but it is subject to the law of diminishing returns. Over a twenty year period, the maximum rate of learning occurs in the first five years. It decreases pro- gressively as time goes on, falling almost to zero in the last five years. At the end of the second decade, the loss of efficiency due to apathy offsets any gain due to experience.

This is the real reason why GPS don't seem interested any more or solicitors take over twelve months to obtain probate of a simple estate. It is the reason why the department store is always out of stock or the Army has contrived to order thousands of pairs of boots of a size suitable only for acromegalic giants. The people responsible for these acts of incompetence are not stupid. They are just bored out of their heads.

What is worse, most of them know it. Whenever middle-aged men are given a chance of a new career on any kind of satis- factory terms, they seize it with undisguised relief. Barristers queue up for judgeships, university teachers and research workers jump at the chance of administrative posts which they would have utterly despised when they were young men. Trade union leaders and businessmen are delighted to be offered political jobs, however insecure. Judges who have a hankering for the City are nothing compared to the number of stockbrokers and company directors who would like to have a go at the Bench.

Unfortunately, those who can make such a switch are only a tiny minority. The rest spend the second half of their lives sunk in nostalgic dreams, occasionally making oblique inquiries about the possibilities of breaking away. I have been approached in my time by dozens of them: doctors who dream of being businessmen, civil servants who would like to be journalists, company directors who yearn to write novels. This is not a mere craving for novelty, a fancy for the greener grass on the other side of the street. It is significant that one never gets inquiries from men in their twenties or early thirties, when they still retain their enthusi- asm for their profession of first choice.

Nor is there any real reason why the natural desire to spread their wings in a new area should not be granted, to the benefit both of themselves and the community. Most jobs, as we all know, can be learned within a year or two if they can be learned at all. In certain highly technical occupations it may take longer than this, simply because there is an unusual amount of information to memorise, but they are exceptional. Administration, which is the common factor in most occupations, is not really a technique at all; it is largely a question of being able to analyse data and develop logical courses of action. It may take a little while to under- stand the technical significance of the in- formation involved, but six months is enough for that.

This applies not only to civil service admin- istration but also to business. Anyone who has spent time in so-called Big Business knows that it is very largely administration, but involving different criteria of efficiency from the civil service. Lord Beeching's much- discussed revolution in railway management was nothing more than the introduction of conventional cost-effectiveness techniques into an area where they had not been used before.

As far as small business is concerned, training is quite unimportant, since the recipe for success does not depend on technique. It depends on good ideas, hard work, and the readiness to take a risk. None of these can be learnt. If you have them, you can be a success in a matter of months. If you haven't, all the experience in the world is useless to you.

If it is fundamentally so easy to master a new occupation, why do so few people do it? The answer is that society erects formidable barriers in their way. The most important of these are psychological. There is a deep puritanical suspicion of a man who cannot remain faithful to one job: it smacks of occupational promiscuity. The respectable way of life is to saddle yourself with one job and one wife at a very early stage of life, and stick with both of them, no matter how dreary and fruitless the relationship has become, until death or retirement brings a merciful release.

The occupational libertine has to learn to live in a constant aura of disapproval. Since I left university twenty-five years ago I have spent ten years as a doctor, two years as a merchant seaman, seven years as a business- man, eight as a journalist and fifteen as a novelist—many of these jobs being done concurrently. While nobody was ever able to pin down any serious deficiencies in my per- formance, most of my employers made it plain that they disapproved of my way of life to some degree or another. Curiously enough, it was in the easiest jobs that there was most objection to any form of extra- curricular activity. My superiors in the business world, who spent a large proportion of their time in pointless travel, endless alco- holic luncheons, and conferences that decided nothing, were particularly insistent that I should not write novels during office hours.

Added to this social disapproval there are

heavy financial sanctions, in the form of life insurance and superannuation schemes. Large organisations all have pension arrangements designed to reward faithful and loyal service, and to hang on to employees long after they

have ceased to be of any use. The part such devices play in promoting the general dim- ness and boredom and couldn't-care-less in- efficiency of our national life is immeasur- able. A man without private means, with a wife and children, is a slave to his company's pension scheme. If he decides to follow his

natural healthy instincts and start afresh, the company and the Inland Revenue instantly get together to deal him a swingeing financial blow. If he applies for new employment, his new employer also has to face a heavy finan- cial penalty, since putting men of over forty on a pension scheme is prohibitively expen- sive.

What can be done about this? In the first place we could encourage both human con- tentment and efficiency by recognising change of occupation as a healthy and desirable thing. It should not be impossible, in an age when most occupations run a contributory pensions scheme, to make them transferable whenever possible and encourage this by arrangements within the tax structure. Re- training schemes for the middle-aged should also- be encouraged.

As for the psychological aspect, it is per- haps time for every employer over the age of forty to think again, not only about his employees but about himself. He should look into his heart and ask himself if he, too, does not feel a yearning for a new beginning. And the same might be asked of the politicians who are impatient for a change of ministry, the businessmen who serve on charity com- mittees, the lawyers, doctors, bishops and trade union leaders who are happy to relinquish their own occupations to sit on commissions of inquiry into someone else's. If they clear their minds of cant they will soon realise that they are not really perform- ing an altruistic public service. They are just looking for another job.