TEXT A Ours has become a society
of employees. A hundred years or so ago only one out of every five Americans at
work was employed, i. e., worked for somebody else. Today only one out of five
is not employed but working for himself. And when fifty years ago "being
employed" meant working as a factory laborer or as a farmhand, the employee of
today is increasingly a middle-class person with a substantial formal education,
holding a professional or management job requiting intellectual and technical
skills. Indeed, two things have characterized. American society
during these last fifty years: middle-class and upper-class employees have been
the fastest-growing groups in our working population—rowing so fast that the
industrial worker, that oldest child of the Industrial Revolution, has been
losing in numerical importance despite the expansion of industrial
production. Yet you will find little if anything written on what
it is to be an employee. You can find a great deal of very dubious advice on how
to get a job or how to get a promotion. You can also find a good deal of work in
a chosen field, whether it be the mechanist’s trade or bookkeeping. Every one of
these trades requires different skills, sets different standards, and requires a
different preparation. Yet they all have employeeship in common. And
increasingly, especially in the large business or in government, employeeship is
more important to success than the special professional knowledge or skill.
Certainly more people fail because they do not know the requirements of being an
employee than because they do not adequately possess the skills of their trade;
the higher you climb the ladder, the more you get into administrative or
executive work, the greater the emphasis on ability to work within the
organization rather than on technical abilities or professional
knowledge. From the passage it can be seen that employeeship helps one______.
A.to be more successful in his career B.to be more specialized in his field C.to solve technical problems D.to develop his professional skill