Buying A Job Or Getting A Life? How Vulnerable Are You?
How vulnerable are you, as an employee, in these challenging times
?
We are facing business and social challenges across the globe which will test the very survival of businesses, large and small. Predictions are that there will be job losses in every country as businesses retrench and downsize to cope with the economic fallout.
In some way we will ALL be affected by the global meltdown. And so if you are an employee whose job is in danger of vanishing in the restructurings, then this article is for you. Times such as these will test who we are, what we stand for and how we will cope with adversity.
My grandfather was a stonemason, trained in the days when building with stone was a craft which took many years to learn, yet enabled him and his peers to build houses and churches which would stand for centuries. He learned his skills on the job and was taught by master craftsmen.
In the later stages of his career, houses became mass-produced and stone went out of favour as being too expensive and too slow, and so my grandfather and his wonderful skills became virtually obsolete. He found himself working out what was left of his career as a labourer on a building site under the supervision of engineers half his age, building what he considered, to be sub-standard houses. These were a new breed of 'builder' - young men with degrees who had learned their skills at university. A serious clash of codes.
My grandfather never swore and rarely lost his temper; however, one day in utter frustration at the way he was being treated, he was heard to mutter, 'These folks with fancy degrees, they could find the square root of a banana and wouldn't bloody know how to peel it!'
I would imagine the engineers that he reported to saw my grandfather as old, stubborn, difficult to manage and past his use-by date.
Imagine if they could have worked together and pooled their talents. Just think what they could have achieved.
Sadly, what happened to my grandfather can happen to any of us at any stage of our lives or careers and is about to happen to a lot of people around the world.
In normal times if we are not taking personal responsibility to keep ourselves up-skilled, and alert to the business climate, then we are vulnerable. From a 'job' perspective, some companies are really smart and actually 'headlight' the jobs which are starting to become not-so-important; or could become surplus to requirements in a downturn in the economy. Head-lighting allows the people in those jobs to start thinking ahead and planning for their future.
However, these are extra-ordinary times and to a degree the circumstances are being forced on us, we are IN those headlights.
It's called life!
Q: How will you cope if you lose your job in these turbulent times?
Q: Do you have the sense of self that will help you through whatever happens over the next 12 months to 2 years?
The most important thing I want to say to anyone reading this article is that we are not our titles or our cars or our corner offices. We are not our jobs; we are not even our businesses. If we have hung our sense of self on our title or business or trappings, and for whatever reason we lose that status, then we are vulnerable.
I think the Gen Y kids are probably the most vulnerable employees in society right now. First of all they are probably 'last on'. Often when redundancies have to be made companies use the last-on, first-off policy. The other challenge for Gen Y is that they have never faced a recession. They have only ever known the good times.
Sadly life isn't actually like that. Life is about facing challenges and finding out what you are made of. So......
Q: How do you cope with adversity?
Q: If you do get knocked over will you get back up again?
The Japanese have a wonderful saying - fall over 6 times, get up 7. And that is what we all must do right now.
One of the worst jobs I ever had to do in HR was to make the jobs of a whole lot of computer engineers redundant. It was a strategic decision but I got to be the lucky person who had to tell the engineers that as of today they were surplus to requirements.
I spent several sleepless nights wondering how on earth I could even do this. I knew these people personally. I knew that most of them had families and mortgages. And so I prefaced every discussion with the words, 'You can either make this the worst thing that has ever happened to you or you can make it the best.' And we went from there.
The company had set in place outplacement help for everyone affected, so they were given help and support in getting their CVs dusted off; they were even given interview skills training. The company felt they had done the best they could for their engineers, but even then, some of these people became angry and bitter and vengeful, and worse, got stuck in that black place for a long time.
Yet others took the same situation, got out into the marketplace, had a look around to see what was available in their field, others used the opportunity to look at completely different career paths, some left the IT industry altogether, others retrained in a different aspect of the industry, one or two started up their own businesses.
How come some coped and others didn't? It's that attitude thing. The no-matter-what-happens-to-me-I-can-cope thinking.
Because you can. No matter what happens to any of us, we can cope. We must. And often that thing that we thought was the very worst thing that could ever happen to us, in hindsight does turn out to be the very best thing that ever happened to us.
So if you are one of the people who ends up job-less as a result of the times we live in. Pick yourself up, dust yourself off, update that CV, work out what you have to offer potential employers and sell yourself to them. Be patient and be persistent.
What is also fascinating if we look at equivalent periods throughout history, and there are numerous, is that it is often in a downturn that people come up with brand new business ideas because of the situation.
So get thinking and get creating. This is your chance!
'What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny compared to what lies within us.' Oliver Wendell Holmes
by: Ann Andrews
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