You cannot control the quake, but you can decide how you'll perceive and prepare for it. And that goes a long way to defining it and determining its outcome for you.
When the economy is reinventing itself and businesses are re-engineering, why not reframe yourself, your job search, and the job market? According to Charles Handy, reframing is "the ability to see things, problems, situations or people in other ways [to] think of them as opportunities, not problems Companies, at their best, do this all the time.
Even the most cataclysmic acts of God present opportunities. To begin again, To rebuild again. When the familiar has vanished, you're forced to look at what's left. The old economic security has gone. So has corporate fidelity and paternalism.
But loyalty to yourself is alive and well. So is your sense of belonging to your trade or profession. By reframing, you can look at your situation from a perspective which could open up a host of possibilities. You can position yourself for the tremendous changes and opportunities that are emerging. Whole new industries and thousands of businesses are being created in our extraordinarily dynamic economy. Innovative software alone, reaching the market daily, changes the way we do business and paves the way for entirely new enterprises. Opportunities are out there. If you're prepared to look for them, you'll find them.
Your job search is a voyage of discovery - a chance to explore some of these possibilities. If you're proactive, you'll be in a better frame of mind to do that. Why not choose an active, "take charge" role, like an:
a) Explorer / treasure hunter / miner
b) private eye
c) investigative reporter
d) researcher/scientist
e) entrepreneur
Can you picture yourself in a diver's gear? Sherlock Holme's cap? or a reporter's trench coat? Delving into gold coins from a sunken Spanish galleon or crucial evidence to unravel the mystery?. Interviewing the CEOs of mid sized firms for your article about virtual manufacturing.? Are you a researcher, sifting through the results of your survey? or a businessperson, exploring ways to provide better services to your customers? All of these activities require keen observation and excellent analytical skills.
You are proactive, constantly pursuing information and opportunities - skills you'll use to solve the case of the unemployed person! Inc. Yourself?
Be Entrepreneurial
Have you ever thought about being self-employed? At a recent workshop, 70 job seekers were asked: What do the words entrepreneur and entrepreneurial mean to you? Their responses were almost invariably positive: "Being your own boss, Independent, Self-starter. Creative Happy Successful Decisive . . . Risk-taker ... In control." Not surprisingly, many of these job seekers, like hundreds of others who have been asked recently, overwhelmingly indicated that their employment goal - either immediate or long-term-was self-employment.
The American dream
What does this dream have to do with finding employment NOW? Does it mean you have to start a business? Buy a franchise? Not at all. You can use the entrepreneurial approach in many ways. Thinking of yourself as self-employed offers lots of advantages. Most important is the sense that you're in control, no longer at the mercy of external forces. That in itself will make you feel better about yourself. When you stop to think about it, you've always worked for yourself - not for the XYZ Widget Company or whoever signed your paycheck. In the past, what you thought about your relationship to your employer may not have been so critical. Now it is, because it's apparent that your company won't take care of you no matter how many years you've worked there. Regardless of the details of your agreement with your employer and how benevolent they may be, you are basically a contract worker. You have a job as long as you meet their needs. That's the cold reality. So you are, in a very real sense, self-employed, and self insured.
Plan to Survive
Isn't it harder to succeed in business than to find a job? Not really. Basically, they're the same. Successful business people will tell you that when they launched their business, they may not have had an elaborate business plan, complete with a carefully worded mission statement. But somehow, they knew:
a) What they were selling
b) Who needs it
c) How they would reach these people (clients, customers)
When you answer these same basic questions, you'll have a marketing plan that will help guide you to your next job. That's quite different from the hit-or-miss approach most job seekers use. A seat-of-the-pants search may not have been so bad years ago when the job you found might have lasted 30 to 35 years. But jobs like that are as extinct as the brontosaurus. Now, the average job lasts only 4.5 years and you're going to be job hunting again. If you're going to be doing something that important that often, it makes sense to do it well. Use methods that work, but getting that help hasn't been easy. There's no central mechanism to provide solid information and assistance to job seekers. What we have is a non-system, a patchwork of government departments, some not-for-profit agencies, and a plethora of businesses-resume services, employment agencies, etc. You deserve more than that.
