The conventional wisdom is that searching for a job is, itself, a full time job. That was good advice in the 20th Century. Today, it’s a formula for long term unemployment. If you spend all of your time looking for a new position, you can’t get to the other task that’s required to be successful in the job market. What’s that? Revitalizing your career.

No one would argue that finding a job is easy, especially in today’s era of cramped opportunities. It takes long hours and a lot of hard work to research employers, reply to their ads and network with friends and colleagues. In the past, however, you could also be certain that such dedication would pay off in a reasonably short period of time. In weeks or at most a month or two, you would have a couple of job offers, and one would probably be better than the last job you had.

That’s no longer true. In this tepid recovery, you can exert the same level of effort as you did in the past and still come up short. You can even work harder than you did in your last job search and still find yourself without an offer. Why? Because employers have changed the rules of the game. They’re no longer looking for qualified applicants for their openings. They want to hire the “better than qualified” person.

How can you make yourself look like a better than qualified person? That’s where the 50-50 job search comes in. You spend half your time working as hard as you can on your job search and the other half of your time transforming yourself into a candidate that employers simply can’t resist.

How Do You Become Irresistible to Employers?

In today’s tough economy, businesses are looking to draw as much talent and productivity as possible out of each employee. You can argue about the fairness of the increased requirements but not about the reality of their existence. Employers want their workers to be:
• at the state-of-the-art in their profession, craft or trade
and
• able to contribute continuously to their success in a significant way.

Everybody claims to have those traits, so simply saying that you do isn’t enough. You have to prove that you are a better than qualified person, and that takes three steps.

Step 1: Candidly assess the status of your qualifications. As a minimum, ask yourself these questions:
• When was the last time you took an in-depth course in the latest tools and techniques used in your field? If the answer is more than two years ago, you’re not a better than qualified prospect.
• Have you ever acquired skills that would expand the range of situations in which you could contribute to your employer? Do you speak a second language, for example, or do you know how to use the latest technology in your industry? If the answer is no, you’re not a better than qualified prospect.

Step 2. Plug the gaps in your qualifications, beginning with those that are most likely to be of concern to employers. If you’re uncertain of the priorities, ask a couple of hiring managers in your field. As a general rule, however, always begin by remediating any deficiencies in your primary field and then work on adding complementary skills that will make you even more able to contribute.

There are, of course, a range of alternatives you can use in this effort. Check out:
• Local community colleges,
• The programs offered by your professional or trade association, and
• Online courses from training firms and academic institutions.

Step 3. Promote your effort. Don’t wait until you’re done with your educational effort and don’t assume that recruiters and hiring managers will know to ask about them. Start getting the word out the minute you start to get better than qualified.

At the very least, add your coursework to the Education section of your resume. List the name of the course, the institution or organization from which is providing it, and the term “On-going.”

That simple entry will signal to employers that you understand the importance of being a better than qualified person and that you take personal responsibility for ensuring you are. There’s simply no better way to set yourself apart from others and set yourself up for success in today’s job market.

Thanks for reading,
Peter
Visit me at Weddles.com

Peter Weddle is the author of over two dozen employment-related books, including Recognizing Richard Rabbit, a fable of self-discovery for working adults, and Work Strong, Your Personal Career Fitness System.

© Copyright 2010 WEDDLE’s LLC. All Rights Reserved.

A lot of people are angry and frustrated with their careers these days. They played the game and obeyed the rules, and still, they’ve been blindsided by circumstances that have battered their security and self-respect. They expected their career to be able to accommodate the situation, but it let them down. They thought their career was a self-correcting system, only to discover it needs a guiding hand.

There’s been a lot of commentary about the career prospects of lawyers these days, so let’s take a look at that profession as a case in point.

According to news reports, the number of people taking the law school entrance exam rose dramatically in 2009. Not surprisingly, law school applications did so, as well. At schools ranging from Washington University in St. Louis to the University of Iowa’s College of Law, applications were up from 20 to over 40 percent. Having evaluated their prospects of success in other occupations (including their own), more and more people have apparently decided that becoming a lawyer is a smart idea.

The New York Times, however, featured a report that suggested exactly the opposite is true. It introduced Daniel Lukasik, an attorney who runs a Web-site called lawyers with Depression, and described what he has encountered:

“Mr. Lukasik recently received a call from a man who said he was a fifth-year associate in Manhattan who complained that he felt expendable even though he was a top performer.

He said to me, ‘What more do I have to do?’” Mr. Lukasik recalled. “’I’m billing a large amount of hours, I’m a team player,’ but he said it’s very possible he might lose his job. And he was a Yale graduate, at a top-20 firm.”

The associate was paralyzed by his sense of betrayal—by the feeling he had that his occupation and the economy had let him down. He assumed—he believed—that because he was doing all the right things, the world of work would treat him right. He was simply unable to comprehend or accept that the workplace is not governed by physics-like laws of mathematical certainty and predictability. It is, instead, a frontier that cannot be manipulated into orderly behavior or preferred outcomes.

How Can You Deal With Such a Situation?

Careers are not self-correcting systems so they have to be guided into a state that provides you with security and satisfaction. And, career activism is a strategy for doing so. To become a career activist, however, most of us will have to change our outlook. In the case of the lawyer, for example, he would have to accept the responsibility for managing his own career. He must be willing to work as hard on his personal future as he does on his legal briefs for his employer. He must stop worrying about his job security and start working at his career security.

With that commitment to himself in place, he could take the first step toward independence in the workplace. He would set aside the time to ask and answer a frank question: Is his current profession—is the law—employing him at his talent or is he working, instead, to reach some idealized lifestyle? The fact that he is performing at a high level doesn’t ensure that he also loves what he is doing. And no lifestyle—regardless of how plush and comfortable it may be—can justify employment at what another lawyer called “an absolute torture shack.” There is no standard of living worth employment by water boarding, in the law or any other occupation.

If the law isn’t employing his talent, it is his job—his most important job—to find an occupation that will. If, on the other hand, the law does in fact enable him to express and experience his gift, then the next step in managing his career would be to assess, as accurately and candidly as he can, if he is performing at his peak. If he isn’t, it is also his job to fix those aspects of his work where he is falling short.

If he is doing his best work, then it is up to him to create options for himself. He should:
• assess whether he is being fulfilled in a big Manhattan law firm and, if not, where he would be better able to pursue Happiness in his profession.
• if working in a big firm is the right place for him, he must take steps to protect himself should his current employer be unable to sustain his employment. He must work to increase his visibility and stature among other potential employers to ensure that he, rather than his current firm, can determine the state of his employment.
• if working in some other sphere of the legal profession—in a boutique firm, the government or the not-for-profit sector—is better aligned with his talent, he must initiate and develop a robust network of contacts that could facilitate his move into that kind of work at a time of his choosing.

Such career activism is already on the rise in the American workplace. A 2009 Executive Mobility Survey conducted by BlueSteps, an executive search firm, found that an astonishing 75 percent of currently employed executives describe themselves as likely or very likely to consider taking a new job in 2010, despite the lingering effects of the Great Recession. They don’t see themselves as anchored to their current employer and they are looking ahead to alternative employment opportunities that would better serve their career goals. Assuming they act on those plans, they will have corrected their careers.

Even with a recovery from the recession, the global marketplace is too unstable for us to return to the halcyon days of the past. Our careers, therefore, will continue to face disruptive threats and roadblocks. But those situations can defeat us only if we let them. Each of us has the capacity to correct the course of our career. We just have to make the commitment to do so.

Thanks for reading,
Peter
Visit my blog at Weddles.com/WorkStrong

Peter Weddle is the author of over two dozen employment-related books, including Recognizing Richard Rabbit, a fable of self-discovery for working adults, and Work Strong, Your Personal Career Fitness System.

© Copyright 2010 WEDDLE’s LLC. All Rights Reserved.

January is a fitting time to think about beginnings. They are, of course, a big part of our lives. Each year, we tear the December page off our calendar and begin a new passage around the sun. Many of us also use the same demarcation point to begin diets or physical fitness programs or family dinners every week. Universally, beginnings are hopeful times, which is why it’s so strange that we exclude them from our careers.

The conventional way of looking at the events in our careers is to see them as a series of endings. Often unconsciously, we assume that graduation is the end of our education. Finding a job is the end of our search for employment opportunities. And, achieving a promotion at work is the end of our quest to reach for the best we can be in our profession, craft or trade.
Unfortunately, however, this perspective not only squashes your hope, it forces you to see your career as
• an experience shaped by outside forces that are beyond your control
and
• a series of disconnected events, each of which leads to its own final and discrete conclusion.

This point of view gave most career changes a bad name. It laced every new assignment, new job, new boss, new work schedule, new employer, and new occupation with a negative feeling. There was no sense of passage, no feeling of progress—no hope—because the event simply occurred. And then, it was over.

Without an overarching rationale or vision, nothing tied the changes in your career together. They all just happened. To you. There was no coherence, no ultimate purpose for you. You weren’t advancing toward a clearly defined objective that was meaningful to you, but rather lurching through a series of disjointed events that were imposed on you. And, the only way you had to determine where you were in your career was the change in your pay, and that adjustment was based on your employer’s appraisal, not yours.

The result of this nonsensical movement was a deep and dispiriting feeling of helplessness. Your career made you feel like that shiny little ball in a pinball machine. You were being pushed and flippered from post to post and, while the lights would occasionally flash and the bells might go off, you were never in control and never had the chance to establish a pattern or purpose for your work.

And, as if that weren’t bad enough, each unconnected event also came to its own conclusion. Of course, you probably did get some satisfaction from the advancement you were able to achieve, even if it was defined by your employers. That satisfaction, however, was always tempered by your knowledge that success meant the end of your endeavor.

The challenge and opportunity of a specific career activity and the happiness it created were transitory, and at its conclusion, they disappeared. You had reached your goal. You were done. The engagement and energy that were stimulated by striving to reach it quickly faded. All you were left with, at the end, was the memory of that exclamation point of achievement and the hungry sense of disappointment at its fleeting presence.

What’s the Alternative?

Such hopelessness is not only unhealthy, it is completely unnecessary. You can instill promise in your career simply by adopting a different outlook, one in which you see career change as a continuum. You can capture a sense of possibility in your work simply by recognizing that each event is connected to the one that preceded it and to the one that follows it and to those that will follow it, as well. They are all stepping stones along the journey you are taking in your career. What sets them in place and holds them together is your commitment to the exploration and expression of your special gift—your inherent ability to excel.

To put it another way, the changes in your employment experience should all have the same purpose: to advance your development and use of your talent. When you ensure that happens, you are the best you can be for:
• Your employer—which maximizes your performance, your perceived contribution and your paycheck; and
• Yourself—which maximizes your self-esteem, your sense of fulfillment and, ultimately, your happiness.

This perspective transforms career events from endings into beginnings. While the outcome is clearly important, it is the ongoing experience of moving forward—the taking of the next step, rather than where the step lands—that is your penultimate reward.

Graduation, a successful job search and the advancement of your career through promotion or job change can be seen for what they truly are, at least in the new world of work in the 21st Century. Graduation is not the end of your professional development, but rather the beginning of your quest for professional expertise. Landing a new job doesn’t mean the hard work is over in your career, but rather, that it is just beginning. And, earning a promotion or taking a better job isn’t your reward for what you have already done, but instead your single, best opportunity to do even more.

Each event, but especially each job, is a platform for both performance and preparation. It is a crucible in which the challenge of your present work draws out the dimensions of your best self. That expanded capacity, in turn, resets you to advance to yet another and greater employment experience which then draws out even more of the best within you and prepares you to embark on still another challenging opportunity. And so on. And so on. These serial beginnings are the only career victories that matter because they, alone, maximize what is most important in your work—what it does for you.

Thanks for reading,
Peter
Visit my blog at Weddles.com/WorkStrong

Peter Weddle is the author of over two dozen employment-related books, including Recognizing Richard Rabbit, a fable of self-discovery for working adults, and Work Strong, Your Personal Career Fitness System.

© Copyright 2010 WEDDLE’s LLC. All Rights Reserved

Prognosticating is a fine, old end-of-the-year tradition. Perhaps it’s the knowledge that the devil we know is bowing out and the devil we don’t know has yet to appear, but we seem especially interested in these forecasts during the last days of December.

How much credence should we put in them?

Well, the dictionary defines prognostication as an activity in which you “predict according to present indications or signs.” To my way of thinking, however, figuring out the future is nothing more than guesswork gussied up as deductive reasoning. Nevertheless, I think it’s helpful to look ahead at what might happen if only to scare ourselves into paying more attention to the emerging trends and issues around us. So, without further ado, here are my predictions for those in the world of work in 2010.

We’ll emerge from the Great Recession with a permanently altered world view. The Great Depression profoundly changed the outlook of a generation or more of Americans. The Great Recession is doing the same. Americans lost their trust of banks in the Great Depression, and while that may be true during this Great Recession, as well, today’s Americans have also lost their trust in employers. In 2010, a growing number of Americans will come to believe that too many of these organizations do not have their best interests at heart and are not led by compassionate, fair and honest executives.

What can you do to protect yourself? Take charge of your career and get comfortable with change. Don’t rely on your employer to advance your career—that’s now your job—and plan for the inevitable adjustments it will require—you are now likely to have a new job, a new employer or both every three years or so. Make sure you’re the master of those changes and not their victim.

We’ll begin to feel the effect of two new classes in America. The traditional distinctions of American life—a society loosely composed of upper, middle and lower classes—will become less important as two new groups begin to emerge: workers and talent. Employers believe that the recession has given them access to an oversupply of workers—their mailboxes are now filled with resumes—even as they face a shortage of talent. In fact, the situation is so dire that they call it a War for Talent. They simply can’t find enough of two kinds of people: those who have a skill that is critical to the organization’s success and those who are superior performers on-the-job. As a result, workers find themselves competing with dozens, sometimes even hundreds of others for the same position, while people of talent have employers competing for them with hiring bonuses and above market salary offers.

What can you do to protect yourself? The good news is that everyone has an inherent talent; the bad news is that not everyone is working at it. The key to success going forward, therefore, will be to ensure that you are doing your best work using the talent with which you were endowed. For many Americans, that may mean a new career field, but making that shift now will also mean greater security and satisfaction in the future.

We’ll see layoffs continue even as hiring begins to increase. During the recession, employers laid off employees to cut costs. During the recovery, they will continue those layoffs to improve performance. They will eliminate the positions of those workers who are average performers and create new ones that require top performers. In this post-recession, global economy, employers believe that to ensure their own survival, they must hire only the best and brightest who deliver only the best and most useful contribution on-the-job. Loyalty to the organization, knowing the ropes and how things get done inside it and all of the other attributes that used to be valued and rewarded with continued employment in the past will no longer work in the future.

What can you do to protect yourself? See yourself as employed in two jobs, whether you’re in transition or working full time. You must conduct your job search or do your best work for your employer and, concurrently, you must devote the time and effort to build up and sustain the health of your career. Simply put, developing your personal Career Fitness is the only way to achieve meaningful and enduring success in the 21st Century workplace.

We’ll recognize the demise of the “come as you are” job market. Historically, you found a new job with the skills and knowledge you had in your old one. You simply updated your resume, sent it out to a bunch of employers and within weeks had several offers, often including one that was better than the last job you had. Unfortunately, those days are over. Most recruiters want to hire people from the ranks of the employed—whether it’s true or not, they believe those individuals are better qualified—so if you’re unemployed, you are at a real and serious disadvantage. If you have any doubt about that, consider the record number of long-term unemployed persons in the country today. Once you’re out of work, you’re out of the zone of primary consideration.

What can you do to protect yourself? Re-imagine yourself as a work-in-progress. Enroll in a class or start a training program even as you are looking for a job. Then, note that effort on your resume. Enter the name of the course, the institution where you’re taking it and the term “On-Going.” That single step will position you as a candidate with two attributes every employer prizes: it will show that you understand the importance of state-of-the-art skills and that you take personal responsibility for ensuring you have them.

Next year will introduce a world of work unlike any we‘ve ever seen in the United States. For many, it will be a disconcerting and even frightening environment. There are, however, steps you can take to protect yourself. And doing so will also enable you to reach for and grab hold of the extraordinary opportunities that this new workplace holds, as well.

Thanks for reading,
Peter
Visit my blog at Weddles.com/WorkStrong

Peter Weddle is the author of over two dozen employment-related books, including Recognizing Richard Rabbit, a fable of self-discovery for working adults, and Work Strong, Your Personal Career Fitness System.

© Copyright 2009 WEDDLE’s LLC. All Rights Reserved.

The American Dream. While it is a quintessentially American aspiration, each of us has a unique vision of just what it is. For some, the dream is a chance to build a successful business. For others, it’s a home of their own. And for still others, it’s the opportunity to shop until they drop. As alluring as all of these visions are, however, I would respectfully suggest that they are outcomes of the dream and not the dream, itself. The American Dream is actually a state of mind.

We all know, of course, that the American Dream exists because we live in a nation founded on certain extraordinary principles. Much as we take them for granted, deep down inside, every American knows that they are especially fortunate to live in a land where they are accorded an enduring right to Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. While most of us are very clear about what Life and Liberty mean, however, there is some confusion about the pursuit of Happiness. And it’s that misunderstanding which causes us to misperceive the American Dream.

The founding fathers, themselves, inadvertently provoked this situation with their capitalization choices. They used initial caps on Life, Liberty and Happiness, when what they really meant to enshrine was a commitment to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of happiness. In other words, what the American Dream promises is not a right to happiness, but a right to Achieve it on our own.

What does that mean for those of us in the workforce?

Over the past decade or so, social scientists have been trying to figure out just what happiness is and where it comes from. While many of us think the answers to such questions are intuitively obvious, it turns out that we may be selling ourselves short. Humans have the capacity not only to experience happiness, but to experience joy, as well. And those two states are very different.

Joy is an emotional state. It is derived from our relationships with family and friends. When those interactions engage and satisfy us, when they enable us to be the best of ourselves with the others in our Life, we experience joy—one of the human species’ greatest gifts.

Happiness, on the other hand, is a cognitive state. It occurs when we are tested by meaningful challenges that stimulate us to express and experience our fullest natural potential, our talent. These challenges can occur anywhere, but they are most prevalent in the workplace. In other words, our best shot at Achieving happiness occurs when we put ourselves in a position to excel at what we love to do.

That is the essence of the American Dream. It is a personal commitment, a determination to devote our Life and exercise our Liberty to the accomplishment of two tasks:
• To discovering our natural talent or what we love to do and do best.
and
• To working only where we can use that talent to achieve satisfying goals.
The outcome of those tasks will be unique to each of us, but the tasks themselves are the same for all of us. They represent our right to the Pursuit of happiness.

Those two tasks are also the key to a successful job search and a rewarding career. Whether we’re in transition or currently employed, they enable and empower us to control our destiny, to shape it to an end that is important and fulfilling to us. It is our right, to be sure, but it is also our responsibility. For only we can take the first step, only we can decide to set off on our own personal Pursuit of happiness.

Why should we bother? Because as wonderful as the joy is in our relationships, we deserve more. We spend at least one-third of our lives at work, and that experience should offer more than frustration, anxiety and despair. It should be, it can be a source of profound fulfillment. Or what the founding fathers called Happiness.

Thanks for reading,
Peter
Visit my blog at Weddles.com/WorkStrong

Peter Weddle is the author of over two dozen employment-related books, including Recognizing Richard Rabbit, a fable of self-discovery for working adults, and Work Strong, Your Personal Career Fitness System.

© Copyright 2009 WEDDLE’s LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Four letter words are generally thought to be unfit for public consumption.  We counsel our kids to refrain from using them, and we do our best to abide by our own wisdom.  It’s odd, therefore, that so many of us seem determined to rely on a four letter word when we search for a job and manage our careers.  What is this seemingly inoffensive term?  It’s the word “free.”

Well meaning institutions and counselors often avoid programs and tools that require job seekers to pay a fee for their use.  They argue that the cost imposes an inappropriate burden on those who are in transition and potentially experiencing financial hardship.  They also contend that many if not all of the fee-based services can be obtained for free—there’s that four letter word—on the Internet.

Certainly, no one can argue with the notion of trying, wherever possible, to avoid asking job seekers to sacrifice any more than they already are.  To say that every product and service they might need should be free, however, takes that view to an illogical conclusion.  Why?  Because their good intentions have at least two unintended consequences that are bad.

Sending the Wrong Signal

First, advising job seekers (and others) that they shouldn’t pay a fee for a product or service that can help them find a job or advance their career is the equivalent of saying they shouldn’t invest in their future.  We pay for our college education, our insurance policies, even our membership in a professional or trade association because we believe that doing so will benefit us and we know it’s up to us to do it.  The same is true with our careers.  There is no entitlement to workplace success, so it’s up to us to make it happen.  If we ignore that responsibility, we undermine our future.

Sometimes, the tools we need will be free—searching the employment opportunities on a job board, for example—and at other times, there will be a cost to acquire them.  Paying that fee is not inappropriate; it’s a commitment we make to and in ourselves.  We have to be smart about it, of course—as with other kinds of investment, it is possible to buy useless or even harmful career products and service—but the payment itself is a profoundly empowering act, one that reinforces our self-respect and our capability at the same time.

Ignoring Qualitative Differences

The Internet is the richest source of human knowledge ever devised.  It’s also a garbage heap of mediocre advice, bad information, stale ideas, and occasionally, outright dangerous opinions.  Most of us have learned, therefore, to evaluate what we find online very carefully.  We select what we determine to be true and useful and we ignore the rest.  Subscriptions to the online version of The Wall Street Journal, for example, have actually risen during the recession, and those subscriptions aren’t free.  Hundreds of thousands of people pay to access that information because they believe that it’s helpful to them and better than what they can get in other places.

The same is true with job search and career resources.  There’s a lot of free stuff out there on the Web, but it’s not necessarily state-of-the-art or very helpful.  For example, you’ll find countless primers and checklists of job search techniques that worked in the 1990’s, but will waste your time and get you nowhere today.  Paying a fee for a career tool or resource doesn’t necessarily mean it will be qualitatively better, but it certainly holds it to a higher standard.  So, what should you do?  Be as smart a consumer of career tools as you are of cell phones and television sets.  Assess the credibility and track record of the individual or organization behind the product or service before you invest your time or money in using it.

Now I grant you that fr** is not your run of the mill four letter word.  It’s neither impolite nor off-putting.  It is, however, potentially misleading and even harmful, at least when it’s used to guide the way people acquire job search and career management resources.  What’s a better way to judge such tools?  Focus on how helpful they will be to you.  You deserve access to the tools that will serve you best, and having to pay a fair price for them isn’t doing you a disservice; it is making a down payment on your hopes and dreams.

Thanks for reading,

Peter

Visit my blog at Weddles.com/WorkStrong

Peter Weddle is the author of over two dozen employment-related books, including Recognizing Richard Rabbit, a fable of self-discovery for working adults, and Work Strong, Your Personal Career Fitness System.

© Copyright 2009 WEDDLE’s LLC.  All Rights Reserved.

The positive growth turned in by the American economy in the third quarter of this year suggests that maybe, just maybe this Great Recession is now in our rear view mirror.  As it fades away, of course, the tales will begin about what we did during this terrible time.  While recounting those legends is surely important, so too is sharing the insights we’ve acquired from our experience.

Cataclysmic events often alter our perceptions of the world around us.  That was true during the Great Depression, and it will be true as we emerge from this Great Recession, as well.  Some of these new views are opinions about what happened and why, but others are actually lessons that we’ve learned about how best to survive and prosper.  They’re the things we wish we had known before the event occurred because that knowledge would have undoubtedly enabled us to fare better than we did.

I think the sharing of this wisdom is good for us—it’s cathartic to acknowledge that we’ve earned an advanced degree in the school of hard knocks—but it’s even more helpful for our kids and grandkids.  In a very real sense, we are giving them a gift, a roadmap for the future that may help them avoid the dead ends and dangerous potholes they are sure to encounter.

Each of us has our own view of the lessons we should pass along.  For me, the following four insights are among the most important.  They are realizations everyone must have in order to chart a successful and fulfilling career in the 21^st Century world of work.

Seeking job security makes you vulnerable.  In today’s turbulent economy, employers have no idea what will happen tomorrow or the day after.  They may promise you job security, but they can’t deliver it.  So, counting on it is likely to put you out for the count.  A far better objective is career security—the ability to stay employed in a job of your choosing regardless of the condition of any single employer or the economy as a whole.  Unlike job security, career security is a state you create for yourself.  You don’t have to rely on the good will of some employer.  You anticipate the changes in your career—the timing of a move from one boss or organization to another, the refocusing or reskilling that’s necessary to accommodate shifts in your industry or profession—and then you plan and execute those changes so they benefit you.

Recognition is something you give yourself.  Most managers and supervisors mean well, but if you wait for them to recognize your accomplishments at work, you’re likely to be disappointed.  Some have the social skills of a brick and others are too worried about their own security to take care of yours.  That’s why it’s important for you to keep track of your own “career victories.”  Sure, it takes a little effort to maintain a contemporaneous record of what you’ve done and how well you’ve done it, but that account will give you more satisfaction than most managers ever will.  Don’t just write it out, however; also review it regularly.  Take the time to remember what you’ve done and pat yourself on the back when you deserve it or give yourself a little counseling if you’ve let yourself down.

Working tirelessly is a sure way to get tired.  Sadly, many people in today’s world of work find themselves wired up with no place to go.  They’ve learned the hard way that staying continuously in contact with the office doesn’t protect you.  It exhausts you.  We’re all worried about the H1N1 flu becoming a pandemic, but workaholism already is.  If you have any doubt about that, look left and right the next time you’re lying on the beach.  Every other person will be glued to their Blackberry or iPhone checking their email.  The impact of such behavior on both individual performance and wellbeing is already acute and likely to get worse.  In a knowledge-based economy, your worth is measured not by your connectivity, but by your contribution.  And, your contribution suffers when you don’t give your mind and body a chance to rest.

Taking care of your career is the best way to take care of you.  The conventional approach to career self-management has been to get an annual checkup and leave it at that.  Historically, we paid attention to our career just once each year—during our performance appraisal and salary review.  That approach was dangerous then; today, it’s a sure-fire way to induce career cardiac arrest or what most of us call unemployment.  The only safe course in a workplace as turbulent as the one we now have is to develop career fitness the same way you develop physical fitness.  You have to commit yourself to building up the strength, endurance and reach of your career every single day.  Yes, that’s a lot of work, but it’s also a smart investment.  You spend one-third or more of your day in your profession, craft or trade, and you deserve an experience during that time that is every bit as good as the rest of your life.

We have acquired many insights from our experience over the past two years, but these four maxims are the key lessons we have learned.  They are the things we wish we had known so they are now the things we want others to know.

Thanks for reading,

Peter

Visit me at Weddles.com

Peter Weddle is the author of over two dozen employment-related books, including Recognizing Richard Rabbit, a fable of self-discovery for working adults, and Work Strong, Your Personal Career Fitness System.

© Copyright 2009 WEDDLE’s LLC.  All Rights Reserved.

A lot of us have been unemployed for a very long time. The conventional explanation for this situation is that layoffs have forced more workers to compete for fewer positions. While that’s true, it is not the only reason—nor the most important one—that so many people remain out of work for so long.

The other and primary cause of long term unemployment is a change in employers’ expectations. They are no longer content to hire qualified workers. That’s the reason so many job seekers get no response, no interview, no call back, nada even when their application clearly indicates they meet one hundred percent of an opening’s stated requirements. Employers may say that’s what they’re looking for in a new hire, but in reality, they expect more.

Employers today are battered by turbulence. They face new and escalating competition in both their local and overseas markets. They must satisfy an increasingly cost-conscious consumer who is also becoming more fickle about products and services. And, they are continuously pressured to keep up with the unceasing introduction of new technology and better practices.

To survive let alone prosper in such an unsettled environment, employers need workers who have two traits:
• they must be expert in their profession, craft or trade
and
• they must be committed to maintaining that expertise.
The first trait defines a qualified person. The second indicates they are also a “career activist.”

A career activist is a person who recognizes the fleeting nature of their ability to contribute on-the-job and therefore takes proactive steps to ensure their qualifications are always at the state-of-the-art. Why is that important? Because a qualified person can do a job today, but may and probably will not be able to do so tomorrow. In the unsettled environment of the global economy, every job is constantly in flux, and only a career activist has the capacity to adapt.

How do you become a career activist and, no less important, how do you prove to employers that you have?

Transforming Yourself

Becoming a career activist begins with acceptance. You must acknowledge that the “come as you are” workplace of the 20th Century no longer exists. The turbulence of the 21st Century economy means that nothing is settled any more. In effect, you must get comfortable with the one thing we humans hate most: change. You must be willing to expect it, plan for it and put it to work for you.

Then, you have to back up that acceptance with action. In the 20th Century, you could get away with paying attention to your career once a year—during your annual performance appraisal and salary review. In today’s workplace, you have to work on increasing the strength, endurance and reach of your career every single day. In short, you now go to work to do your job and to do all of the things that will ensure you can continue to do so.

Proving Your Activism to Employers

Once you’ve adopted that kind self-improvement philosophy and made it an integral part of your workday, you will start to develop a record that employers will appreciate. It will demonstrate your ongoing acquisition of skills and knowledge in both your primary field and in ancillary areas that will enable you to use that expertise in a broader range of workplace situations. It will also reflect your ever greater visibility and stature among a continuously expanding network of professional contacts. And, it will underscore your commitment to working on challenging assignments with top flight organizations and high performing peers.

Those are all the hallmarks of a career activist’s record. It is comprehensive in scope and, ironically, it will make you look incomplete. It will portray you as a person who is never satisfied with where you are, but always seeking to be more of what you can be. If you’re in a job search, for example, it will detail a course of instruction or a training program in which you are enrolled by noting the fact on your resume with the term: “ongoing.” That one word is an employer’s proof positive that you are, in fact, a career activist.

The long term unemployment that so many people are enduring today has its roots in the structural problems of the American economy. Its tap root, however, is a significant and permanent shift in what employers expect in their new hires. Unlike in the past, they are no longer content with qualified workers. They want (and need) to employ qualified workers who are also career activists.

Thanks for reading,
Peter
Visit me at Weddles.com

Peter Weddle is the author of over two dozen employment-related books, including Recognizing Richard Rabbit, a fable of self-discovery for working adults, and Work Strong, Your Personal Career Fitness System.

© Copyright 2009 WEDDLE’s LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Most of us go into a job search thinking we may be a little rusty, but confident that, basically, we know what to do. Then you do it, and the galling indifference and humiliating rejection begin. Employers don’t acknowledge your resume submissions, executive search and staffing firms don’t return your calls, and recruiters act as if you are damaged goods. It’s hard not to feel as if you’re a failure.

And yet, you’re not. Let me say that again: You are not a failure. You are not a loser or a deadbeat or a flop. Your belief that you are (or your concern that may be) is based on two misconceptions. You think your career should unfold in a straight line. And, you believe that today’s job market is just like those of the past, only tougher.

Those views are widely held, and they are completely wrong. They may have been correct in the 20th Century, but today, they’re as accurate as a stock broker’s predictions. So when you buy into them, you throw yourself into a well of defeat that leaves you believing that you’ve done something wrong. Or, that you haven’t done something right. Whichever it is, the conclusion you draw is the same: you’ve let yourself and your family down.

It’s a terrible self-indictment, and you don’t deserve it. Let me say that again: You are not a failure. Only you can get rid of that feeling, however, and there’s only one way to do it. You have to clear up those misperceptions. You have to view the job market and the workplace as they actually are. Not as they used to be or you wished they were. Do that, see today’s world of work for what it really is, and you will turn what used to be called failure into what is now genuine success.

Correcting the Misperception of a Straight Line Career

You have probably never thought about it much, but if you’re like most of us in the workforce, you assume that a career will unfold today just as it did in the last century. Your progress in the workplace will trace a straight line. You’ll begin at point A and if you do well, you will move up to point B and from there, you will advance to point C and so on. Ever onward and ever upward.

The image of this traditional kind of movement, of course, was the career ladder. It prescribed one way up and you either kept moving along the rungs or you fell off, got pushed off or retired. The dynamic was Darwinian, but at least you always knew where you stood.

Well, that career ladder is now gone. It’s been tossed out by employers that can no longer support the human resource management infrastructure to manage your career for you (and everyone else). The straight line approach has, as a result, been replaced by the zigzag career. Ever forward, but not necessarily always up.

The image of this new kind of movement is the career jungle gym. As you may recall from your schoolyard days, the jungle gym had two alluring qualities. First, you got to pick your own way forward—there was no teacher and today there is no employer telling you where to go. And second, sometimes you might move straight up, but occasionally you would move from side-to-side and even down and around to get where you were going. There was no discredit, disgrace or dishonor in the path you picked, because (a) everyone got to pick their own way and (b) if you kept your eye on your goal, you would eventually get there. The same is true with your career.

Correcting the Misperception of a Normal Job Market

It would be reassuring, I guess, to believe that today’s job market is just like the ones of yore, only tougher. If that were true, we would at least know the rules of the game. Unfortunately, however, it’s not. The rules have changed, and we must adapt if we want to succeed.

Historically, we had a “come as you are” job market. In other words, the skill set you had in your last job was sufficient to find a new job. All you had to do, therefore, was update your resume, send it out to a bunch of employers, do a little networking around the edges and bitta-bang, bitta-boom, you would land a job that was as good as or better than the one you had before.

Today, the opposite is true. If you are in transition, the skills you had to be effective in your last job are not sufficient to find a new one. If you have any doubt about that, consider this: given a choice between two equally qualified candidates, one who is employed and the other who is in transition, recruiters will select the employed candidate 99.9 percent of the time. Why? Because, whether it’s true or not, they believe the employed person is more capable and therefore more likely to make a valuable contribution to their organization.

How can you overcome such a disadvantage? You have to reinvent yourself even as you are looking for a job. Update your skill set or add a new skill that will enable you to apply what you can already do in a broader set of circumstances. Enroll in an academic or training program or take a course from your professional association, and then, add that fact to your resume. Such a notation demonstrates that (a) you understand the importance of always getting better in today’s workplace and (b) you take personal responsibility for doing so. Those two attributes will help to set you apart in the job market and restart your career.

Looking for a job in the current environment is definitely frustrating and often discouraging. It does not, however, make you a failure. Let me say that again: You are not a failure. What’s happening today is simply proof positive that the rules of the game have changed. If you change with them—if you correct the way you look at the job market—you’ll have what it takes to turn what used to be called failure into the modern definition of success.

Thanks for reading,
Peter
Visit me at Weddles.com

Peter Weddle is the author of over two dozen employment-related books, including Recognizing Richard Rabbit, a fable of self-discovery for working adults, and Work Strong, Your Personal Career Fitness System.

© Copyright 2009 WEDDLE’s LLC. All Rights Reserved.

 Billions of words have been written about job search tools and tactics in this job market of our discontent.  Job board dos and don’ts.  Twitter.  Facebook.  Building a personal brand.  Improving your “findability.”  It’s all good advice, but none of it will work if your career is sick.  To put it in another and admittedly blunter way, don’t bother looking for a job if you have a wimpy career.

You see, that’s what’s different about today’s job market.  Come as you are has been replaced by come as you need to be.  The good old days of searching for employment with stand pat qualifications are gone.  If you’re out of work, your career needs resuscitation.

It doesn’t matter that you got superior ratings on performance appraisals in your last job.  It makes no difference that you have a track record of being loyal, dependable, and hard working.  And, it is totally irrelevant that your employer went out of business, was acquired or for whatever other reason was the cause of your unemployment.

The plain, hard truth is that employers view people in transition as damaged goods.  It’s not fair.  It’s certainly not true.  And it stinks.  But it is reality.  You won’t find many recruiters who will admit it.  And in most cases, they work hard to avoid the appearance of such a bias.  But deep down inside, it’s there.  An everyday event confirms it: when presented with a choice between two equally qualified candidates, one employed and the other not, the offer will almost always go to the person who already has a job.  It’s the job market version of Catch 22.

So, what can you do?

Reinvent yourself.  It doesn’t matter how well educated, trained or senior you are in your field, change your image in the job market.

How?  By fixing your career.  By building up its strength, its fitness.  There are many techniques involved in doing that, but perhaps the most important is pumping up its cardiovascular health.  The heart of your career is your professional expertise, so go back to school.  Right now.  Even as you are looking for a job.

Build Career Fitness

Revitalizing your career in the middle of a job search involves two important steps:

• Step 1: Begin acquiring a new skill or refreshing one you already have.  You might, for example, take a course in a second language at a local community college or attend a new certification program offered by your professional or trade association.  You can choose almost any topic just as long as it will clearly and meaningfully enhance your ability to contribute on-the-job.

and

• Step 2: Add the fact that you’re back in school to your resume.  Note it in the Summary at the beginning of that document and, in its Education section, provide the name of the course you’re taking, the institution or organization that’s offering it, the formal outcome if there will be one (e.g., the certificate or degree you will earn) and the term “On-going.”

Those two simple steps will instantaneously transform you into a new person.  First, they will enhance your skill set, making you a potentially more valuable employee.  Second, taking a course of instruction or training program even as you are searching for a job demonstrates attributes all employers want but find it hard to identify in a candidate: resolve, fortitude, and determination.

Most importantly, this course of action will set you apart from other candidates by demonstrating that you have two very special attributes: you understand that in today’s rapidly evolving world of work, staying competent in your field is an ever-moving target AND you take personal responsibility for keeping yourself at the state-of-the-art.  You recognize the responsibility and accept it.

Become that person, make that transformation, and the playing field will level.  You may be in transition, but you will no longer be at a disadvantage when compared to employed candidates.  You will have reinvented yourself as a career activist, a person who is committed to continuous self-improvement no matter how senior or experienced they may be.  An individual who has the right stuff—the skills and the attributes to be a champion at work.

Thanks for reading,

Peter

Visit me at Weddles.com

Peter Weddle is the author of over two dozen employment-related books, including Recognizing Richard Rabbit, a fable of self-discovery for working adults, and Work Strong, Your Personal Career Fitness System.

© Copyright 2009 WEDDLE’s LLC.  All Rights Reserved.