Archive for April, 2008

Job Security & Today’s Economy

Friday, April 25th, 2008

As a guest on a national radio talk show a while back, I got a call from the mother of two young college men. She wanted her boys to avoid the pitfalls of reorganizations and job instability that seem to be rampant in today’s economy. She asked me what they should major in “so they will never lose their jobs or be downsized.” I said, “Tell them to go into nursing.”

I wasn’t being flip. Downsizing, also called “workforce reduction,” “negotiated departure,” “restaffing,” and a host of other euphemisms, is the trend as companies adapt to an increasingly global economy and shrinking profit margins. “Firings used to be done with surgical cleanliness,” according to employment guru Harvey Mackay. “Now they’re called restructurings, and they’re done with a meat cleaver.”

But even in today’s economy, there are areas of job growth. These include healthcare, education, government, and some technology sectors. Hardest hit are manufacturing, transportation, construction, and retail. Mortgage brokers and loan officers aren’t doing so well now either.

The South is the strongest area in the country for job growth right now, while the Midwest is the hardest hit because of its broad manufacturing base.

Yes, there is a screaming need for nurses. In fact, many hospitals and health care organizations are importing nurses from other countries because it’s so difficult to find enough nurses in the U.S. But you don’t need to become a nurse to increase your job security and avoid the “meat cleaver.” Update your skillset and target the growing sectors.

~ Anne Follis, CPRW

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Education and Your Career

Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008

Back in 1990, when I first began writing resumes and providing career consulting, I saw a number of retired Fortune 500 corporate executives who were seeking part time consulting positions. The majority of them had no formal education beyond high school, and every one of them said that anyone with just a high school diploma starting out in business today would never be able to climb the corporate ladder the way they did. They were right.

If you are wondering if finishing that bachelor’s, master’s, or doctoral degree will be worth it to you in the long run, the evidence says overwhelmingly that it will. Never in U.S. history has a person’s educational level been linked to earning capacity as it is today, according a 2002 study by the U.S. Census Bureau.

The study, which compared earnings to education levels from 1975 to 1999, found that the gap in earnings for people with different education levels has grown significantly over the years. Back in 1975, for example, full time workers with a bachelor’s degree earned approximately 1.5 times what workers with only a high school diploma earned. And employees with an advanced degree, who earned 1.8 times the earnings of high school graduates in 1975, averaged 2.6 times the earnings of workers with a high school diploma in 1999.

The study indicated that gender and race can also play a part in the earnings gap, but across the board people with higher levels of education earn more than people with less education. According to the study, this growing earnings gap is attributable to the supply of labor and the increasing demand for skilled workers.

Several years ago I met with a prospective client in his early thirties and reviewed his work history of mostly short-term, dead-end jobs. Needless to say, he was very discouraged, and I suggested he begin taking college classes and work toward a degree, no matter how long it might take. He protested that it was not feasible; he just couldn’t afford to go to college. My insistence that he could not afford NOT to pursue his education and that, in fact, there are government grants and other loan options that would more than pay for themselves in the long run, fell on deaf ears. I wish I’d had this study back then to prove my point. A college degree can result in hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional income over a lifetime, and is well worth the time and expense.

In another instance I did some outplacement for a manufacturing subsidiary that was closing its doors due to a reorganization. The company offered tuition reimbursement to its employees, and among the clients I worked with, two stand out. They were both about the same age, they had both been with the company for 20-years, and they were both plant managers. One of these clients took advantage of the tuition reimbursement program and slowly but steadily took classes at night, earning a bachelor’s degree in 15-years. The other had nothing but a high school diploma and never took any classes. He thought his job would last a lifetime. He was wrong. Do I need to tell you which one fared better in the job search?

There are, of course, companies that will consider hiring a person who has industry experience, and if you see a job for which you are well qualified, but the ad says a degree is required and you don’t have one, send a resume anyway. You have nothing to lose, and I have known people who’ve been successful in landing the job because of their skills and experience, in spite of not meeting all of the education requirements.

Nevertheless, you are bound to find limitations everywhere you look if you don’t have that bachelor’s or (increasingly) master’s degree. I have had countless clients tell me how unfair that is, and in many ways they’re right. There are capable, knowledgeable, accomplished job candidates with minimal education who have much more real-world experience than some people with multiple degrees. It doesn’t matter. Fair or not, that’s the way the world is, and it’s not going to change any time soon. In fact, in today’s economy, with unemployment levels growing, unemployment for people with college degrees is just 2%, according to Career News.

So no matter where you are on the education scale, you might want to look into more schooling. The payoff could be considerable.

~Anne Follis, CPRW

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Power Pack Your Job Search!

Thursday, April 10th, 2008

Updating Your Job Search Strategy

If you’re like most job seekers, you invest the majority of your time and precious resources in scanning Internet job boards and responding to ads in the newspapers.

Reality check. Estimates vary, but if that’s the strategy you’re using to find a job, indications are that your likelihood of success is around 10 to 13 percent. No wonder people get depressed and quit before they find a job. It can be like pounding your head against a brick wall.

The problem is that there are a lot more people looking for jobs these days than there are jobs available. (I’ll bet you already figured that one out!) Consequently, there are literally millions of resumes posted on the various job boards, giving new meaning to the term “needle in a haystack,” and when an ad hits the newspaper, it’s not uncommon for an employer to to receive hundreds of responses, if not thousands.

So if your primary strategy for finding a job is to surf the Internet boards and respond to newspaper ads, you are competing with dozens, hundreds, thousands, and in some cases millions of other applicants, making the odds against you pretty overwhelming. No wonder you’ve begun to feel as if you’re dropping your resume into a black hole! There’s got to be a better way.

There is, but it’s going to take some hard work and initiative on your part. If you enjoy sales and marketing, it will be right up your alley, because for this little window of time (i.e., while you are trying to find a job), you are in sales, and the product you’re marketing is you. And in case you haven’t figured it out yet, there are lots of other “products” out there. Some of them are cheaper, some of them are smarter, some of them are older, some of them are younger, some of them have more experience, and some of them have less. It would be nice to think that the most qualified applicant will be the one who lands the job, but it frequently does not work that way.

Put yourself in the position of the person doing the hiring. You have an opening you have to fill within two weeks. You have two hundred resumes to review and counting. You would love to shut down the office for the next fourteen days until you’ve settled this matter, but that’s not at all practical. And so you get the awful job of sifting through resumes and calling people to come in for interviews while still performing all the other functions of your position. And you would rather submit to a root canal without an anesthetic.

And then some eager beaver (let’s call him Joe) gets a hold of you on the phone. Actually, he’s been calling for weeks. He’s talked to your assistant and sent you e-mails and dropped off his resume and then dropped off another copy “just in case the first one got lost.” Finally, he calls early one morning before your assistant gets in, just as you are facing the prospect of going through all those resumes. He is pleasant and polite and to the point. He tells you briefly what his skills are, he expresses an interest in your company, and he asks about employment openings.

On the one hand, this call is a little annoying. On the other hand, you look at the growing number of resumes and think, “This guy seems to know a little something about what we do around here, and he’s awfully eager.” And at a subconscious level you’re even thinking, “If he works out, I won’t have to go through all these resumes.”

He presses a little bit. “Would it be possible for me to come in and speak with you? I promise I won’t take up too much of your time, but I would appreciate just a few minutes to introduce myself and present my qualifications in person. Would today be okay or would sometime later in the week be better?”

What would you say? If you’re like the hundreds of hiring managers I’ve talked to who have been through this, you’re likely to say something like, “I’ve got a little time this afternoon if you can be here at 3:00.” So Joe gets a crack at the job, while the 200 applicants who simply submitted resumes and then sat around twiddling their thumbs hoping for the phone to ring may very well be history.

What made Joe stand out? Is he smarter or more qualified? Not necessarily. He was simply the one who called the right person at the right time.

But, you say, how can you possibly know when to call whom?

You can’t. And so what you do is make a volume of phone calls (I recommend 10 to 20 or more a day) and persist through a thousand stalls, rejections, and maybes until you touch base with the right person at the right time who says yes. It’s that simple. And that difficult.

Before you moan and groan and say you can’t do it, it’s not your style, let me reiterate. In the past, the approach to getting jobs was passive. You submitted resumes and waited, hoping for a response. Since back in the good old days there were more jobs than people to fill them, you usually didn’t have to wait very long, and this approach worked most of the time.

But we’ve already established that the world has changed — a lot — and today the onus is on the job seeker. You must take an active, persistent, aggressive approach to finding the job you want. If you don’t do it, no one will. That I can guarantee. And my experience has been that for many people, the process can be exciting and empowering. Rather than submitting helplessly to the whims of the job market, which can be the most depressing experience of a lifetime, you are taking control of the process for yourself.

~ Excerpted and updated from the book Power Pack Your Job Search! by Anne Follis, CPRW. For more information, go to CareerHappy.com and click on “Power Pack Your Job Search”

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