Career Sustainability - careers advice, inspiration and mental stimulation for job hunters

The words of a 92 year old fulfilled careerist

2012-01-19T18:36:00.001Z

Denys Taylor, my sagely pal from my native Northumberland, led an illustrious career in the advertising and public relations industry. Typing this blog from his apartment, he shares a number of career managements tips for young people entering the labour market.
Having spent 2 weeks in 1936 with career experts from the British Society of Industrial Psychologists, their main kernel of advice was guidance towards a career as a marketing executive.
He would have it that guidance has to come from outside; that we're incapable of seeing our own attributes and being objective in ourselves.
We're no wiser today than then. We're no nearer guiding young people effectively today than in the 1930s. "There are so many distractions now; young people are doing things for pleasure and not necessarily illumination."
Where will enlightenment come from? Is hardship prerequisite to personal growth. It certainly helped many people during the course of Denys's long journey. He says he's pretty disillusioned by the prospects in the world today, it's getting bleaker because we're not getting wiser. For all the increase in knowledge and productivity, the world doesn't appear to actually grow.
Sadly, he regards his inevitable departure "as the end of not understanding". He reminds me of Ghandhi's famous quote: "prayer is the yearning in one's soul for more wisdom"; not subducation or approbation.
More optimistically he would like to see the older generation providing more career guidance and passing-on insight. "Every school ought to have a Careers Adviser on the staff".

I hope to be able to return to Denys to capture more of his career reflections next week. Denys, having hailed from Northern England retired from his position as Managing Director of CAPRA (the Cooperative Advertising & Public Relations Agency); having melded 920 separate cooperative initiatives into a single national marketing policy.

Answers to Unemployment Number 1:

2012-01-19T12:15:00.000Z

Make a considered career decision first - the job you truly love is far easier to land than the one you don't!

Career Sustainability: A blog for Britain's Unemployed Young - 'generatin...

2011-10-21T19:57:00.000+01:00

Career Sustainability: A blog for Britain's Unemployed Young - 'generatin...: A few months ago I got a call from the BBC to originate some ideas for an upcoming series 'Up for Hire' , on BBC Three. I don't recognise th...

A blog for Britain's Unemployed Young - 'generating futures'

2011-10-21T19:55:00.000+01:00

A few months ago I got a call from the BBC to originate some ideas for an upcoming series 'Up for Hire', on BBC Three. I don't recognise the DNA of many of my ideas in the show that I witnessed as I sat in the studio audience last night, but it has been a thrill to be involved in a show creating such a buzz and getting such an important topic on the media radar.

The 4 show series, condensed into a single week, tracked the job search fortunes of 4 long-term unemployed young people, 2 graduates and 2 non-graduates. At BBC Centre in London last night, after the show, it was great to speak to Kirsty and Chris, two of the recruits, and see them brimming with the confidence of the kick-start the show has injected into their early careers.

Watching each of the four 'recruits' grow from pretty dreadful first attempts at the 'minimum wage' jobs they did in the fun park on Monday night and gradually, show-by-show, gain traction each night, to ultimately transform into purposeful workers by last night (Thursday 20th October) has truly been a feat to behold. But to meet them in the flesh was to sense their palpable sense of positivity and focus.

They had grown from 4 hapless, clueless youngsters bumbling through the minefield of joblessness, into purposeful adults in what seemed like a 72 hour blinking-of-an-eye over the course of Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday night's extended 1½ hour show.

These four young people grew tangibly, of that there is no doubt. Yet where I am left is with a feeling of regret, not warmth and optimism. For these young people are four out of an unemployed population of 1 million young people in this country trying to break through. As a nation we really ought to be ashamed of ourselves for getting in such a mess and leaving the next generation of workers in the dole queue before they've even smelt success.

As most family values focus on breathing opportunity for growth, development and, above all security, in the lives of our young, we should as a nation - an extended family - feel remorse for how we are kicking our young people in the teeth as we are in 2011. The unemployment epidemic hitting our young people is destructive and threatens to ruin a whole generation who will take years to absorb the shock wave.

My early career was blighted by the failures of Thatcherism to tackle youth unemployment and I had soul-destroying experiences of YTS (Youth Training Schemes) and YOPs (Youth Opportunity Programmes). These experiences marred my early career and took 10 to 15 years to recover from. We are about to repeat the same mistakes again.

At 32 I crashed into the buffers, having lost another job, having rolled with punches throughout my twenties, I was dumped out of work again in the recession of the early 90s. My previous 15 years I'd often liken to sprinting down a dry grassy slope barely able to keep my feet beneath me. Having left home at 17, it was a constant fight for self-preservation and sanity.

However, I then got my first real career guidance interview with an inspiring Career Guidance Practitioner, who sat me down and helped me dissect, consider and reconstruct my 'career attributes'. The effect was transformational. I clearly had no clue who I was or what I could amount to before the experience and, as the 4 'Up for Hire' recruits I saw grow on TV this week, my life suddenly began to gain traction.

Within 2 years I had studied a year's postgraduate diploma in Career Guidance, survived a Probationary Year as a Careers Adviser, and taken on a Special Needs caseload working in schools and colleges looking after the fledgling career decisions of mainstream students alongside 'the gifted and talented' and learners experiencing emotional and behavioural problems. Their gaining traction instilled an immeasurable job satisfaction within me.

Working with the young people and seeing the results I was achieving with my career decision making method heralded the genesis of my Career Dovetail Formula; based upon my repeated discovery that my clients had little or no self awareness on the one hand, and on the other virtually zero awareness of the kinds of jobs that existed in the labour market. In essence, the laws of probability meant it would be unlikely they would ever fall into the best career path to capitalise their innate career attributes as most people seemed to entrust the bridging of childhood to adulthood to luck rather than fore-planning.

Positively leveraging our intrinsic qualities gives each of us a sense of self-affirmation and meaning to get-on in our lives. Forgive me, but I get really pissed-off when people say it's okay to randomly squander our talents and to allow young people to bump through job-after-job never really discovering a sense of purpose and more often than not, becoming increasingly demoralised.

It's bullshit to say it isn't important to invest in career decision making early. We seem to have got used to living in a world where mucking around and never planning a course towards our future is okay; a world where it is not 'pc' to mention failure. That might have worked in our land of plenty, but let me tell you the party is over - really over - especially for the young people trying to start-out and feed a family today.

A whole new generation of young people are going to starve if they are not tuned-in to the power of their vocational abilities. For the next decade life will be a challenge for anyone who dares leave the education and training system not able to stand up on their own two legs and steer a course towards a well-specified career goal. The days of bling are over - fake sparkle doesn't cut-it anymore - it's the real deal now. The day of judgement has arrived - career judgement. Lay firm foundations, construct solid job structures, build sustainable futures. And repeat.

For too long we have taken accountability away from politicians, educators, parents and young people. Our commercial arena is simply not getting the skills it needs to remain competitive. Organisations are filled with under-performers; a Herculean, tiny minority prop up the rest. Katie Hopkins made some unhelpful inflammatory remarks on 'Up for Hire' as an alleged expert on the subject of higher education. However, had she tempered her melodramatics into greater poignancy - she would not have murdered any hope of a constructive debate - because hidden within her tantrum were some bitter home-truths.

The UK labour market simply cannot absorb 50% of school-leavers going on to achieve a degree - "mickey mouse" - or otherwise. It is true that there are some morbidly indulgent degree pathways that rank alongside the most far-fetched I've ever heard of: a degree in the Vulcan language! Indirectly, it is great that the inimitable Ms Hopkins has catapulted this topic into the media; albeit toxically. But let's bring this debate's temperature down to a simmer and take a more objective look at what is going wrong with youth employment.

'UK Inc', as Prime Minister, John Major, once referred to it, has a finite labour market capacity - in real-time. It is more or less of a fixed size. Year-on-year for the last 3 years this market has shrunk. This is frightening even when it does not take into account the terrifying demographics with our population growing at 500,000 p.a. a shrinking teenage population and a seemingly, ever-growing and bulging population of pensioners in need of a workforce to generate the interest on their investments. To be globally competitive surely we ought to be properly auditing what our labour market has and what our labour market needs?

Teetering on the cliff-edge of an economic disaster, the UK has a grave choice to make. Either we equip our young people with the self awareness, labour market awareness and self-assuredness that a competitive marketplace needs or continue into some kind of national trance; a self-denial zone where the ship is really sinking but we're not capable of accepting reality.

We've led an entire generation up the garden path thinking they don't have to stand on their own two feet to survive (could this be 'welfare syndrome' an unfailing sense of being provided for and never having to do anything to survive?). We've convinced them that it is okay to base our whole ambition on a set of wannabe X-Factor principles where everyone is going to put food on their table by signing badly? Bear in mind the miniscule percentage of successful wannabes, as opposed to the legions of 'auditionees' who go home empty? Yet week-after-week, everyone is glued to their goggle box waiting to get famous. Or know someone famous. To fawn.

The same mentality seems to have hijacked the country's training systems. A combination of union might and political incompetence killed our once illustrious apprenticeship frameworks. As a nation we have not adjusted to the demise of our heavy industries and stepped-up to the demand for future-facing industries. We now copy rather than innovate.

We perpetuate the 'brain-drain' through not empowering REAL TALENT; the kind of talent that authentically contributes to society and generates good will as well as good taxes. Our economy has lapsed into reactivity, and the paradox is that within the space of people lives, still with us today, we've gone from top - and year-after-year - we're slipping further down the league tables. The reality is that unless we (the UK) approach this problem differently, we are on course for Third World status within a lifetime.

As I have written elsewhere, our country's obesity epidemic is just a metaphor for what we're like inside as a nation. We're not dedicating out skills, forgetting how to apply them and have taken our eyes of the prize; only a few of us are genuinely conscientious. It has been too easy during a prolonged period of plenty to get lazy. And out of this lull have come certain degree courses that might as well be millstones around our young people's necks when what they need is some impetus and a lifejacket.

In addition to reaping the backlash from dreadful economic policy, when Gordon Brown was prancing around in his invisible suit, and all the policy-makers and the voters were so intoxicated by the endless stream of cheap money they daren't tell him that he'd torpedoed his own ship, we have started killing-off and demolishing the whole superstructure that helped target the needs of young people and give them a helping-hand in working their future out.

In spite of announcing the launch of an 'All-age' National Careers Service in November 2010, John Hayes has done a U-turn and, having closed the vast majority of the country's careers centres, he has replaced it with a national helpline phone number (he caved-in to Gove). Mindlessly, at just the time the nation needs it most, virtually the whole of the professionally qualified careers profession has been made redundant. When was the last time an entire specialist workforce was put out of work and the media didn't give a hoot?!

The standard retort is that no one ever received helpful guidance from their Careers Adviser. I know this subjective view to parallel bad restaurant reports. A restaurant can give pleasure to 999 customers, but it only takes the 1000th to spread bad reviews and spells disaster. There are some remarkably inspiring Careers Advisers working in this country. And it seems through our period of plenty we have found a way of feeling we just don't need them anymore. We will live to regret it. Or at least our economy will… and then our children… and then their children's children.

Consider what success might look like for a moment:

We gear-up our National Careers Service to partner with industry leaders and help them envision what our country needs to construct an economically dynamic labour market.
We do the numbers - we properly audit the shortfall in skills and we work to facilitate an education process that produces those skills.

Four years ago we were massively oversubscribed by qualifying medical students where supply outstripped demand for their skillsets.

Two years ago a Law graduate could not get onto the all-important training year with law firms because all the law firms were shedding staff to keep their firms afloat.

Yet few of the universities tempered their approach to offering places and we all sat watching as the water in the ship started to lap at our knees

As Draconian as it might sound, we sanity-check all degrees on the basis of the contribution they make to society. And no, this doesn't have to be the death of the Arts!

We ensure all young people who embark upon a degree course or apprenticeship understand the destination and job prospects that pathway to the workplace holds for them. They consider their prospects ahead of time.

We reinstate Careers Action Plans for school and university leavers to capture each stakeholder's commitment to the chosen career pathway.
We start career counselling, competency identification and aptitude assessment earlier in school to enable young people to build upon the momentum derived from known strengths not a never-ending quest.
We set-up a national computer database which accurately describes the tapestry of jobs in our economy and interfaces it with labour market supply.
We knit our labour market-together to build a congruent, integrated and sustainable system where commercial, economic and labour market demand are in relative alignment.

As Steve Austin's boss said, "We have the technology...." We can rebuild our labour market. But we need some visionary thinkers to takeover the helm of the ship and steer a course to more fruitful waters. As it stands, our problem is that we are welded to convention at a time when we need pioneers to invent new ways of thinking and give them the support they require to turn our ship around. Everyone possesses a real talent for something. Let's help them develop.

As good as 'Up for Hire' was on the BBC this week they missed an opportunity to truly inspire. There was an elephant in the TV studio. Not once did they properly tackle the subject of career planning. Nobody seems to have noticed but me. The 'career guidance' phrase wasn't even uttered; (although this is partly the fault of the career guidance profession for never getting their PR right - but that's another story!)

My final point comes back to the difference that was made on four young people's lives when experts and experienced workers invested a few hours in their development. Each of those youngsters was despondent due to long term unemployment and a lack of any prospects existing on the horizon. The relatively short time it took to turn them on to how exciting their prospects could be, if they only knew, created electricity in each of them and transformed their outlook for the good - and for good.

It is time to catalyse a movement where Government neglect can no longer be a factor in the future of our young people's careers. There is a way of turning this ship around. We need a lobby to turn this ship around and we need it today.

Jamie Oliver famously coined the phrase that our schools are 'nutritionally barren'. Today I want to warn everyone reading and ask that you repeat my words to everyone you know because we are also 'vocationally barren'!!

I am launching The Purpose Foundation to help young people lay the foundations of purpose in their lives and to partner with industry to recover our industrial excellence.

Together we can get the numbers right and tailor education and training systems that not only turn-out well-rounded and well-adapted young people, but in addition we generate unprecedented momentum in our industry with the aim of becoming a truly sustainable economy so that our children's, children's legacy is one worth inheriting.
Not like the one we're leaving them now.
The Purpose Foundation Manifesto
If you are interested in supporting this initiative please sign-up at:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Purpose-Foundation-supporters
Once we have enough support, we can build something truly inspiring from there!
Please spread the word and help grow a movement.
Duncan Bolam

http://www.blogger.com/duncanbolam@careerdovetail.co.uk

This publication/blog/ article is intellectual property of and explicitly owned by Duncan Bolam. Career Dovetail©®™ is a Registered Trademark and the property of Duncan Bolam © 1998-2012.

Job Feed My Soul

2011-09-08T15:23:00.000+01:00

For many, many years I was despondent at the complete and utter lack of meaning in my career. And I mean despondent. The expectations of others seem to cloud my judgement. In retrospect, I recognise that I was tetchy, arrogant, unfulfilled and in a constant state of unrest.

As my own story goes I lost my dream job at the age of 32 and slammed into the buffers. I became a resident of ‘Skid Row’ and found myself in an utter and complete tailspin. There were one or two occasions where I questioned whether I could even go on. Life was bleak and the day-to-day outlook did not seem to be improving. I was in a rented bedsit, on the dole, on the breadline, living on baked beans and struggling to cope with being what I regarded at the time as ‘down-and-out’. How damaging we can be to ourselves.

In the depths of my despair someone I had previously regarded as a friend for life, a person I held in hugely positive regard, asked me what felt like being a failure. I thought I’d hit rock-bottom, but I soon found out I was wrong. This kick in the teeth knocked me even further down. I saw my ‘friend’ through a different lens. That was December 1994. I remember it well because I lost my job, reputation and roof-over-my-head on 4th December.

I’ve written about it at length elsewhere, but in the interim period I received my first bona fide career guidance interview with an inspirational Adult Career Adviser called Mike, and I owe him a huge debt of gratitude to this day. His guidance compared to that of an alchemist as he took me from the depths of despair and skilfully guided me towards my renaissance.

By the end of the first week in January 1995 my life started to show green shoots like the snowdrops hale the end of dark winter months. That metaphor still works for me all these years later as I watch for the early Spring. The same way my heart skips a beat when I see the first swallow arrive on my horizon. It is these uplifts that feed our soul. Somewhat ironically, I had been accepted onto a postgraduate diploma in Career Guidance and started the rebuild process and germination of the person I knew, deep down, I had the potential to be.

As my friends who knew me before my transformation will tell you, finding my ‘calling’ changed me deeply. And I emphasise that I use the word ‘calling’ in a completely non-Lutheran sense. (I’m no longer a conditioned Christian, as regard myself far more a Holist in my outlook.) What I mean when I say calling is that I tapped into the innate vocation that lives within each and every one of us. My life transformed because every faculty I possess, every life experience, every career attribute, is drawn-upon and channelled daily in my job and repays me the dividend of meaning and fulfilment.

Having done my year’s postgrad I went on to my Probationary Year as a Careers Adviser, relocating to Surrey and working in three mainstream secondary schools and one special needs school. I tapped into a new-found self belief as young people were mirroring my enthusiasm for my job in some form of virtuous circle that spread the dividend outward.

Gradually, the traction came back into my life. In truth, the traction probably entered my life for the first time! As now I had a vocation my identity and self esteem became more strongly anchored. I found where previously people might have regarded as arrogant and argumentative; I became increasingly comfortable in my own skin, peaceable and contented. No longer feeling hunted and forever in pursuit of fulfilling my potential in some far-flung fantasy. I had tapped into my innate strength and it was feeding me.

Nowadays, I see no greater pleasure in my life than guiding others towards tapping into their inner vocation and uncovering the career attributes that can feed their soul. You can see the ‘before and after’ in their eyes. I know what the experience felt like in my own life; like the dark in a cave and the beach on a summer’s day – total contrast! With and without.

I see the eyes of meaning-filled people sparkle with a perpetual intensity that is infectiously charismatic and nurturing; especially craftspeople building tangible products with their hands. These are especially wholesome jobs – the epitome of ‘Career Sustainability’ – career identities that will last for the long haul of a lifetime.

Whereas, people in dead-end, meaningless jobs, and those unfortunate people not to have any work in their lives, can seem soulless and empty; with tapping into the affirming powers of meaningful work instilling that all-important sense of purpose and virtue being the remedy to our quest for the meaning of life.

Working with what you’ve got within in you is invigorating on every level. It truly uplifts the soul and builds the life. The toughest part is placing one’s trust in others to help decode what your calling is because part of being human is that we’re not always very skilled in recognising what we’re best at. Our filters don’t work this way .

Only the weak and faithless perpetuate their lot by never seeking help. The process of reaching out and connecting builds stronger bonds in stronger communities; the more meaning in the community, the more peace everyone enjoys. Life goes on, sustainably.
Feed your soul and others’ today – tap into your career attributes – help others tap into theirs - purpose feeds all of us and lifts our souls.

Career Action Plan

2011-09-03T20:44:00.001+01:00

If you're seriously into self preservation and avoiding unnecessary risk, then why haven't you invested time in your Career Action Plan lately? Not having one is akin to going on vacation without travel insurance, risky and potentially downright irresponsible.

Sit down and contemplate what your career attributes are: skills, strengths, vocational interests, experience, competencies, qualifications... how they piece together and how they dovetail into the World of Work. Plan your way ahead and instill purpose in your life. Develop your perfect interview script for your dream job. Don't give up until you have designed it.

Need encouragement? Why not do the sensible thing and hire a Career Development Professional. You service your car and pay a mechanic. Why not invest in servicing your career because introspection like this is one of the toughest tasks you will ever perform, but when the economy is spiralling downwards, having a preconsidered career strategy detailed in your Careers Action Plan is a key component in any contingency plan and perpetuating your income.

Don't think big companies spend millions a year on contingency plans if they're not important. Why not be prepared, sort your Career Action Plan out without any further delay.

Decision tangles aren't just for the young, everyone needs some guidance

2011-09-03T14:46:00.000+01:00

I met two young guys this week who are deep in the throes of decision making dilemmas. One had managed to whittle his career decision making down to three options; whilst the other had become seriously ill after drowning under the weight of being blind to his significant career attributes, not knowing what he is equipped to achieve or what he is here to do.

Put mildly, the guy with 3 options is still looking at hugely diverse options from professional sport, a career in media technology and an entrepreneurial start-up; the other just incapable of deciphering a way forward and utterly waylaid by the not knowing.

MPs in England and many policy-makers seem to believe that as a society we equip our young people with the decision making powers necessary to tackle the hugely portentous choices that we inevitably bump into throughout the course of our lives.

Please feel free to correct me, but throughout the whole passage of my education I cannot recollect a single exercise in a classroom that went anywhere near teaching me how to evaluate my options and decide. Decision making is a critical life skill, a survival skill, that we seem to believe is learnt through some kind of osmosis.

In the harsh light of reality, this process of osmosis is what some people call 'The University of Hard Knocks' or 'The University of Life' when what we are really trying to say is that the only way to truly learn the skill of decision making is through repeated failure and the build-up of some helpful layers of scar tissue.

Fair enough, making mistakes is a fantastically effective way of learning what not to do in the future. I think this approach works quite well in the realms of learning to ride bicycles, but with a decision as impactful as a career path, why should we encourage young people to stake their psychological wellbeing on such an unpredictable, high risk strategy? We ought to remember how much of our identity is built upon what we choose to call ourselves in the workplace, how our career connects all of the dots between mortgage, grocery shopping, holidays, cars and pension plans. Without a well-considered career plan and the resilience to navigate change, who are we?

I've been there to help the 26,27,28 year-olds pick-up the pieces of shattered dreams and misspent years banging their heads off brick walls whilst the blood is trickling off the end of their noses. I've done it just this week and my heart really bled for this tremendously capable, kind and sincere young guy who had invested his all down the wrong track, only to have it explode in his face years later, just at the time when many of his peers are gaining real traction on their lives. Yet our Government officials seem to think our young people don’t need career guidance.

When you do talk to young people ahead of these pivotal decisions and/or just after the potentially misspent years, it seems to me the errors were caused by ill-fitting expectations. Parental pressure, peer pressure, societal pressure can heat up a decision just enough to distort reality. This is bad enough. But there is an equally sinister side to cocked-up dreams of fast cars, sun-kissed beaches and the good life, the incredibly exaggerated expectations of the young person.

Now that we have created a culture where every young person seems to believe the only viable route to the good life is to grab a degree, anything short of this lofty aspiration now smacks of failure. When in the harsh light of the economic reality - at the time of writing - a degree is possibly the last career option I would advocate unless the chooser is committed to expanding their education further along a very specific route with well-defined goals in mind.

More dangerous again in the league table of miss-matched expectations - and this is not going win me any popularity stakes - is that so many young people I meet want the big pay cheque, the fast car and all the trappings of wealth and responsibility without doing 'the filing', 'tea making', or any of ‘the grunt' required. It is as if they're on a fantastic snakes and ladders board and all of the throws of the career dice land them on ladders which take them very smoothly, effortlessly and swiftly to the loftiest heights of their chosen career trajectory. This naïve outlook really can cause damage, the pieces of which are very hard for anyone to pick up.

Being the possessor of great potential is a huge responsibility which requires fantastic decision making powers, deft management, total commitment, but above all, the patience to turn the potential energy into well-targeted kinetic energy. And this only really comes from the investment of time, the accrual of time-tested experience and hard-earned respect - self respect goes hand-in-hand with, and is dependent upon, the respect of others.

A life time of opportunity and fulfilment is a very difficult journey to short circuit. The extra time invested can only help hone our decision making capabilities in the long term. It seems it is only the weak and perpetually insecure who are afraid of asking for help.

A Level Results & Common Sense

2011-08-19T14:15:00.000+01:00

Today is just a short blog to mention the madness of the clamour for university places at a time when the career guidance profession is all but obliterated by Government policy.

For many years Careers Advisers would be on hand to help pick up the pieces of broken plans on A Level Results Day. For some reason this Government do not believe that Career Guidance has anything to offer. This might be true if we were not in the midst of more upheaval and social change than perhaps ever before in history.

In 2011 young people are inundated with career options at a time when Government seek to balance the demographics in the labour market. Never could the World of Work accommodate 50%+ of graduates. The elemental economics of supply and demand tell us this. In a globalised market we need aggressive training programme to ensure our companies are leading edge. I personally don't believe we can achieve this without a realistic workforce determined to put themselves at the top of the skills economy.

Today is probably not a great day to be postponing your degree until 2012 at the risk of paying back debts for 30 years. There have got to be better options. Why not talk to a Careers Adviser about what they might be?

Job Search SB 6

2011-07-16T06:27:00.001+01:00

The Path of Least Resistance:

When you are looking for a job make sure you understand exactly what your career passions are. It is no good moaning about rejection when you haven't taken the time to do the detective work necessary to identify your working talents and career attributes, such as - skills, strengths, interests and values.

The shortest journey to you getting a job that you truly love, where you outshine your competitors on the interview shortlist, is to decide what you do best - and do it.

Career Steer

2011-07-16T06:12:00.001+01:00

The world of career development is built on more than 100 years of theoretical and practical evolution. Somehow this professional discipline has managed to keep a uniquely low profile for such a widespread field making such a notable contribution.

In spite of being proven by tens of thousands of academics to impact beneficially to the psychological, sociological, physiological and economic wellbeing of the individual citizen and society at large, people place little recognition on these compelling facts. Career Guidance, Careers Advice, Career Counselling, Career Coaching, call it what you will, the bottom line is, it is good for you.

A career that is going somewhere is a beautiful sight to behold. Watching a person emit a sense of purpose is one of the most charismatic sights in the known universe. People fly around a well-polished talent like moths around a candle. The gifted artisan lights up the smile of a stranger without the need of words. Yet the probability of any individual citizen uncovering the innate career which lies inside them is 10:1 against.

It is part of the human condition that it is easy to help others with their decisions, but harder than hell to help ourselves work-out our own. In fact I believe this inability to make important life decisions on our own is a naturally in-built failsafe mechanism that strengthens the fabric of society by having us accord and interact with those around us. Hence, why, with the proliferation of singleton households, the all-important sense of community has waned and it has become harder and harder for individuals to contribute to the greater whole.

All the more reason to get a steer on your career and consider whether your career is going to take you somewhere you really want to go with your life; or career out of control in a way that contributes little to anyone, least of all your Self.

What price would you pay for knowing?

www.careerdovetail.com

MyBlogLog

2011-02-07T16:43:00.000Z

Job Search Sound Byte 5 - Answers to a Tough Labour Market

2011-02-07T14:34:00.000Z

The Tougher it gets out there, the better the reasons are for planning your career

As with bouts of depression, being jobless is unbelievably tough and climbing out of the trough feels insurmountable. The deeper the trough, the harder it can be to climb out. As with life in general doing what we can to get our discipline to kick in is vital in relation to how quickly we succeed in overcoming the short term challenges.

Often overcoming bouts of low self-esteem can be closely linked to the state of our diet. If we are not looking after ourselves and have a poor quality diet mixed with unhelpful substances like nicotine, alcohol and unprescribed medicines, these factors can all intensify the feelings of worthlessness and prolong the periods of work-less-ness.

Speaking to a Career Development professional and talking through where your work preferences lie is a great way to putting yourself back on the road to recovery. Instilling that all-important sense of direction in your life is key to getting back into work and rebuilding your bruised self-image.

Recognise that there are many job factors that need to be meshed-together to form your career strategy and how you are going to apply yourself to your job search. As a rough guide it will probably take in excess of 12 hours deep introspection to truly identify your capabilities, strengths, skills, talents, values, likes, dislikes, motivations and attitudes and piece them all together into a sustainable plan.

As a formula to help your decide The Career Dovetail System is great way of improving your awareness.

How do you recognise your purpose in life? And how to see it in others

2011-02-07T14:11:00.000Z

My heartfelt belief is that 90% of the population are in the wrong job altogether or not engaged by their work.

According to the laws of probability, not thriving in the right work for you is likely because we’re inundated with so much choice these days that the probability of landing a job that you love makes it unlikely. Someone mentioned a statistic to me which I constantly repeat: 75% of the goods available to consumers today were not invented in 1975!!

Young people and old are flooded with decision making challenges on a daily basis. So without taking career planning seriously you’re highly unlikely to randomly land in a job that you love. As I frequently point out, people treat their career planning along similar lines to pinning the tail on a donkey.

What is a job that you love anyway?

Well for me it is all about a job that conjures-up a sense of purpose in your life. The alarm clock rings, the duvet hits the ceiling and you know just where you’re going every day. Your working generates a busy hum and everyone around you knows you are on target to succeed. Based on passion, your work is effortless.

Your life is the personification of meaning. You have meaning in your stride, in the tonality of your voice, in your body language and it is actually quite attractive to behold. People experiencing purpose in their lives are more attractive and they have great energy in their lives. So the likelihood is that not many of us benefit from this esoteric aura that earns us a pleasurable living.

Bean-Counters don’t see the value in purpose because they cannot see it and they cannot measure it. However, if they stood back for a moment and looked at the people who demonstrate purposefulness in their lives they’d see it. And probably find a way of measuring it because it a where organisations generate all of their value.

By definition most innovations stem from people who see a problem and want to solve it. The see an obstacle to getting something done efficiently and invent a solution that overcomes the hurdle. They thrive on this kind of purpose and it is this drive that fuels their daily contribution. Therefore, purpose-filled people are value generating people and Bean Counters might do well to recognise them better.

Turning this around, if only 10% of most organisation’s employees are purposeful and yet they are profitable and sustainable businesses, imaging the value that could potentially be generated if more employees were purposeful? Bean Counters might not recognise it, but that bottom line they’re so focussed on all stems from their colleague’s purpose in life.

Turning people on to meaning-filled and purposeful careers is not some esoteric fantasy. We owe it to ourselves, our organisations, our bottom-line but most of all to our employees to turn them on to their purpose and bear witness to the change in attitudes. Sustainability, wellbeing and value and all inextricably linked to well-intentioned focus, meaning and purpose. Get those pillars in alignment and see your stock rise.

So I leave with this thought: If you could measure purpose in your life how would you measure it? And how would you recognise purpose if you saw it?

Responses to: duncanbolam@careerdovetail.co.uk

Job Search Sound Byte Number 4: How to get keep your job or land a job - Staying employed in tough times!

2010-10-27T15:20:00.000+01:00

We’re 2 years into the global financial crisis and nobody seems to know who to blame for all the mess. Some say it is investment bankers, some say government. I must admit to finding it confusing that the investment bankers are taking the flack when the two banks that led the UK into the banking crisis both specialised in mortgages. But that is another story!

Suffice it to say, a tsunami of job-losses is about to hit! The long-awaited ‘Comprehensive Spending Review’ produced by the UK’s coalition Government arrived last Thursday and it spells out a lot of doom and gloom for public sector workers with many people expecting more than 400,000 civil servants to lose their jobs in the next year.

The idea is that, according to traditional Conservative ideology, these newly unemployed masses will be soaked up by a resurgent private sector. How likely is this to happen in reality? Many of my dyed-in-the-wool enterprising friends would struggle to justify hiring a worker with an entrenched public sector mindset due to the damaging stereotype prevailing in society.

Sadly, the latter-day British civil service worker is tarred with a quite toxic reputation of hiding behind red-tape and never being accountable for anything they do in the workplace. Rightly or wrongly, many British citizens have been on the wrong end of this experience and the toxic reputation looks like sticking. Beware of the image you present.

So if the job-loss tsunami is going to hit the public sector workers the most, and you are one, then your best strategy is to market yourself as a very dynamic worker with a demonstrable track record of productivity.

Many of the public sector workers I have assisted through the redundancy nightmare feel a gaping hole when asked to give quantifiable measures of their success; often because they are a cog in a much larger machine and laying claim to a number describing productivity which is their own can be very difficult.

The fact remains that hirers in the private sector do not hire generic workers as a first resort. They hire proven track records. They hire energisers. They’re looking for producers, deliverers and value generators who can contribute directly to the bottom line. Alongside which we mustn’t forget that it IS a dog-eat-dog world out there; especially when times are lean.

The Magic Ingredient:

For years, and years, and years I’ve talked to career professionals about what it is that makes a job candidate outstanding - truly outstanding. What is the one magic ingredient that makes the one interviewee stand out from the crowd? The Answer: Purpose and Conviction - they both amount to the same thing - attractiveness.

What is Purpose and Conviction?

I’ve written for many years about these two vital components in a well-planned job search campaign. The difficulty is that it is almost impossible to put your finger on exactly what Purpose is. The same applies to Conviction.

Both Purpose and Conviction are intangible commodities. Like the 5 Senses, they are relatively easy to describe. But when asked to describe the 6th Sense, that's a different matter! Yet these words find a way to be incredibly attractive qualities when seen in a person. They help the beholder omit a powerful sense of confidence. The person gives off a sense of understanding and a sense of direction in their lives which 90% of the rest of the population don’t have.

Very often The Hirer is threatened by this innate sense of purposefulness and sureness. Many of us can feel intimidated by someone who has an innate sense of knowing where they are going in life. Some people feel threatened and jealous. So once you’ve worked-out how to implant this fantastically attractive quality in your life, you’ve got to know how to handle it - it's a bit like your own version of Kryptonite! As many people are frightened by it!

How to harness your conviction and not intimidate people:

Imagine a pressure gauge on a steam train. Picture the needle hitting bursting-point and the need to get out of the way of a boiler which is just about to explode. Picture the gauge saying that there just isn’t enough pressure in the boiler to move the train forward and the scramble to shovel more coal into the firebox. We can see that there is a happy medium between too much power and not enough.

The same applies to conviction and purpose in a person. If we are overly confident people will tend to feel intimidated and possibly even resentful. On the other hand people can also get a clear sense of when a person does not have very much confidence with the metaphor being that their pressure gauge is too low; they lack self-esteem and a sense of direction in their lives.

Self-assuredness is the happy balance, neither not overly confident, nor lacking. If I go to see a doctor I’d like to be made to feel by their body language, demeanour and the tonality of their words that they knew exactly what they were doing and they exuded a sense of self-assuredness. 99 times out of 100 we can tell whether a person gives off this all-important sense of Purpose and Conviction the very moment we meet them for the first time. We can even detect this when the person is on the other end of a telephone!

Some people call this the Law of Attraction. Whatever it is, when the going gets tough, and you need to get going to find another job or prove your worth in the one you are in, dig deep and identify what your purpose is in life. And get hired for doing just that! Everyone I have ever met has an innate skill in their life, the only problem is that some people haven't found it yet!

Find a qualified career professional at http://www.acpinternational.org/ & http://www.icg-uk.org/

Turning THREATS into OPPORTUNITIES for Career Professionals…

2010-10-27T13:56:00.000+01:00

Since 2000 day rates for outplacement consultants have depreciated cumulatively by approximately 80%. Any owner / director of a careers firm may be deeply suspicious of my reasons for stating this unsettling fact. However, the bitter reality is that the viability of the outplacement industry is in doubt and it time to do something about it.

To turn this worrying trend around relies upon our upskilling, professionalizing, quality assuring delivery and ensuring procurement and HR professionals understand what they’re buying and why there is a ‘duty of care’ involved in the transaction.

The reasons why:

This is an almost infinitesimally complex answer! A key factor is that following the aggressive round of mergers and acquisitions seen in the early 2000s the large firms swallowed-up many of the smaller firms and the great outplacement price-wars ensued. Margins were cut-to-the-bone and very soon consultant day rates started to feel the pain. Back in the high days of outplacement when firms prided themselves on recruiting duly qualified professionals day rates of £400 + expenses were not unheard of but the prevailing average was in the mid 200s per day.

Coming up the present day, a key factor is that in the passed 12months an additional 90 firms have entered the tender lists for outplacement contracts – nearly all of whom are recruitment firms. It begs the question, why?

At this point I’ve got to admit that it becomes increasingly challenging to remain objective and not be seen to be defensive and protectionist as at the end of the day this is a partial view as career coaching and outplacement is how I prefer to earn my living. But the reality is that giving the newly redundant a CV make-over and a half day’s job search workshop does not constitute outplacement, at least a service worth delivering.

The flipside of this argument is that – making sweeping generalisations – recruitment professionals tend to fuel their work by very contrasting sets of values to those of a bona fide career professional. Recruiters are, in the main, business development professionals. Whereas, career professionals would tend to demonstrate a helping, caring, empathetic / counselling dimension in the way they go about their work.

There is also the stark reality of legislation. The Employment Agencies Act 1973 openly discourages any vested interest in taking fees from both ends of the recruitment – career development continuum. Firms taking commissions from organisations for placing candidates in roles have a vested interested that cannot, or should not be ignored, if they are to take an outplacement fee as part of the same transaction. Yet here we are in the UK with some of the most successful recruitment organisations in the world owning and operating outplacement firms as well; albeit separated by ‘Chinese walls’.

Whilst running the London Chapter of ACP International we twice invited the former DTI’s special task force responsible for policing the Employment Agencies Act and twice they stood us up with delegates waiting and primed. How I set the presentation up was for the task force to come and translate the legislation for career professionals and to help us understand the implications for our work. The upshot was that the department explained that taking fees for career coaching and career guidance as private practitioners was illegal and in breach of The Act! I continue in my attempts to lobby Government for clarification on this.

Unhelpful lack of ‘joinedupness’:

So if the former DTI (now BIS) are policing the Act, why then does the DWP tend to appoint recruiters to supply contracts to Jobcentre Plus for delivering job search workshops to the long term unemployed? Apart from anything, this is a clear indictment of the state of the career profession in the UK and a placard for why the career profession has got to now get its house in order.

Another qualification which seems to satisfy many of the outplacement firms hiring consultants is that of the Sales and Marketing discipline. Let’s get one consideration right out in the open, I do not harbour any issue with portfolio workers earning a living from more than once strand of income. Far from it, I am proud to be a ‘portfolio worker’ myself! Nonetheless, where I do feel unabashed is in my professional expectation that anyone entering into the careers profession is duly equipped to offer safe, high quality, career coaching and guidance based upon a reasonable amount of time invested in training and experience tested 'at the coal-face'. At the moment quite literally anyone can set themselves up as a career professional; which sullies the whole industry and drastically diminishes our brand as a 'profession'

No matter what you might think there is a very serious element to providing outplacement consultancy and that is of impartial, confidential counselling. Suicide is a real potentiality of redundancy and happens all-too-often. This might smack of scaremongering, and to an extent it is. But it is aimed at demonstrating a point; outplacement is a very serious business and should never be sold short by the uninitiated, ill-prepared and the professionally naive.

I dare say that in writing this article I will win more enemies than friends. But I have no axe to grind with anyone, when all I want to achieve is to re-establish the reputation of an industry I have been very proud to consider myself a part of for 13 years.

Dame Ruth Silver, has led the Career Profession Task Force in the UK since the turn of the year. She has done a remarkable job of engaging with and exercising the plethora of strands that comprise the various branches of the careers profession in the UK. We wait with baited breath on the Minister’s reactions to the task force’s recommendations given early in October. The Recommendations can be accessed here:

‘Towards a Strong Careers Profession’ - http://publications.education.gov.uk/eOrderingDownload/CPTF%20-%20External%20Report.pdf

There is one outcome for certain, whether through a ‘License to Practice’ or a form of ‘Registration’, career professionals in the UK will need to step up to the mark and demonstrate competence if they are to continue to practice at a level seen to protect the consumer on the one hand, and to satisfy the Recommendations on the other.
The Major Benefits:

• The number one bi-product arising will be consumer safety and a raised profile in society for the career profession. Inexpert raids on our work will end and bona fide career professionals will benefit from a properly delineated professional boundary. As with any other legitimate professional field of expertise.

• Quality standards will go up and the consumer will experience greatly improved standards of service. No longer will a college student sit in front of a so-called Career Coach and have a quick tour of their LinkedIn network passed-off as a quality-assured career development intervention. Giving someone a half hour CV make-over and a cover letter with no longer be seen as an acceptable interpretation of outplacement consultancy specialism.

• The appropriately qualified career professional will soon experience a resurgence as they are regarded as the stand-alone profession they ought to be. But in spite of what owner/directors might think, this will not lead to a collapse in the outplacement industry. It should in actual fact reinforce its status and generate value as a result.

Former President of ACP International, Mark Venning, explained to me a few days ago that ‘employability training’ is neither ‘career development’ nor ‘outplacement consultancy’. It is a low value impersonation of a more full-blown service. HR professionals should consider this when they appoint service providers. As should procurement professionals. I recently posted an article on the HR Director’s Summit LinkedIn Group on the lack of quality assurance standards in outplacement buying and not a single HR professional responded.

Diminishing the anxiety attached to qualification 'Snakes & Ladders':

A few weeks ago I spoke to a hugely experienced and respected career development company’s owner. He was very worried about the implications of upskilling his workforce and having them meet the soon-to-be established standards recommended by the Careers Profession Task Force.

The prevailing misconception amongst my experienced colleagues practicing in the private sector is that they would have to go all the way back to entry level training and retrain from scratch. Very few people, my friend the company owner included, have come across two distinct methods designed to avoid such wasting of time and equally as importantly, money.

Accreditation of Prior and Experiential Learning (A.P.E.L) and the Credit Accumulation and Transfer Scheme (C.A.T.S.) are designed to make the most of your work-based and education-based learning and experiences. So no one who is well into their stride in a given vocation needs to feel in the least intimidated about translating their experiences into formal qualifications.
The Association of Career Professionals International UK is working very hard to identify learning institutions and partners who can help experienced career professionals to develop the necessary evidence portfolios to convert into relevant career-based qualification frameworks.

This is not scaremongering – it is really going to happen:

In the coming weeks, months and years the Career Profession will be expected to meet a universal level of professional competence as a bare minimum. This is not scaremongering. The Careers Profession Alliance is currently distilling a common set of professional standards and a Code of Ethics. ACP International UK is integral to this dialogue. Therefore, now is the time for independent and salaried career coaches and outplacement consultants operating in the UK’s private sector to mobilise and demonstrate their commitment to this exciting initiative by becoming part of the key professional body representing career professionals in the private sector.

A call to unite:

To quote Dame Ruth Silver: “It is time for careers professionals to work together to provide a strong and unified voice, to show professional leadership and to take responsibility for transforming careers advice for young people, and their parents, who rightly expect excellence in the services they receive.”

To join ACP International: http://www.acpinternational.org/main/join.aspx

Our goal is 500 new UK members by the end of 2010!

Attend the UK conference for private sector career professionals on 27th November at The Hubworking Centre, Wormwood Street, London.

What is the point in going to university in 2010? With such an oversupply of graduates, surely many will be modiocre....d

2010-08-26T16:19:00.000+01:00

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*Why did they stigmatise the ‘Career’ word?

When the Labour Party came to power in 1997 legend has it that they banned the word 'career' from policy-making documents on the grounds that it was "aspirational, discriminatory and elitist". Many of my friends know my favourite retort to this nonsense is the story about the Street Cleaner in London who was given the freedom of the city for never missing a day's work in his 40 year career; shopkeepers could set their watch by his pushing his barrow along the pavement and you could eat your lunch of the footpath it was so clean! When interviewed he exclaimed how proud he was of his career.

I regard myself as being very fortunate that I worked as a Career Adviser in 1996 and 1997, the last years of the previous Conservative government; not because of my political affiliations but because their career services mechanisms were hailed as being the gold standard amongst the 28 OECD countries. What this meant in reality was that 95% of school leavers had at least one careers interview with a trained career professional in their final year and left school with a signed Careers Action Plan including at least half a dozen action points designed to help them fulfil their career goals.

The new Connexions service saw many former career guidance practitioners having to learn to shape-shift into a Personal Adviser and not only help and advise young people on their career strategy, but alongside these challenges they also had to learn about how to assist with welfare payments in complex benefits system, how to intervene in complex family and social traumas, often with their main focus turning to the minority groups in the population whilst the majority were left to flounder. To a large extent this contributed to a significant loss in profile for career guidance professionals and a collapse in professional standards.

Who Said We Need So Many Graduates?

Sadly, the first thing that Tony Blair’s Government did when it came to power was dismantle this internationally acclaimed system for supplying career guidance. The next strange act by the Labour Government was to hurl themselves at getting 50%+ of school leavers into university. Our global competitors don’t need this many graduates. Why do we? Could it be something to do with the smoke and mirrors of hiding the real number of unemployed who would have gone onto the dole queue? I hope not.

This naivety has made a significant impact on the health of the economy as there never could be enough capacity in the British labour market for such a number of graduates when the main reason we lag behind our global competitor’s economically is due to our lack of technicians not our theoreticians and academics. Couple this with the controversial, but increasingly obviously truism that our education system has been dangerously dumbed-down to satisfy the Labour Government’s obsession with targets, and you are left with a potentially broken generation whose career dreams are unfulfillable even before they enter the labour market.

Surviving the agony when reality bites

So within 2 years the whole world has changed beyond recognition and we are staring at a ‘double-dip’ recession. It is now August 2010 and everyone is holding their breath. The ‘Combined Spending Review’ is due out in October and the press are guesstimating between 400,000 and 2miilion public sector workers will lose their jobs in the next 2 years. Many have already gone since the swingeing cuts of the new coalition started to bite immediately post General Election.

The shifts in the tectonic plates of old education policies and the ambitions of the new are going to cause shockwaves felt mainly by the young. Gone are the aspirations of winning door opening degrees with the promise of fast-tracking to success in the ranks of full-employment as reality bites in. Overnight, we are going to have to accept that the supply and demand economics of higher education are changed forever. Universities geared up over 13 years to accommodate thousands of extra spaces now need to reverse that economically dubious trend.

As a would-be graduate considering going to university, take a long hard look at those economics. For the fresh graduate with that newly earned financial millstone around your neck, consider your next steps carefully. What you need to identify quickly are where the skill shortages lie. Where is the oversupply and run quickly in the other direction? Early 21st Century career survival is about adaptability and resilience. People applying for jobs through job ads and recruitment sites are playing an agonising numbers game where they are competing against almost insurmountable odds. Networking your way to job search success is more important now than ever and without these skills, the outlook is stark.

Unorthodox approaches win through. I hope that's an obvious point! Conventional approaches to employment are where all of your competition lies. This is the hardest job search maxim to translate. If you are looking for full-time, permanent, 9 till 5 kind of employment, then you are in the market of over-supply. Take yourself where the demand is high and the supply is low. If moving geographically is required to achieve this, then more power to you for having the gumption to react to labour market demand. It is always a tough decision. (Believe me, I know).

Maybe even consider overseas markets. Maybe even consider self-employment. Have you ever explored the option of being a ‘Portfolio Worker’; someone who possibly has a part-time job to cover the bills on 2 or 3 days per week, a voluntary job to feed the soul and a couple of self-employed contracts to speculate on generating real wealth? This might include buying a franchise, mowing lawns, proof-reading documents, buying, selling and merchanting – maybe using auction sites like Ebay.

The important survival skill in a competitive labour market is to make sure you are not welded to convention. Your parents will likely have experienced a hugely different labour market dynamic and your grandparents, many of whom enjoyed one or two jobs in a career spanning and uninterrupted 50 years, possibly with one company, will have no comprehension of the challenges facing a 21st Century career changer. Unless, of course, they were around in the Great Depression of the 1930s!

Two Eyes on Future Trends

Adapt and survive. Be prepared to take on new challenges. Only stand still with cast iron certainty. But always, always have two eyes on future trends. The labour market never stands still and will continue to evolve. Keeping the British economy at the leading edge of global commerce is an uphill struggle until we sculpt a labour force fit enough and up-to-date enough to compete for overseas currencies. The emerging economic giants of India and China have stolen a march on UK whilst we wondered what to do with 3rd and 4th generation unemployment after the collapse of all of our heavy industry. Ship-building, steel, mining have all gone.

We reinvented ourselves into a Hi-tech nation manufacturing semi-conductors just before the world’s semi-conductor markets collapsed. We then reacted swiftly into the world’s call centre capital and remodelled our science parks into call centre hubs. Sadly, many of our blue-chip organisation decided to outsource our call centres to Asia, Africa and now South America and our call centre hotspots in the North of England and Scotland are fighting to retain their market share. What are we going to do next?

There is no better time to obtain some impartial career advise. To identify a local career professional why not check out:
http://www.icg-uk.org/
http://www.acpinternational.org/

Follow this column for further updates or contact http://www.careerdovetail.co.uk/ if you have found this blog thought-provoking and would like anymore information.

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What to do if A-levels didn't go according to plan

2010-08-26T14:42:00.000+01:00

"Open clinics, first come, first served, for A-Level Students who may not have won their first pick degree course or university.
Are you sure this is a good time to compromise and risk wasting a lot of money? Is university the only option? What are your viable options?"

Job Search Sound Byte Number 3

2010-05-12T15:42:00.000+01:00

Most citizens are petrified to embrace their uniqueness and exercise their individual talents because it is so often beaten out of us as kids.

The very definition of innovation is resistance - from those ‘scaredy-cats’ wishing to perpetuate the status quo. History is littered with descriptions of original thinkers being outcast as heretics – maybe this is the definition of ‘history in the making’. Fresh thinking is usually met with entrenched thinking. Look at historical figures like:
· Alfred Wegener whose Pangaea Theory hailed the existence of a supercontinent that drifted into today’s continents, led to his ostracism from the geological community on the basis it was too far-fetched to be possible
· Ignaz Semmelweis outcast by the medical establishment for encouraging surgeons to wash their hands and cleanse of the new-fangled notion of germs, and, of course.....
· Charles Darwin who, for many decades, concealed his findings on natural selection being the basic mechanism of evolution could undermine long-established Christian ideology.

My ‘Potential-Thieving Triangle’ (below) is aimed at making sense of how society specialises in squashing fresh-thinking. And why courage and respect are key values in empowering creativity and perpetuating innovation - two values conspicuous by their absence in so many organisations.

So if you want to really get on in life, and not hide your light under a bushel, get in touch with your working passions, embrace them, it can only be good for your self-esteem and contagious in your job search campaign.

Work courageously!

Fear of flying: Why 90% of workers are in the wrong job..

2010-05-12T15:27:00.000+01:00

Job Search Sound Byte Number 2

2009-06-12T17:48:00.000+01:00

The key to applying for jobs is balancing the need to appear outstanding whilst adhering to the accepted conventions of the application process.

Job Search Sound Byte Number 1

2009-06-12T17:43:00.000+01:00

Intention is the arbiter of success!

The Bereavement of job loss Number 2

2009-06-12T17:26:00.000+01:00

As a result of the whirring churn of the labour market since the good old days of a ‘job for life’, most Western cultures are vocationally barren. What do I mean by that phrase? My absolute belief is that each of us has a skill, an innate ability, a talent, a gift, and / or a competency, within us which we must exercise. We got to channel our individual abilities out! Fewer and fewer Western governments invest in effective systems that help their citizens exercise their inner capabilities. Therefore, as Jamie Oliver the famous chef talks about our schools providing "nutritionally barren" food, our education systems produce vocationally barren citizens devoid of career aspiration.

Homo Sapiens relies on work to experience self-worth. Our self image is dependent upon the ‘Invisible Transaction of Work’; which I have written about extensively elsewhere. We are referred to as Human Beings, and I really love the Being bit. It means that to be a being, we’ve got to doing. Beings do.

Whereas, philosophers such as Descartes would have it that ‘I think, therefore I am’, I would argue that the point of living is more along the lines of ‘I do, therefore I am’. The human body is designed to work. We are engines. We put calories in in the form of fuel and we burn them. We build societies, structures and systems.

The obesity epidemic of the 21st Century is purely a metaphor for the fact that we are not doing anymore! The Welfare State coined in the United Kingdom in the 20th Century was a laudable movement to prevent poverty. However, we have generations of citizens who have never worked. As a result we have generations of people who maybe never experienced positive self regard, self esteem, dignity and independence.

In the same way, job loss can generate a sense of low self worth because we feel we have lost our self image. Somehow our view of ourselves becomes tarnished. This is to be expected. But this does not mean it has to be accepted.

The Bereavement Curve is like a dark valley that we must pass through to come out of the other side. After years of delivering redundancy counselling I have learned that the antidote to this hardship is generating stories that describe our achievements. This is often where working with a Career Coach can be invaluable because the irony is that when we have just lost our job, the last task we feel equipped to deliver is talking about our successes!

I’ll talk about Success Stories in another entry….

The double bereavement of job loss Part 1

2009-06-12T16:53:00.000+01:00

In the early 1970s Elizabeth Kubler-Ross translated the findings of her extensive research into bereavement into what became known as the ‘Bereavement Curve’. As is so often the case, this diagrammatic representation of her thesis left a powerful impression on one’s mind; in parallel with the old adage that ‘a picture paints a thousand words’. Kubler-Ross summed up that those losing loved ones appeared to pass through seven stages of grief: shock, anger, denial, stress (either in the form of anxiety, or for some full-blown depression), apathy, acceptance and action.

Having worked as a freelance consultant in the field of redundancy counselling and performance coaching for 12 years, I am well versed in bastardising the ‘Bereavement Curve’ into what has also become known as the Change Curve. The fact of the matter is that human beings, in the main, are change averse. Often our security depends upon stability and routine combining to build up a sense of dependability and faith in the structures we surround ourselves. Often we subscribe to conventions to instil within us a sense of rhythm and repetition. Call it a ‘life beat’.

Job loss hits us hard primarily due to this breach of our life’s rhythm. Conventions lapse and the anchors with which we secure our routines are lost. For some, momentarily, and depending on how well we are prepared for change, for protracted and painful periods. Paradoxically, the more we wed ourselves to convention, the harder the flail of redundancy hits us. Let’s put it this way, the more indelibly etched the habits, the greater the turmoil.

The traditional psychological contract between employee and employer has shifted through 1800 from pre 1970 where employees were loyal to employing firms for providing jobs for life. To post 1990 where ‘The War for Talent’ (by Ed Michaels, Helen Handfield-Jones, and Beth Axelrod, Harvard Business Press), seeing companies battling for flexible workforces and the freedom to deliver ‘just-in-time’ products and services, meant that more and more companies struggled to instil any sense of loyalty in their workforce. And why should employees develop any sense of loyalty when the average number of jobs in career had shot up from one or two jobs in a lifetime to as many as 18 career transitions from job to job.

So if that is Bereavement Number 1, what is Bereavement Number 2……..?

How meaningful work always wins through

2009-06-12T16:46:00.000+01:00

90% of the people I meet are in the wrong job. Outspoken words indeed. However, they are true. The reason? 90% of the people I meet don’t love themselves unconditionally.

So few people I meet are cool about who they are. It is a dreadfully sad state of affairs that somewhere along the line we brought Victorian attitudes with us into the 21st Century and we so often spurn a healthy self-image. In fact, if you think about it, our tabloid culture specialises in destroying anyone lucky enough to have a healthy self regard.

What does this mean? Because I understand this needs to be put simply. Let’s start with a sporting metaphor. Successful sports stars would achieve very little if they did not believe deep down inside that were good at what they do. And that they can win! Inner belief is essential. Yet in the workplace there seems to be some kind of expectation that everyone has to be conventional and spend their days conforming to accepted standards regurgitating mundane tasks.

Most companies specialise in hiring conventional people with mediocre skills to deliver unexceptional tasks. Yet business managers and HR managers talk about talent management; managing talented people so that they can perform highly and fulfil their potential and, as a result, help the organisation deliver upon its strategic objectives; thereby growing value.

As I state in ‘How CVs are killing the corporation’, the reality is that if we are outstanding, we are often outside of the building staring in. Instilling and cultivating meaning in our work is critical if we are to survive in an economic downturn. You will be found out if you don’t do your work with a sense of intention. I recommend that you appreciate what you are doing for work is recognisably valuable. If it is not in your work today, what have you got to do to find it?!

I often talk about the ‘Invisible Transaction of Work’; which has nothing to do with money. The ‘Invisible Transaction of Work’ means that we receive a payment for doing something we recognise as being fulfilling. We can see the results of our labour and it makes us feel good. Our work instils within us a sense of purpose and we learn to appreciate who we have become.

What are you going to do to instil meaning in your work life?

Making Modern Careers Sustainable

2009-06-02T18:48:00.000+01:00

As of writing, I'm sure I don't need to remind anyone times are really tough if you are out of work right now. In fact, times are really tough for many people IN work right now. The world seems to have a gone a little bit crazy with the global economic crisis and so many firms struggling to make their numbers add up. How did we get so complacent that we allowed ourselves to get into such a mess? Probably because when times are great it is easy not to worry. Many of us have had about ten years of growth and good times. After such a long time we forget to make the usual self-preservation checks and before we know it....Caboooom....we've been made redundant and we have no means of servicing the debts we ran up during the good times.

In the 21st Century, a healthy world depends upon workers working and making our careers sustainable is all about doing the necessary detective work to discover the real meaning in our work. The hard part is tailoring this meaning to actual labour market demand. I watched a BBC programme the other day on how Brazil has switched its focus to bio-ethanol fuel sourced from sugar cane as they have little access to crude oil. The tough reality is that if you live in North East Brazil there are virtually no other options than cutting cane in the fields as this industry is just about the only employment in that region. Doing something else would mean leaving the community to explore other kinds of employment options; which if the worker has a family and strong sense of community., is a tough call. The economic reality can be harsh and history is filled with migrant workers being forced to move to earn a livelihood. So talking about 'fulfilling careers' can be a luxury some workers feel they cannot afford.

My heartfelt belief is that each one of us has a talent within. If we can discover this talent work ceases to be such a terrible chore. Even for those labouring hard in the fields in the hot sun, there will be some who find the work rewarding. They might not grow rich financially but they have the life they prefer. To make a career sustainable is about understanding the invisible transaction that only happens when we identify meaning in our work. Meaningful work will almost certainly involve making a contribution that benefits society around us. This fact is possibly the secret many only learn when it is too late. The banking systems have collapsed as a result of greed when a tiny minority gained disproportionate rewards from unsustainable transactions ignoring time-served wisdom. As long as nurses, care workers, teachers, fire crews and people serving their communities gain such lowly recognition compared to the obscene salaries of professional sportsmen, catwalk models, film stars and celebrities of questionable contribution to their fellow beings, then there will be imbalance and immorality in the economy.

Beware of working transactions driven by self gain alone with such little consideration given to how our work enriches the wider community. The reward of a sustainable career enjoyed over the long haul of a worker's life relies upon a holistic, interactive, vocational system of meaning, contribution and lasting value!! Or, in simple terms, workers channelling their innate talents to better the lives of those around them.