Linkedin just had an article about the best places to work today. The usual suspects are listed: Google,  Facebook and Amazon and some newer, and surprising  ones to me,  Uber (lots of bad press and legal issues)  and Tesla (who makes no profits and may run out of money, not gas.)

But was really struck me was how few of the top companies even existed 25 let alone 10 years ago! The ones that remain have changed a lot: Time Warner (magazines to cable), JPMorgan (a dozen mergers later started as Chemical Bank) and Disney which looks like it may be around forever and never age like Mickey Mouse!

Fortune magazine had an article that stated that 88% of their 500 largest firms from the 1950’s are gone and predicted that 40% of today’s largest firms will be gone in 10 years.

Since I constantly advise graduates and young people where to work, this got me thinking. People used to get a job right out of college and then retire there 40 years later with a good pension. None of this is true today for millennials.

In my book, I stressed that as one moves up in their careers, they needed to study beforehand the leadership and culture of the next company they wanted to work for to try to gauge their personal fit and thus improve the chance to succeed. Now I believe that even graduates and young working people need to do this plus reading all they can about their targeted potential employer. What is their overall strategy, how sophisticated are they on technology and social media, are they well financed? And is their own business model sustainable or will they be the next industry subject to what we increasingly call disruptive innovation, like Uber to taxicabs?

Even though young graduates may work for a half dozen or more organizations in their career, they need to try to look down the road to try to figure out if their next employer will even be around! I believe this new group of millennials are better equipped and more comfortable, than my generation ever was, to research and analyze all the available, on-line information that now.  After all it is their future world. This may also be one of those few areas where most well meaning parents are just not able to help. Looking for your first job or your next job has always been difficult and in this rapidly changing world it just got harder!