Posts Tagged ‘finding a job’
Network our way through the recession?
There is a funny video about Linkedin going the rounds that I found from @jackiecameron1.
Unemployed people sign up to Linkedin in a desert of jobs. Everyone is networked, but to each other, to no one has a job.
What use is networking if there are no employers in the group?
Networking is not hitching a ride!
What is very apparent in the rather delightful (and accurate) spoof is that no one is doing anything. Everyone is trying to hitch ride on everyone else!
Who in that network is trying to make anything happen? Who is inviting other people to help, even for free?
Networking out of a desert of jobs
To take the metaphor of the desert further, if anyone got the group organized to look for water, they might find some!
Why doesn’t anyone start some useful activity?
The simple answer is that no one there trusts anyone else. If they did, they would invite them to do something!
How do we begin to organize that group?
Here are 7 steps for organizing a group who seem to be out of ideas, out of resources and who don’t know each other well.
A Show Confidence in Your People
#1 Begin!
#2 Be active.
Do something! Sit down and make a sandcastle! See who helps.
B Help Your People Gain Confidence in Each Other
#3 Change the sandcastle so that people are helping each other.
Move your position so that you are handing sand to the person building. When another person joins in, move to the the end of the line.
#4 Move the line slowly in the direction that seems most promising.
At the same time, get people to sing so that they become more aware that they are a group.
Keep your attention on the sandcastle by-the-way! People are only going to be bothered with the sand castle if you are!
C Work with People Who Trust the Group
#5 Position a reliable person at the end of the line while you start a new line.
Make sure the person at the end of a line knows to sing out if they see anything unusual on the horizon.
D Bring Information About Opportunities Into the Group
#6 When someone sees something unusual on the horizon, don’t create a stampede.
Move the whole bicycle wheel, by changing the direction that the sand moves. Move the sandcastle builder to the other end and reverse the direction of sand. In an orderly way, move the other spokes. Keep it playful!
E We Are All In This Together
#7 Continue and continue!
You might decide to abandon your group and go it alone. Yes, it might be slow moving the group along and it might feel as if the group is slowing you up. But aren’t your chances of finding water higher in an organized group looking out for each other?
It is easier to think straight when things are really bad
It sometimes feel that deserts are too much to cope with. I am also going to tell you that deserts are better than abandoned farm land. You are lucky. Yes, you are!
Let’s imagine, you simply find yourself in a abandoned but essentially sound farm. You don’t start building a useless sandcastle. You do something useful. You start to plough the land and plant seeds. The difficulty is that you have now fixed your group to that field. You will be unable to move slowly across the horizon to a better place. In modern parlance, your solution is not scalable!
That’s why I like the idea of deserts. We are willing to abandon sandcastles and rebuild them elsewhere.
When you chose your seed project, build something, anything, where we can see results and where we can all help! Keep the projects short and sweet so that people can see results and move them as we spot other things on the horizon.
Experiments in extreme living
What I want you to do is to build something with the resources under your feet. And invite someone else to join in.
When the person joins in, give them a prime spot and support them. Invite another person. Keep building.
That’s is the challenge. That is the task!
Career decisions for young and old
I do a lot of career coaching. I talk to youngsters of all ability ranges. I talk to MBA student making career changes after a flying start in management. I talk to people who’ve been unlucky enough to lose their jobs and who looking for an echo career.
Are easy when we know what we want
What all these people have in common ~ those who are happy to get work at the minimum wage and those negotiating banker-size bonuses ~ is that they will not get what they want until they decide what they want.
And tracks are laid out for us by someone else
Many of us ~ particularly the talented, able and lucky ~ go through life on a set of rails. We go from one school to another, on tracks laid down by other people, and decision making has amounted to no more than “this” or “that”. Both are good and we chose on the basis of the frills ~ which perks were more to our taste.
When the tracks are gone, we have to lay them for selves
Then one day, shock and horror, the tracks are gone. We will have to lay them down ourselves. Suddenly, we realize that we are “institutionalized”. We haven’t being make decisions for ourselves. We are capable of rolling down pre-laid tracks without thought, but we are totally incapable of laying the tracks.
Smashing Magazine has a very comprehensive list for finding work
It’s a steep learning curve. Today Smashing Magazine has a list of “do’s” for free lancers. These “do’s” are the basis for job searches as well. Print them and rate your progress at getting them right.
The trouble is that step one is deciding what you want!
I can tell you right now which steps you will find hard ~ deciding which sector you want to work in and finding out about the companies. That’s the equivalent of laying the tracks. That is the part that you’ve never done before because you always took for granted that the tracks were there.
How to lay your own tracks
- Print out the article from Smashing Magazine
- Get a shoebox or box of similar size
- Keep your envelopes from junk mail
- Take envelopes of one color or size and every day find a website relevant to the industry that enchants you. Read and take notes.
- Take envelopes of another color or size and every day find a firm in your industry that sparks your curiosity. Read and take notes.
- Every month sort through. Keep the ten best firms and make notes on questions you want to answer about the industry.
- Also sort through and look at the people you would love to meet and learn a little about them
I can be sure that in 1-2 months of doing a little work every night, the industry will come alive. Smashing Magazine’s list will begin to be easy. Indeed, I strongly recommend that you start a blog. Get a Posterous account, which is easy to manage, and start “Expeditions into the Publishing Industry”, or whatever. In time you will be an acclaimed expert ~ and you will have got there by the first step that you took today.
Stop daydreaming about step 53 ~ take the 1st step
Indeed, if you don’t take the first step, if you keep telling me about step 7 or step 10 or step 53, then I know you are not serious. Step 1: print out Smashing Magazine’s article. Step Two get a shoebox. Step Three get a junk mail envelope and make your first notes.
And sigh with relief that you live in days of the internet!
And stop whinging! This is easy in the days of the internet. Just 10 years ago, this was almost impossible to do!
flowing motion 
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