Tuesday, February 09, 2010
By Gary Forger, Senior Vice President, Professional Development, Material Handling Industry of America
For many, the heart of survival at any company during times like these is to fit in for now to get through the current crisis. In other words, just keep your job.
And for those who have already been laid off, it’s all about getting through the current jobless crisis.
Both approaches, say human resource and recruiting experts, may deal with the here-and-now, but don’t address the bigger picture of your career. In other words, there is a big difference between focusing on a job and a career. And that is no less the case in turbulent times.
To address that difference, the recruiting organization Mergis Group makes four recommendations:
- Stay positive for yourself and your career: Don’t obsess about what you have lost or what you are afraid to lose. Focus instead on the good things you do have.
- Think about your goals: Think carefully about what your career goals are and know what you want. Think of detours as an adventure and a learning experience instead of disasters.
- Get involved: Volunteering inside and outside of work is a great idea.
- Stay connected: Don’t go off the grid during these rough times.
In fact, the majority of comments about career development in tough times focus on these four buckets, even if the words they use are different. Some experts offer anecdotal suggestions. Others are more prescriptive. Here’s what some are saying.
Stay positive
No matter how you cut it, this recession has been of historic proportions. And that makes advice from career coach Ramon Greenwood even more important – hang in there. Despite the dark clouds, he says, these trying times will pass.
One way to hang in there is a simple Web site – www.greatday.com. Also known as The Daily Motivator, the site offers thoughts each day on developing and holding a positive outlook not just at work but everywhere else.
That just might be especially effective if your work environment is highly negative. “It is important to not get sucked into politics and negative sentiment about the company. It is important to be objective and to try and see things from various perspectives. It also means not giving room to negative thinking about your own job security.” That’s according to Laletha Nithiyanandan, vice president of consulting services at Kelly Outsourcing and Consulting Group.
And you already know how negativity breeds negativity. As Lily Tomlin once said, “No matter how cynical you get, it is never enough.”
Career coach Alan Kearns recommends asking yourself a simple question to help stay positive – what do I appreciate about where I currently work? It’s simple enough to do and helps to bring into focus what’s good about your current situation despite a sea of layoffs.
There’s even a story from Business Week about the power of being positive in the face of an acquisition or merger, Bank of America and Merrill Lynch in this case. An executive coach points out that people clearly at risk are those that “are giving in to despair, sadness, and bitterness, and always grousing. People never forget how you come across in extremis. If you can shine at this moment, you can shine forever.”
Think about your goals
“I am amazed at how much work people put into vacation planning but how little they put into career planning,” writes Kearns.
Setting goals is all about minimizing risk, enhancing options and continuing to move forward, says Lara Quentrall-Thomas at Regency Recruitment Ltd. And as she points out, goal setting also gives you a sense of control over your destiny and how you invest time and energy.
Along those lines, Kearns recommends that you write a three-year plan of the role you want with a company and the steps needed to get you there.
Over at trueprofessions.blogspot.com, a career strategist tells how she built her own plan. Much of it was experiential, but it was an evolving plan nonetheless.
Ellen was in human resources and spent too much of her time working on reductions in force. In her mind, she had reached a career dead end at a young age. Ellen evaluated her options outside the company and within (there were none). So she became an independent contractor and found other aspects of human resources she really liked.
“The biggest bonus I received from making this move and reinventing myself was this: I learned what I really wanted to do with my career. Contracting for two years revealed more information about my strongest and weakest skills, my likes and dislikes, the type of organization I liked working for the most, and the special ingredients that made a job great (for me),” she says.
That said, it is important to manage your expectations as you make plans and set goals. In the publication IT World recently, the story was told of chief information officers with great credentials who abandoned their career ladders in the late Nineties and went to dotcoms. When they went bust, it took the CIOs a year or more to get back on that original ladder.
The writer wondered how choices made in this current economy will look on resumes a decade from now. “Adjusting your definition of a successful career in this economy may help you make smarter choices,” says the article.
Get involved
At so many companies trimming staff, the survivors often put their heads down. It’s called turtling.
“If you stay quiet, hope for the best, cross your fingers, so the thinking goes, you just might ride it out,” says Quentrall-Thomas. “This is the path of zero control. Turtling is a hope-for-the-best strategy but it isn’t a strategy at all. Turtling is hiding and hoping the monsters don’t find you.”
A much better response is to get more involved, take on more responsibilities. It shows a team spirit and willingness to deal with the crisis head on. Taking on more can also lead to new skills and increased personal value to the organization.
Make the right moves here and there can have all kinds of upsides. On the one hand, it can make it clear to management that you have much broader range and should receive due recognition in terms of pay or title. In other circumstances, it could be an opportunity to acquire new accounts and customers who could well be more valuable than ones you already have.
But the idea of volunteering extends outside the office too. Experts advocate taking that same team spirit and putting it into the local community.
It’s a matter of developing role models, says professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter in a recent blog on harvardbusiness.org. “This downturn’s survivors will be the role models for a new kind of business practice that is more socially responsible not as an add-on or after-thought but as a first thought at the core of its business operations.”
She also maintains that “the sense of social mission that accompanies the business mission keeps people focused on the importance of their work to solving societal problems.”
While that might sound completely out of place in terms of advancing your career in this downturn, it probably isn’t. Instead, it makes the point that getting involved has expanded beyond traditional bounds.
Stay connected
In a word, network. Like crazy. Whether your career is still on track or has become derailed. Networking can be done in so many ways from attending local chapters of professional organizations to blogs and other forms of social networking.
In a recent blog at logisticsmgmt.com, Michael Regan, chairman of the board of TranzAct Technologies Inc., asked if people were taking their careers for granted. He maintains you are doing just that if you:
- Don’t belong to at least two industry associations
- Haven’t attended at least two of their meetings in the past three years
- Have fewer than 25 professionals in your network, and
- Don’t have at least two mentors.
While Regan is more of a traditionalist advocating face-to-face networking (although he does write a blog), the other end of the spectrum is online social networking. LinkedIn, Facebook and others are high on the list here.
But there are others like brazencareerist.com that is Gen Y centric. “Start managing your career for the new workplace” is its tagline. And its focus includes the new rules of the job hunt and how to jumpstart your personal brand. The publication Fast Company has called it “Twitter meets Facebook meets LinkedIn meets Gen Y.”
Regardless of the approach(es) you choose, staying connected is probably more important than ever to managing your career whether you have a job or not. Without that network, you are literally out of the loop.
In the end, the Mergis Group had this to say about advancing your career in tough times.
“Renew your sense of thankfulness as often as you can, maintain a positive attitude, and keep an open mind. Life isn’t predictable, and you never know what great opportunities may come. Just make sure when they do come, you are ready to receive them.”
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