Career Transitions Hit Home
There is a saying among journalists, that you never want to be part of the story. Still when fellow journalist Eve Tahmincioglu, asked me to guest blog at www.careerdiva.net about One Family’s Career Journey I readily agreed.
My husband and daughter are both in career transitions. My daughter is a rising college junior, a history major with a fledging interest in becoming a curator. My husband is a long time IT sales engineer, who was unexpectedly laid off last June.
With unemployment among teens and young adults at record highs and long term unemployment a factor in the economic recovery, I hope readers can gain some useful insights from our story.
Coming next week on www.amyzipkin.com our Conversation with Geoff Colvin the author of Talent is Overrated, which will soon be out in paperback.
Paying Lip Service to Job Hunting
Temporary work is considered a bellwether of the economy. And as the economy perks up, (over 284,000 temp jobs have been created since the low in September 2009, 50,000 in February alone), some of the millions of unemployed may be toying with temping as a way of getting back into the job market.
Those still on the sidelines, may want to consider the findings of Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor David Autor. With his colleague, Susan N. Houseman of the Upjohn Institute, he’s found that temporary help job placements do not improve subsequent earnings and employment outcomes. His study covered low skilled workers. And he says the temp work takes away from the hard work of job hunting.
What hard work? He directed me to the troubling statistic uncovered by his colleague Dr. Alan Krueger of Princeton University who with Andreas Muller who published a paper in May 2008 entitled The Lot of the Unemployed: A Time Use Perspective.
It seems before the financial meltdown unemployed Americans spent a mere 40 minutes a day on their job search, while their gainfully employed colleagues spent a full 408 minutes on the job. What did the unemployed do with the rest of their day?
For openers they spent nearly double the amount on the care of others, 112 minutes for the employed vs. 226 minutes for the unemployed. What did they do with the rest of their time? The unemployed spent more time on education a day, 25 minutes, vs. 11 minutes for the employed. And they spent a disproportionate share of their leisure time watching television, 201 minutes for the unemployed vs. 109 minutes for those who were employed.
Dr. Krueger is on leave at the Treasury Department and unavailable for comment. And, yes, in May 2008, the recession was just beginning. It’s become a truism that jobs are hard to come by and it’s an employers’ market. Still some job seekers might get better results if they redoubled their efforts.
Tags: job seekers, time management, unemployment
A Family’s Career Journey
What happens when a family goes through career transitions together? My first of a series of occasional
guest blogs appears today at www.careerdiva.net and is now reproduced here.
Usually I’m writing profiles of executives and business trend pieces. Still when I told Eve my college aged daughter is grappling with decisions about majors and internships and my husband is career transitioning, she generously offered this guest blog post.
My daughter’s a sophomore and some experts are saying careers she’s preparing for don’t even exist yet. So as she weighs a major—this week history is under serious consideration—what else will she need to do to make sure she’s not overqualified or under prepared at graduation?
Will the work ethic that had her clocking part time hours at the local book store since she was 16 and loading up her schedule with a two day a week part time internship inoculate her against the downturn and unemployment rates that hover in double digits for her age group or will it be a recipe for burnout?
An internship appears to have an edge, but is no guarantee. Last week the National Association of Colleges and Employers, a Bethlehem, PA trade group, released the results of their 2009 Student Survey and 23 percent of graduates with an internship had a job in hand just before graduation last April. Just 14 percent of those who hadn’t been interns landed jobs. http://www.naceweb.org/press/display.asp?year=&prid=308. In all likelihood a good attitude will serve her well as Eve recently reported. http://www.evetahmincioglu.com/web/blog/2009/10/23/do-college-grads-need-miss-manners/#more-1391
Still depending on how long a recovery takes recent grads in the job market now, and perhaps my daughter, may pay a price for bad timing. Till Von Wachter, an associate professor of economics at Columbia University says graduating in a recession leads to persistent effects on earnings and career outcomes. He writes in an e-mail, “Some never quite catch-up, and stay employed at lower wage jobs in lower paying firms after a recession ends.”
As my daughter weighs her options, she may consider her father’s experience. He’s been in data processing since punch card and slide rules were considered high tech and he landed his first job six months ahead of a recession.
He’s navigated a dozen jobs, and several career changes including joining and being laid off from two start-up companies, one in the mid-eighties that burned through millions of dollars before evaporating and another that downsized during the dot.com bust before selling itself to a competitor.
He walked away from the first company with worthless stock certificates. Soon, there was the job with another company that, up to that time, had a tradition of no layoffs. When they went through a major retrenching five years later we had our first lesson in belt-tightening that served us well after the dot.com bust.
A layoff in June is the most recent. As he segues to new career options once considered the stuff of science fiction—software as a service (SaaS) and digital marketing services among others, some experts say he, and probably my daughter, would do well to consider the new requirements of job hunting. Social networking may not be enough.
Rita Weiss, a career coach in Westchester County, says its essential to get clear on what you want to do and when networking always thinking “How can I help” as opposed to “What can I get?” And she says this is no time to go it alone. While peer groups, associations and volunteer activities can all help with job hunting, she advocates finding an accountability partner. She writes, “Most of us find it far too easy to not follow through on commitments we make to ourselves.” But when we make a commitment to others, there is a much greater change that we will follow through.”
On the Anniversary of a Lay Off
Commemorating an anniversary seems an appropriate way to inaugurate a new blog. July 29 is the day I was laid off from one of the nation’s leading department stores.
As anyone who has been laid off knows, it is a painful experience. In my case I had helped train the personnel manager who fired me when several years earlier, recently divorced, she arrived at the store to begin her retailing career on the selling floor.
Although mentoring someone 17 years older was a stretch, as an entry level operations manager I persevered, even as she jumped the promotion line ahead of the rest of us 20 somethings into middle management. Clearly we were never on the same track.
Just as I had discharged my obligation to train her, she discharged hers in dismissing me. Her parting was a direct, “You’re just not……(fill in the name of the store here.) And perhaps it was true, from her perspective. As the freelance journalist that I later became, I learned there are many sides to a story.
It took some time to find my footing first. Unemployment and its partner, battered self-esteem, seemed like near constant companions along with a newly found passion in personal finance to preserve a small nest egg and stretch unemployment insurance benefits.
The period of unemployment set in motion an abiding interest in careers and management and one of the mainstays of my journalistic portfolio—personality profiles of senior management. I continue to grapple with the idea that a dismissal was “strictly business.” In all business transactions there is always a personal relationship, chemistry or the lack of it, that greases our interactions.
In the coming months, as companies stop shedding jobs and the nation regains its collective footing, this blog will answer questions about careers in the post Great Recession economy. Feel free to add your thoughts to the conversation. We’ll offer tips and suggestions, reporting and insights so you can better understand your career and the individuals—your colleagues, your managers, your subordinates, your customers—who influence and in some instances hold sway over it.
Today’s question—How did you negotiate a company leave taking? What would you do differently now if you had the chance?
Tags: Careers, layoff, mentoring, unemployment
