Posts Tagged ‘jobs’
How much work will it take to land your dream job?
The first time I migrated, I set up the 100:10:1 ratio. 100 applications: 10 interviews : 1 job.
I set the ratio for psychological reasons. I was being practical. My goals and plans include the endurance I need to succeed the race.
Do you go green at the sight of these figures? Want to puke?
Truthfully, most people don’t have the stomach for these figures. They go green, and then grey. They aren’t motivated by these figures. They are depressed.
Now I tell you, that the position is far worse than this
If you are a migrant, which you may be for many reasons, or if you are changing career track, the figures will be a lot worse. Think of 200 applications. Think of 300 applications. Think of 1000!
And think of the worst possible behavior on the part of people who process them. They ignore you. They patronize you. They stand you up (even when they’ve paid for your air ticket). They lie.
Oh those 999 who don’t hire you are seriously depressing!
This cannot be true you say
“I know someone who got a job first time”, you say. “This cannot be true! I have never had this trouble!” “This country needs skilled migrants.” “They advertised and asked us to apply!” “You are being cynical. You are jaded. This is just sour grapes.”
Indeed.
Let me tell you how it works
Today I found this mantra for advertising.
“The first time a man looks at an advertisement, he does not see it.
The second time, he does not notice it.
The third time, he is conscious of its existence.
The fourth time, he faintly remembers having seen it before.
The fifth time, he reads it.
The sixth time, he turns up his nose at it.
The seventh time, he reads it through and says, “Oh brother!”
The eighth time, he says, “Here’s that confounded thing again!”
The ninth time, he wonders if it amounts to anything.
The tenth time, he asks his neighbor if he has tried it.
The eleventh time, he wonders how the advertiser makes it pay.
The twelfth time, he thinks it must be a good thing.
The thirteenth time, he thinks perhaps it might be worth something.
The fourteenth time, he remembers wanting such a thing a long time.
The fifteenth time, he is tantalized because he cannot afford to buy it.
The sixteenth time, he thinks he will buy it some day.
The seventeenth time, he makes a memorandum to buy it.
The eighteenth time, he swears at his poverty.
The nineteenth time, he counts his money carefully.
The twentieth time he sees the ad, he buys what it is offering. “
This was apparently written by Thomas Smith of London in 1885 and was reproduced to “advertise advertising” and to make the point that we need, what may feel like, excessive redundancy in advertising.
You need 20 contacts to make a sale!
I said 100:10:1. Yes, that 1 sale will come from 20 contacts.
So if we contact 100 people, and we instinctively home in on that one employer who will eventually employ us, we need to make 100 (inital contacts)+10 (interviews) +20 contacts with the luck employer of me!
And as we are not likely to be so lucky, we need to make initial contact with 100 people and expect to contact each of those 20 times, with the one we stay in contact with employing us! 100 people x 20 contacts = 2000 meetings.
OK so lets get real. Are you starting cold?
How do some people get jobs more quickly! Well they are already in a sales funnel. They are using their Dad’s contacts. Their university does part of the work for them. They belong to a network without understanding that they do.
If for some reason you are starting cold, or you get part way down your career and you realize you want to make a big change, you need to take charge and weave your own network.
You cannot afford to act randomly. You have to be prepared to find out
- Who you want to work with
- And assiduously build up contact with them.
If you are at school or university, begin early.
Compare with these figures
In a social network, 1% of people generate content, 9% critique content and 90% consume content (1:9:90). We see the same “J curve” on student chatter lines and in professional associations.
Ken Thompson of SwarmTeams talks of the 2% economy. Only 2% of messages to people are opened when they are from someone we don’t know or remember. We open all the messages from our friends. And we respond to about 10% of them.
Yup, we ignore 90% of what our friends tell us!
Get cracking!
I strongly recommend listing 10 firms who interest you on 10 old envelopes and look for ways to meet people who work in the department you want to join.
Keep notes. Add envelopes. Prioritize them.
Budget your time.
If you are starting a 3 year degree, you need to meet 2 people a day, every day, including Saturdays, Sundays and Christmas, to make 2000 contacts before you graduate.
And think career from the outset. Don’t think job. Think career.
Start now
Start exploring now and start collecting information, contacts and know-how.
It all adds up and takes you closer to that team who is doing exactly the sort of work that you want to do and that they need you so badly to do!
(And if you haven’t started and need a job now? Then divide your time. Put time aside for this project daily and do whatever you have to do to survive as a separate project. Just don’t let go of this one. That you will regret. The lost time will irk you more than flipping burgers. Begin!)
Where were you the day Lehman’s crashed?
I had spent a long day sequestered in an office building in London. Coming out into the dark evening, I was surprised to see a serious story in the free newspapers handed out at the entrances to the Tubes.
The 158 year old bank, Lehmans had declared bankruptcy and 10 000 financiers, bankers, clerks and support workers who arrived at work on the prestigious Canary Wharf were told they must cease trading and clean out their desks.
Our response to abrupt crisis
Abruptly losing your job and your livelihood is not a disaster but it is certainly a crisis. Some of Lehman’s employees may have taken the first plane out to a sunny beach, but most of them would have sat around the next day wondering what to do. The day after would have been a day of rumination. What went wrong? Could it have been avoided? Who is to blame? And, ultimately, what should they do to retain the same income, status and meaning in life.
Career coaches and people in career crisis
Many career coaches will see erstwhile employees from Lehman’s and may have seen some already.
Proxy career coaches in the form of doctors, bank managers and employment agents will see them sooner. What is the best advice that we can give Lehman employees and all others whose way of life comes to an abrupt, surprising and juddering stop?
What it feels like to be in a career crisis
The first thing we need to remember is being laid off is a rude shock. Having had no preparation for the event,
- Ex-employees do not know what to do
- Ex-employees panic
- Ex-employees want it to be ‘all OK right now!’
Our task as career coach
Ex-employees may have no experience or training in damage control. They may be have no experience in managing their own emotions and attention. This is our task if we are to help them succeed. We must help them to
- Regain emotional equilibrium
- See the solution
- Regain control
What we will achieve as a career coach
We are not, though, going to make it “all OK right now”. Our clients will want us too.
A year ago when Lehman’s crashed, even the pundits thought we might spring back to normal like a new elastic band. But, for most people, the early teens of the 21st century will be a time of enormous transition. A country with a GDP of 1.4tr cannot dole out 1.0tr without having to make some adjustment.
Yet there is a flip side to a bad situation. When your house has burnt down so to speak, there is little point in building one that is exactly like the one before. We build a better one.
Our challenge as a career coach
In the early stages, when our clients want everything to be OK, when they are in the first of the five stages of grief – denial – they will not want to work through the long hard slog of rebuilding. They will want everything to be bounce back. We have to work with them even though they are in no mood to work.
Helping them find any foothold as they work through their grief is important. Listen to them. But also help them keep moving. They have a lot of rebuilding to do and every small step will be important when they emerge from the emotional turmoil further along the line.
The career coaches that we need
Coaches who can do more than say “aha” are needed now. We need coaches who can help people take baby steps while they are overcome with emotion.
6 questions I ask professional career coaches
It is amazing that this is not taught on work psychology degree programmes. These are the first 6 questions that I ask professional career coaches.
- How do we work with people overcome by grief?
- What practical steps can any of us take when our career and life has fallen into an untidy heap?
- How long does it take to rebuild a career mid-stream?
- How soon can we introduce the idea of rebuilding a better career to a client overcome by grief?
- How many people really do rebuild a better career after such a disruption?
- What distinguishes those who begin that project from those who don’t?
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!
Get to the heart of what will be the vibrant, interesting, & lucrative jobs and careers in the 21st century?
Posted on: November 26, 2009
New management
When I went to university, we were told that management is the art of getting work done through people. A passport to laziness and exploitation!
Today, we say management is developing people through work.
Work should be fun. It is fun for some of us.
And work should be fair. Not only should we receive a fair day’s pay for a fair days work. We should be growing as a person and capable of doing more with each hour of work that we put in.
Rewriting the training manuals for jobs and careers
In 20th century management manuals, Stage 1 of work was doing. For about 10 years, roughly from 16 to 26, we learned a trade and built breadth & depth through education and exposure. Our job was to cultivate a deep knowledge of our materials and tools, appreciate our customers, and adapt what we did for their needs. We wanted to learn enough about the wide range of situations that we might encounter in the future so that we could go with the flow and make a living as the years went by.
Sadly, of course, markets change and revolutions happen in technology. With very little notice, customers defect to other products and markets, competitors outrun us, or the technology changes sufficiently to require another 10 year apprenticeship.
In the ‘olden days’, HR departments were responsible for seeing ahead and retraining staff ahead of any abrupt changes. By definition, the HR Director’s job was to spot changes on the horizon and get everyone retrained in new ways without disrupting today’s operations. There was a reason for that high salary!
You are now your own HR Director
Today’s management theorists and leadership coaches counsel another approach. They recommend that each of us scan the horizon for changes and retrain ourselves in good time.
This is quite hard to do. As noobes, we barely understand the business. We don’t have data to see ahead. Indeed it might be kept from us. And training tends to focus on skill rather than the ‘sweet spot’ where are skills are deeply valued by our customers.
The sweet spot where your skills are deeply valued by your customers
I know that there has been a lot of research on how to train people on the sweet spot.
- I recall attempts to train doctors by introducing them to patients from day one. The conclusion, I recall, was that the pre-clinical training was necessary to speed up communication between noobes and experienced doctors and the experiment was abandoned.
- Cognitive psychologists have developed computer games to test whether it is better to learn the market before we learn the underlying technology of our business. They concluded no. First, learn the technology, then try to make money.
- Military psychologists have found that youngsters trained to manage their attention on computer games performed better as fighter pilots. In the game, the recruits played the part of captains of de-mining vessels. Each ‘month’, or game cycle, they would concentrate on the overall outcome of running the ship and concentrate on learning one of the functions only ~ navigation, finance, HR, etc. The limitation known with this approach is that under pressure we often go back to the “level” that we first learned, requiring, once again, that we can see into the future and pick our “level” correctly.
It seems easy to mess up our mental models of the sweet spot and what we need to do to manage it. We can overemphasize the money end and underemphasize the skill. We can also learn to manage situations that are too small to sustain a living.
More research needed on managing our own training for 21st century jobs and careers
None of these experiments have focused though on developing a sense of the sweet spot and organizing skills and commercial acumen around a sweet spot that morphs, ebbs and flows. I know no experiment where “subjects” were explicitly trained to monitor what is happening around them, to think of their own skills (and the skills of their team) and bring those together into a rewarding balance.
I wonder what would happen if we learned to think that way from the get-go?
Organize your own thinking about vibrant, interesting & lucrative jobs and careers in the 21st century
If you want to try, to organize your thinking about the sweet spot between your skills and the needs of customers, this is what I recommend.
Pick on anything you did today that you enjoyed and draw out 3 spokes
- name the key technical skill that you used to provide your customer with value
- name the customer and describe his or her needs
- name the sweet spot and try describe it in one sentence
These three spokes correspond logically to three factors associated with successful business teams:
- The teams ask questions more often than the give answers
- They concentrate on the outside world a little more than on themselves
- The look for what is going well and are positive 5x more than they are negative
Become your own HR Director
I think it will take quite a few lots of 10 to 15 minutes jotting down notes for this way of thinking to come easily. But when it does you will be your own HR Director
- Looking ahead
- Retraining on time
- Finding the sweet spot where you feel vital, involved, entertained, valued AND rewarded!
Do let me know how it works out!
Where is this recession going?
I’ve spent some time following economic information about the recession and I think there is a fair chance that it will be L shaped. I think the financial shock has been so bad that it is not good enough to wait. I think the correct analogy is that we have had an earthquake, the house has cracked, and we would be smart to attend to the foundations. In fact, why not take advantage to ‘build a better’ house were we have a more comfortable, more sociable and more exciting life.
I think that is the project politicians should be attending to, and I think we should too. The sooner we identify the kind of “house” we want to live in, the sooner they can get on with organizing it!
Where do we find exciting opportunities during a prolonged recession?
As a psychologist, I listen out for the way people describe things. I look to the structure of their statements to identify what really excites them, what is going somewhere and where there is room for other people.
#1 Does the person describe action?
Do I know who is doing what, when, where and how?
#2 Is this a project that other people can join?
Do I know when and where other people can join the party? Is the description an invitation to me and others?
#3 Is the person responsive when other people chip in?
Is the person looking for responses and did they allow time to reply to people? Did they expect people to want to join them?
#4 Is the person curious about other people?
Does the person respond to inquiries and suggestions with requests for more information or elaboration? Do they believe that other people can add value to their project?
#5 Through the entire conversation, does the person keep their eye on their goal?
While the person is responding to inquiries and following up, do they maintain their momentum and movement toward their goal?
[AIRCG]
5 questions to tell whether a businesses is going somewhere
These are the 5 questions I ask to tell the difference between a business that may look thriving, and may go the same way as banks and newspapers, from business that will thrive despite the profession.
Once we have found a business that is vital and exciting, then we can ask more detailed questions about our role within it. More on that tomorrow!
I know my institutions and can read their behavior
Many years ago, I friend of mine was negotiating his salary with his employer. To aid his efforts, he paid a friend who was an employment agent to advertise a job just like his and to offer a wonderful package.
My students at the time were all excited. The advertisement vindicated their choice of major. Yes, if they worked hard, they could follow an institutional path and be rich!!
Not even knowing my friend’s devious scheme (I found out later), I dismissed the advertisement with a contemptuous, “It’s a scam”.
See, I knew three things that my students didn’t know:
- The prevailing salary rates, not just in my profession, but in sister professions of accounting, marketing, etc. I knew what the market thought was reasonable.
- Business conditions and the amount of gross profit available for institutional careers (you know the one’s guaranteed by the taxpayer no matter how much you mess up)
- That people run institutions lie.
Before I worked as a work & organizational psychologist, I too thought institutions were honorable
I remember the first time I fell for an institutional scam. It was a painful experience and it took me years to get over it.
We trust institutions
When we are young, we believe that institutional leaders are honorable. Institutional leaders go to great lengths to make us believe that because that is their job. After all an institution is only an institution if it is stable and trusted. So they will tell you anything to have you believe they have done their job.
But we should remember that to check whether they are trustworthy
And that is why we must not trust them. We must ask for evidence. Hard, cold evidence. What are the career paths in the organization? Where are the statistics? What are the future scenarios for the organization? Can you look at them?
An institutional leader cannot use his own spin as evidence
Lord Mandelson is doing the right thing by making universities show students the destinations of graduates An institutional leader cannot hold up his own spin as evidence that he has succeeded in making order and stability for us. He was to show us the evidence.
In the days of the internet, data on the institution’s performance should be freely available
And I am afraid that if that in the days of the internet that if that evidence is not freely available on the internet in slurpable form – meaning that you can download the input data, not the processed data – then they obviously have something to hide.
Harsh words, I know
But remember my friend, and remember how my students were taken in.
Ask questions and the first question is ~ what happens when I ask?
First sign of scoundrels running the organization
If they don’t want to answer, or if they set up a meeting where we are doing all the answering and our questions come after they have made up their minds, then they are frauds. Then they are frauds and and we have found them out.
Disappointing, of course. Doubly disappointing. Trebly disappointing.
- We don’t get what we want.
- Institutions by definition should be honorable. So we don’t get what we want AND we know we have frauds in our midst.
- Institutions are usually paid for by the taxpayer. We don’t get what we want, we know you are trying to cheat us AND we are paying for you.
My priorities when you use public money to cheat me
Hmmph. Well for now, my priority must be to get what I need and want. Then I will participate to clear out the rotten institutions. Then I will think about recovering my money from you.
Is that the right order?
For the young & inexperienced
And if you are young and inexperienced, stop trusting institutions who don’t trust you with hard, cold data. Spin that they have done their job of making a safe, orderly environment for you is not evidence. Ask for the evidence. If they don’t have it, act accordingly ~ warily ~ get what you need and in due course, expose their shenanigans.
Hating our jobs . . . let’s do some extreme living!
You are in good company, aren’t you? Most of us hate our jobs. And it would be cool to have a job exchange.
I have another idea though. I found it on a list of unusual things to do before you die. It’s a kind of “extreme living”. The idea is this : very deliberately find a job that you hate, and do it. There!
Now why would we do that? Why deliberately find and do a job that we hate!
Because we can. Be. . . cause . . . we . . . can.
No, don’t walk away. Of course it is daft to do something unpleasant.
It’s enough trouble escaping what we hate. Why do more?
Because . . . well, you know what I am going to say. Because – we – can.
You dread your job because you are not in control and you think you will never be in control.
There are lots of times in you life that you are not in control.
But you can practice being in situations when you are not in control.
- When I was a graduate student, I very deliberately went to movies on my own. Other people went in groups. It looked odd for a young person to go on their own. So I did. Until I stopped being uncomfortable.
- A bit older, I spent three months traveling from city to city in Europe very deliberately arriving at midnight with no accommodation. Until I stopped being scared of finding myself with no where safe, dry and warm to sleep. Or rather until I learned how to find somewhere to sleep no matte where I am. You can imagine I traveled a lot more extensively because of the self-designed training course that I gave myself aged 25.
- A bit older, I decided to overcome my fear of speaking in public by presenting a public talk every month for a year. I did. Many times, hardly anyone came. But I wrote a new paper (a proper academic paper) and presented it. For 12 months in a row! I learned the art of getting on with it! And I stopped wasting time on anxiety.
So get over you dread of jobs you hate by deliberately taking a job that you hate!
Bet you learn a lot. Bet you come out the end knowing you can survive any job.
And there are many other things better faced head on.
Part of life is dealing with the dross. There is no better way than giving yourself a crash course.
Do it over and over again until you are good at it!
P.S. Great way to apply for a job. “I am applying for a job because I expect I will hate it . . .” That made you smile.
Are our markets efficient?
Gee, I have been so buried in writing proposals, I no longer have any idea of which day or week it is. Rather literally. But it is in writing proposals that we realize just how inefficient the market economy is. All these people marketing, selling, bidding, cajoling. Do we really increase the value of the economy this way? Isn’t this time wasting much like the perennial security guard at every doorway in a third world country. Doing nothing, going nowhere? Don’t you get incensed at the waste of your time? Let me explain further why it affects everyone. You, me. Our sons. Our daughters.
Flexible labor markets
You all know the concept of a “flexible labor market“, don’t you? If not follow the link to a clearly written A level crib sheet.
Good markets
Flexible labor markets are based on the idea that a good market “clears”. A market is good if I can bring my tomatoes and customers come and buy them.
The price is not determined in advance. The price is allowed to change with supply (number of people selling) and demand (number of people buying). And as we all know, at the end of the day, the price can drop significantly as sellers contemplate no sale. Equally, the best stuff will sell at a higher price early in the morning.
Good labor markets
When we come to labor markets, the idea is that you and I, sellers of labor can go to the market and sell our goods, that is, our time and expertise. If there is a good market, we will be bought, when we want to be bought; and buyers will find someone to buy, when they want someone to buy.
Labor markets that you and I know
Of course, labor markets are not 100% flexible. We are blocked in by contracts. The employer guarantees to give you work and to pay you on time. You guarantee to do work and have to give notice if you want to change employers.
Rigid labor markets
Some labor markets are very inflexible. I believe in the UK, 30 years ago, if we wanted to move a telephone in a student dormitory, it would be a nightmare. Why? A telephone technician wasn’t be allowed to screw the device onto the wall. That was the carpenter’s job. If this story is not 100% accurate, then it was similar.
Not everything has changed
The “defined benefit” pension scheme also adds rigidity to the markets.
A defined benefit (DB) scheme means we pay in a fixed % of a our salary today for the right to draw a pension at a given age (usually 65) at 66% of our average of last three year’s salary (or similar calculation).
The importance to this calculation to what I am saying today is not the pension, much as it is on everyone’s minds, but that the 66% was based on an assumption of working for 40 years out of 60 for one employer (starting in your early twenties).
Here you can see the legacy of rigid labor markets that we haven’t sorted out, even in theory.
Why do systems like defined benefit pensions distort the labor market?
Implicit in your monthly donation of a fixed %, is that you will stay for 40 years. If you leave before then, you will pay a heavy financial penalty.
So most people stay. Every year, some people retire and we can replace those with 20 year olds while everyone moves up a notch. Neat?
Yes it is, BUT
. . . this model doesn’t allow for radical changes in skill. And it only works when people do retire – which they haven’t been the case with the bulge of the baby boomers. Of course now the boomers are approaching retirement, organizations running this model will suddenly need to take on a lot of young people, some of whom will not be able to get the experience they need quickly enough to replace people who are leaving.
Equally, if you have to take people on for 40 years, as an employer you may think twice. It is much more convenient to be able to ask someone to leave when you have no work for them or cannot afford to may them.
Why employers like a flexible labor market?
So employers like a “flexible” labor market. They want it to be easy to ask people to leave.
What is the payoff for us?
And the payoff for us is that
- young people are more likely to get “starter” jobs
- we should be able to move employers more easily
- the economy should be more vibrant with a better match of skills to changing conditions.
But what a muddle
The downside is that we haven’t thought this through.
Pensions and in the States, health insurance, are tied to employment. So employees are unable to move.
If employers don’t provide these benefits, an underclass of employees develops. In the trade this is aptly called the secondary labor market – cheap and disposable.
And where does this leave employees – people of working age
My biggest concern is that when a labor market is massively flexible, how do employees – that is you and me – the sellers of labour, see far enough ahead to know what to invest in?
Of course this is an issue in all business. How do farmers know how many tomatoes to plant? How does Warren Buffet know what stocks & shares to buy on the stock market?
They do it in three ways:
- They form institutions – trade associations or their own firms – to do research on markets and to influence markets through lobbying and marketing.
- They make long term contracts – e.g., agree to sell to TESCO’s at a pre-determined price
- They get better real time information on markets.
Think of third world farmers contracting with FairTrade to sell you coffee. They are doing it less for the price and more the stability of the contract.
Think of third world farmers who adopt mobile phones at the speed of light because they can find out prices readily in local and international markets.
What the theorists haven’t delivered
So why then do we assume
- Employees (you and me) don’t need information on future prices to decide how much to invest in skills today?
- Employees don’t need sane coherent contracts that allow us to complete a season. A season may be 6 months to a year for a farmer. Our investment in a 3 year degree is repayable over what period with what certainty?
- Employees (you and me) shouldn’t band together to form trade associations to research and influence markets. I know that is what unions do, sort of. I know that is what good professional associations do.
My question to you
My question today, and I hope some people can answer it, as I am a noobe in this part of the world, is
which political parties have an explicit agenda to make sure each and every person has sufficient information to make informed decisions about the investment in skill.
I don’t think governement has to make decisions about our investments for us. But it does need to make sure there is an environment in which institutions who repesent us emerge (and do their job well).
Where does a young person in the UK and the USA find out this information?
My grand-mother had a clear ‘rule’ – none of us should work for a family-business. We should all go out and work in another business or organization. My grandmother was obviously fed up with family businesses. She had been burned by them a few times. And I think she made the right call.
I think we should go further though. We should all aim to have our own business.
Is it the Talmud where we are advised to join an established business? That is good advice. We should acknowledge what works in the world and work with it.
But I think we should also aspire to autonomy. Many organizations work on a tournament system. You have to start in round one and work your way up. Should you want to move to another organization, you cannot carry credits from the previous rounds with you!
We need a way to aggregate our experience into a stronger and stronger portfolio.
Online portfolios are a good start. Planning our careers as if they are a business is another.
But as employment law is very clumsy and big organizations are more interested in subordination than developing your ongoing value, isn’t it a good idea to register yourself as a company, employ yourself, and develop alliances with others from day one?
Who is doing this? Who is making sure their youngsters go on to independent careers after an apprenticeship with some one else?
Create your job – don’t wait
Posted on: September 24, 2009
Unusual ways to find a job
We have to take our hats off to the History Graduate who pounded Fleet Street with a sandwich-board offering himself on a free trial period of one month.
Employers with a sense of humor
We can also hat-tip the guy who hired him.
- But wouldn’t it have been better if he had a portfolio of his work online before he graduated?
- Wouldn’t if have been cool if he knew what he wanted to do?
- Wouldn’t it have been cool if he had had targeted 10 specific people and gone to them with the same offer?
Ways for students to get good jobs after graduation
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- Graduate uses sandwich board to find job (telegraph.co.uk)
flowing motion 
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