Rethinking Career for Mature Workers

Posted on May 13, 2013 by Bill Ryan

In general we think that getting old has many more downsides than upsides what with declining health, reduced relevance, and being closer to death perhaps among the most egregious. And as has been noted many times in the past few years, the rapid and widespread ejection of many older workers from the workforce has left many feeling depressed and inconsequential at what they feel is a premature conclusion to their careers.

Aging and career do not have to be oil and water. Rather let’s view the career of the mature worker as being in need of serious reform as they look toward a future in which work can still be engaging, satisfying, and lucrative. Fortunately one of the great advantages of aging is a growing realization to make one’s remaining years count more than ever before. This can be a powerful motivator to approach life and career with renewed vigor.

A process to reestablish a derailed career later in life begins by accepting that the old rules for finding work do not apply much anymore. Looking for job postings that may be a fit is largely wasted time. Instead direct yourself toward conducting a thorough self-assessment. Identify all those traits, skills, qualifications, and most importantly experiences, which when combined define you as a valuable asset. Leave nothing out from this list. And if needed query those who know you well to see how they perceive you.

At this point reflect on this rich inventory with the goal of selecting what Dick Bolles, the author of the perennial What Color Is Your Parachute, elegantly calls your favorite skills and your favorite experiences. It is at this point this cognitive exercise invites in the emotional realm. By recognizing the most energizing of what you have done and can still do you appreciate what is possible in your future work.

Making the most of your remaining work years is made possible by acting on your strengths. We don’t have to accept a bitter end to our working years. Alternatively we can construct a career made meaningful by capitalizing on the best of what we have to offer. But a significant part of doing so involves remembering those changed rules I mentioned earlier. There is a good chance the best of you may not fit neatly into a single job for which an employer will compensate you.

Multiple income streams result from orchestrating a variety of work lines that together make up your favorite performance characteristics. Investigating and implementing various means of monetizing your sweet spots can lead to a satisfying hybrid career.

There are some things to keep in mind about patching together multiple income streams. For example, you need to remain quite flexible in dovetailing your diversified ventures. Determining what can be scaled up and down due to parameters of time, money, and energy will place you in the role of being your own career choreographer. And achieving a degree of sustainability with each stream may take time, but think how rewarding it will be when you get there. Having this new career be enjoyable is what it’s all about. This life puts a new twist into the notion of being your own boss.

We started this reframing of career for the mature worker by administering a self-assessment. There is no better time to reflect on where we’ve been and how far we’ve come than near the end of our “productive” years. Now is the time to give ourselves permission to approach life with a different flavor and approach than has been done before. Allow yourself to feel free, mix it up, and experiment. Benefit from all you’ve accomplished. Exhilarate at being at the top of your game.

 

 

Posted in Career Development | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off

Is It Becoming a Women’s World?

Posted on April 23, 2013 by Bill Ryan

As a an aging male with 60 years of perspective I can’t help but note the huge change American women are undergoing in terms of their career options. As women have demanded and are realizing a shift in social, political, and economic power sharing there is a wide and growing range of work choices available to them.

I still remember how odd I thought it looked to see my first uniformed female police officer and big rig female truck driver and woman on a construction crew. It’s not that I thought it wrong, but it did seem out of place. Growing up in the 50s and 60s I basically thought as a young person that work for women outside of the home was limited to being a secretary or elementary school teacher or nurse. Now women seem to be in nearly every profession, including the running of companies. In retrospect I suppose observing the integration of women into traditional male jobs was my first eye opener to cultural change, that since has only increased in pace.

For those of us who think increased equality among citizens is a good thing, then the news is great. The power structure long dominated by male viewpoints is yielding to a more balanced approached enriched by ideas contributed by women. Conventional wisdom suggests this is leading to a society that is more fair and representative of every person’s interests.

While I applaud this historic development and in no way wish for a regression I also notice an angst and relative lack of direction on the part of men. In general while the career prospects for women are expanding men appear to be more adrift with their changing role. Here are some of the signs I see:

  • Men took a greater unemployment hit during the recession than woman. Jobs requiring brawn like construction and traditional manufacturing were being shed faster than jobs requiring nurturing and education like healthcare and business services.
  • Women now outpace men in receiving college degrees. In a world that is going to rely only more on an educated workforce this bods well for those individuals embracing higher learning.
  • The trend in leadership roles is to become more gender neutral. As women move more into management and executive positions it displaces the men who formally held those spots. In fact as men accommodate the integration of women into all sorts of jobs once held by men it results in widespread displacement.
  • The competition field for securing jobs is getting deeper. Not long ago men had to form job search strategies that pitted them against other men only. Not any more. Now men have to compete against women. This is not a comfortable place for many men to be.
  • The nature of work is changing in that physical strength, the greatest value point men have traditionally had, is increasing in less demand. Technology, mechanical engineering, and robotics are already handling much of the digging, lifting, and carrying once done by strong men. And as time goes on there will be even less need for physical strength on the job.
  • Increasing numbers of men are wanting to spend more time with their kids. Men putting their careers on hold or at least slowing the pace of development in favor of parenting seems to be becoming quite acceptable among the children of Baby Boomers. How this choice is seen by hiring managers once the man wants to re-engage with the workforce is still unclear, but potentially damaging to his career.

How this all turns out is hard to say. Perhaps work is becoming completely gender neutral and we will no longer think in terms of male and female jobs. But for men who like things traditional, facing these employment adjustments may be rocky for the foreseeable future.

 

Posted in Career Development | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off

Make Music When Tooting Your Own Horn

Posted on April 4, 2013 by Bill Ryan

One of the most difficult practices for people to pull off when advancing our careers is the verbal self-promotion. Known most commonly as the elevator pitch or the power statement this self-promotional introduction can have the power to leave a lasting impression with an influencer or leave you forgettable.

Being able to professionally introduce yourself to decision makers or those connected to them, when your objective is to seek employment or career advancement opportunities is an important practice to master. Typically there is often not much time to make a strong impression when chances to make these kinds of introductions come about. People are busy, time is short, and if you can’t communicate relevance and practicality to the listener rather pointedly, then you run the risk of being boring, extraneous, or even a nuisance.

As if this isn’t pressure enough, think how awkward and stressful it can be to make a sales pitch about yourself if you’re introverted, shy, or lacking in confidence. Well, that describes a whole lot of us! No wonder so many of us take solace in saying, “I don’t like to toot my own horn.” We actually have convinced ourselves that to not display traits about ourselves is a virtue. We may even blame this weakness on our parents. “I wasn’t brought up to make a spectacle of myself.” True, to not draw attention to you is preferred in some social situations, but it doesn’t help us to make a mark in career development.

Your professional introduction summarizes your expertise and value to the workplace. Making one need not be a major hurdle or social faux pa. There is a way to compose, practice, and eventually master the introduction. To make the spiel impactful it should be short, perhaps 30 to 90 seconds, and rich in content. To begin follow a simple formula. For example:

My name is ___.

I am [use job title or subject matter expert descriptor].

I have ___ years’ experience as a _____.

Add Power Statement 1.

Add Power Statement 2.

By Power Statements I mean a line that includes a competency and an accomplishment.

Let’s look at an example:

My name is Jane Smith.

I am an expert in dental office management.

I have 13 years’ experience as a dental office manager, including 8 with a $2M practice.

I am highly organized. For example, I was fully responsible for all ordering of supplies, negotiating with dental supply vendors, and conducting inventory control.

I am also great with personnel development, having hired, trained, and evaluated all 7 of our non-medical staff.

These pitches can contain your soft “human connection” skills or they can highlight your innovative solutions, whatever you can include to size up your value.

So now that we have a pro intro framed out we have to make sure it doesn’t so too clinical. If you come across sounding too rehearsed and scripted it’ll sound that way—and not be impressive. So practice making these points as a real person would sound. Practice reciting it to others, without worrying about word for word memorization, and get feedback. Is it sounding natural? Is it coming across smoothly and genuinely?

Another interesting approach is to begin your intro with a question. Questions have a way of focusing our attention at the outset. For example, “You know that stress you feel every spring as April 15 approaches? My name is Jim Smith and I’m a Tax Preparer…”

Whatever approach you use, unless you’re a smooth talking salesman who can have just the right persuasive words roll off your tongue, you’ll need to prepare and practice. Developing a strong professional introduction can help accelerate your career. So go ahead, toot your own horn and make music while doing so.

 

Posted in Career Development | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off

Can Yahoo! Again Become An Innovative Environment?

Posted on March 4, 2013 by Bill Ryan

A very interesting and potentially watershed story has emerged in recent days in business news. It concerns the top-down working conditions decision made by the recently selected CEO of Yahoo! Marissa Mayer. Ms. Mayer has announced that telecommuting among the company’s employees is to be eliminated. Although this decision was intended for internal dissemination only it quickly leaked to the rest of us and has sparked a rapid and vociferous debate about productivity and innovation in cutting edge companies—and by extension to the rest of us.

To be clear I have been and continue to be an enthusiastic proponent of any workplace practices that promote creativity, collaboration, autonomy, productivity, and humaneness. And among the exciting changes emerging within the post-industrial workplace has been employer recognition to adopt flexible working conditions, many of which achieve these very goals.

Common examples include open concept “office-less” workplaces that promote interaction and sharing, remote working via technology whether from home or other places conducive to production, and work settings that include benefits like childcare, gyms, and ping-pong tables. The underlying management belief in these types of arrangements is that workplaces should be results-only-work-environments, encouraging employees to produce individual and even idiosyncratic styles as long as measurable deliverables are realized.

A management approach embracing an attitude that trusts its employees to be value producing when they’re given freedom to choose schedules, environments, colleagues, and problem-solving approaches is the working conditions trend. So why has Ms. Mayer, a product of Google, Silicon Valley, and data driven decision making, made the move to eliminate one of the fastest growing flexible workplace practices, telecommuting? The apparent answer is to re-establish a lost culture of innovation.

Innovation has become the holy grail of business, particularly in the fast-paced Internet-based industry of services and content. Yahoo! was once a big player in the early days of the web. It was one of the first to establish one-place shopping for search, email, news, shopping and much more. Since its mid-1990s launch, however, it is losing market share to much bigger innovators such as Google, Apple, and Amazon, who are currently dominating the web. Yahoo! is in trouble. Survivability is in doubt.

So is corralling all employees back to the ranch going to reinvigorate an innovative edge and competitive advantage or is this a desperate move based in fear that if old fashioned business standards aren’t reapplied the company is going to sink? Time will tell, but this story does raise the question of what it takes to create work conditions that inspire workers to innovate and produce at optimal levels.

Encouraging high levels of creative performance in any workforce will result from valuing original problem solving and adaptability. When management applauds new ideas, the exercise of imagination, and learning from rather than avoiding mistakes, then innovation flourishes.

For most of us unlearning the way we were educated can lead to more creativity. Our schools were designed to produce workers for the industrial age, not the much more sophisticated information age we have only just entered. Sameness, rigidity, and compliance characterize the way most of us were educated. Assessment methods have been little more than means of measuring accountability or adherence to these standards.

This outdated education model is often replicated in too many businesses that value hanging on to tradition more than innovation. As a result innovation is often stifled at a time when it is needed most to stay competitive and relevant. My concern with Yahoo!’s latest move is that it appears to be a reach for an old-styled accountability practice during a time of anguish. It’s as if the thinking is non-traditional workforce practices are not giving us a competitive advantage, so let’s go back to what worked in the old days.

I’ve no doubt Marissa Mayer will use data over time in determining what works and what doesn’t work for fostering innovation at Yahoo!. For the rest of us we will have an interesting experiment to observe with lessons to be derived for the future of business and the facilitation of innovative workforces.

 

Posted in Career Development | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off

Internet Privacy and Our Careers

Posted on February 15, 2013 by Bill Ryan

Social media appears to be growing in functionality beyond being just a way for friends to share interests. Marketing professionals, for example, generally accept that getting their product or service shared and discussed among connected individuals is now a solid and preferred part of any business’ promotional plan. Facebook and Twitter have become an essential part of many marketing campaigns.

The power of social media is also playing a factor in career development. Sharing career related tips, job openings, employer reviews, and more is occurring among trusted peers. But perhaps the most powerful advantage of social media is the way it exposes individuals to those sourcing and background checking talent. Each of us has the option of crafting our information and building dynamic profiles that reinforce the professional brand we wish to project.

In fact we are at the point where to not have a robust presence on social media places us at a distinct disadvantage in advancing our careers. Remaining in the digital shadows could very well mean we don’t get found by the very stakeholders we need to have find us in order to move forward. This phenomenon is particularly a problem for the older end of the workforce, who still don’t accept or harbor a mistrust of social media and its implications.

Despite the growing advantages of leveraging social media for talent searchability it does raise a significant social issue that is increasingly becoming relevant, the value of individual privacy in the digital age. A disconcerting correlation is now evident—the more we increase our Internet presence the more we diminish our privacy. The web is becoming ever more invasive. Cookies that track our Internet use, location tracking apps, and other user-identification functions means others can and do store and re-purpose data about us. Simply using the Internet engages us in personal data sharing of some sort even though we rarely or ever give anyone permission to collect and use our personal information or Internet use behavior.

Maintaining some semblance of personal privacy in the Information Age may soon become the next big civil rights issue. What we now know is that keeping a relatively unregulated Internet yields individual privacy rights to those with some degree of economic power and capital, i.e. big business. So what’s new? Power always seems to concentrate with the haves vs. the have-nots in an unregulated environment. In time we’ll see how it all turns out.

There is a legitimate concern when we use websites for information gathering and research purposes and our personal data or web use is collected and tracked behind the scenes. But use of social media specifically is intentional sharing of information about ourselves. When we essentially advertise ourselves online via social media we have a harder time crying foul when we’re found out. Each of us needs to weigh the potentiality of an Internet display with the concurrent erosion of anonymity. Although this is a very personal decision the reality is that being searchable is a best practice in job searching and recruiting.

Controlling what is known about you online with a professional looking profile and website is the recommended way to go. Applying a 20th century concept of privacy to these times is not practical for career movers. At least to some extent we need to get over the privacy angst. However each of us does need to advocate for stronger opt-in controls of what is displayed about us online. There should be options beyond no web involvement at all and full unregulated exposure. The Internet should serve us, not the other way around.

 

Posted in Career Development | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off