Career Insurance
Learning to
Stay Employed in Today’s World of Down-Sizing, Re-Engineering, and Mergers
Second Edition
By
Tom Sheppard
------------------------------
Career
Insurance Policy
for
__________________
This Policy
Protects Against:
Down Sizing,
Mergers,
Re-Engineering,
Closings,
Layoffs,
and other
fluctuations of the employment market
Brought to You
By:
Tom Sheppard
------------------------------
Congratulations. By reading this, you have just taken a
significant first step in writing your own Career Insurance Policy. Read on, and discover
how to protect your career from the dangerous world of today’s employment market.
how to protect your career from the dangerous world of today’s employment market.
Do you believe in:
+
The Tooth Fairy?
+
The Easter Bunny?
+
Job Security?
This may come as a shock to some, but none of these
exist. While the truth about the first
two may cause feelings of disappointment (and in some cases result in a
mystery), the last can turn your whole world upside down.
With down-sizing, re-engineering, mergers, plant
closings, and business failures, and the layoffs that accompany these events, no one can guarantee that they will have a
job from one month to the next.
Being a good worker and a loyal employee used to be
enough to ensure long-term employment.
Not anymore. Companies struggle to survive in today’s highly competitive
world. They cannot afford to keep people
on the payroll out of a sense of loyalty.
IBM
and Digital Equipment Corporation, as well as most Japanese corporations
maintained “No Layoff” policies for years.
In recent years all of them found themselves in serious financial
problems which forced them to implement massive layoffs and early
retirements. They sent tens of thousands
of employees packing, many of them with decades of service to the company.
|
Question: Is it possible to protect yourself from layoffs and
cutbacks?
Answer: Yes! In fact, it is possible to protect yourself
from the effects of layoffs and cutbacks, mergers and re-engineering. The method is simple, but it is not easy.
To protect yourself from
layoffs and cutbacks you must make yourself more valuable to your current
employer, and more attractive to potential employers.
No Guarantees
Obviously, life has no guarantees other than death
and taxes. No one has an airtight
guarantee that we will live to see the sun rise tomorrow. Likewise, no one today is guaranteed
employment for life. Even in government
service and the military, tow areas of extremely stable employment in the past,
cost cutting is forcing people out of their jobs.
The Wall Street Journal noted that many companies
are beginning to look down on the idea of rewarding employees for
longevity. Simply because they were able
to hold on to their jobs for many years is not necessarily a sign that they are
doing any good for the company. Instead,
they favor focusing rewards directly on concrete contributions[1].
“Life is not fair. Anyone who
tells you it is, is selling something!”
My children hear this all the time. They can recite it from memory from an early
age. It may sound cynical, but actually
it is not. The truth is that God may balance
the scales in the end, but His end is not the same as our end. So, if you go through life expecting the world
to treat you in a fair and equitable manner, you will live with constant
disappointment (or in many cases fearing that your past poor performance will
catch up with you).
In fact, if life were fair, we would get a speeding
ticket every time we exceeded the speed limit.
You see, fair can be a two edged sword, cutting in both directions.
It is the innate unfairness of life which makes it
impossible to make any real guarantees.
Even the company which gives you a life-time guarantee on their product,
can go out of business because of bad decisions, or failure to adapt to new
realities of the market place.
Because of the unfair nature of life, you cannot
count on others to take care of you.
Instead, you need to stack the deck in your favor. You need to fight back.
You are responsible for your
own security. The only thing you can count on to ensure the
stability and growth of your career is your own efforts. No, you cannot guarantee that you will always
have a job. However, you can always
ensure that you have skills which are in demand in the market place. Keeping your skills up to date is the only
thing that will protect you from cuts and layoffs. And, if you do get a pink slip, it will
dramatically improve your chances in the job market. You have to be continuously working at
improving your skills.
In their book on systems, originally titled
“Designing Stable Systems” the Weinbergs
make a point about systems which is true about a lot of things. They state that if something remains stable,
it is because the forces trying to destabilize the system are counterbalanced
by the constant push from forces trying to maintain that system. If you look at your career as a system, then
you can rephrase the law of entropy to apply directly to your life. It might
read as follows:
“If you are staying employed, it is because the forces trying to put
you out of work are being counterbalanced by your efforts to keep yourself
employed.”
If this is true, and it is, then you must keep up a
constant effort to keep yourself employed and employable. If you try coasting, you are falling behind.
In fact, you probably got your current job as a
result of a lot of effort on your part.
Your performance was seen as worthy of promotion or your potential for performance
was recognized and you were hired.
Either way, you had to put in a lot of effort to get where you are
today.
Rick Pitino, former coach of the Boston Celtics and
former coach of the National Champion Kentucky Wildcats never eases up. He is deathly afraid of not surviving
success. When his team wins a game, he
celebrates the win. Then, the next day
he expects them to be back at practice putting in 110%. He believes that a work ethic must be
maintained every day. If you start
coasting, because of your victories, you are setting yourself up for a
fall. And, when you have to support
addictions like eating regularly, sleeping indoors, and wearing decent
clothing, you cannot afford to fall out of your job. To survive success requires that you maintain
the good work habits which got you where you are. As soon as you start to believe you really
are as good as everyone says you are, you are in trouble.
Manufacturing Based Economy
It may help you to understand how important this is
for you by studying a little history.
For many decades our economy has been heavily
reliant on manufacturing as the engine of prosperity. The factories and mills provided the jobs
needed to feed our families. Most managers
today are managing their people using principles of management which were first
formulated in the factory.
Imagine yourself as the boss of a large factory.
Your line bosses come to you and they say, “Boss, that pump on the big
Whachawhosit Mark I is malfunctioning again.
The truth is, the whole whachawhosit is obsolete. We can only put out 150 fruzzes an hour with
it. The NewBoys Company across town just
installed the new Whachawhosit 5000X. And now, they are cranking out 450
fruzzes an hour using only half the people we have on the line.”
Being a good manager of your business, you invest
the capital and buy a new Whachawhosit 5000X (or maybe even the XL to get a leg
up on the competition). You sell off the
old Whachawhosit Mark I for whatever you can get for it. Maybe it is so old, all you can do is sell it
for scrap. Out goes the old equipment
and in comes the new. No one sheds a
tear for the old equipment.
Today computers are the assembly line of the
present. Every six months the latest and
greatest one becomes obsolete. In
countless companies around the world, as the newest, fastest, most capable
computers are brought in the front door by the truck load, computer equipment
less than three years old is removed from the desktop or the wiring closet and
carted out the back door to be sold off for salvage. And when that newer, faster, more powerful
machine lands on your desk, you don’t shed a tear for the clunky, slow,
overburdened machine that was taken away.
But, today we live in what Peter Drucker calls a
Knowledge Based Society. The computer is
just a tool in the hands of a labor force of skilled knowledge workers. It allows them to put their knowledge to work
for the benefit of their employer. But
what happens when their knowledge becomes obsolete.
“The total amount of information in the world doubles every two years.”
If you are
a knowledge worker, a person who manipulates data, turning it into information,
and the amount of information is doubling every two years, how long will it be before you are obsolete?
Question: How long will it be before you
are obsolete?
Answer: If you keep working at it,
never. If you coast, then you are already obsolete.
When the Whachawhosit Mark I was
carted out the back door, no one shed a tear.
When your computer was upgraded or replaced with a new one, no one shed
a tear. But the Mark I and your old PC
didn’t have a mortgage to pay and a family to support. They had no bills to pay and no ego to
bruise.
When you are scrapped, kicked to
the curb, let go, laid off, or fired, your ego is bruised and your home and
family are at risk. The loss of
employment not only strikes at a person’s very self-image, it threatens them at
their survival.
There is, however, one essential, surpassing and
excellent difference between you and a machine.
You can learn.
|
A machine
lacks the essential ingredient which people have for survival - the ability to
learn and change.
In
Steven R. Covey’s bestseller, “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People,”
the ability to change is shown to be essential to success and
effectiveness. Without the ability to
change, we become victims of our environment, our upbringing, our
genetics. With the ability to change, we
become masters of our own destiny. We
are able to rise above poverty, abuse, war, tragedy, handicaps, in short, we
can rise above any obstacle by adapting ourselves from the inside out.
Continuous Self-Improvement
To
keep from being jettisoned to the scrap heap like an outmoded machine, you must
plan and carryout a schedule of continuous, active effort to improve your
skills and your performance. This makes
you more valuable to your current employer and more attractive to potential
employers.
During
the late 1980’s and early 1990’s Total Quality Management (TQM) became the
latest management fashion. Pioneered in
Japan by Americans Peter Drucker, Edward Juran, and Edward Demming, quality tools
helped propel Japanese companies to the top of the world heap. Where once the sticker “Made in Japan” was
synonymous with poorly made trash, it now reflects an image of quality every
bit as daunting as the hard earned reputation of German engineering firms. This notable achievement was attained in
large part by the steady application of a variety of TQM tools.
Facing
extinction, American car companies finally listened to Doctors Drucker,
Demming, and Juran. They avidly aped the
Quality Circles of the Japanese. They
adopted nearly every Quality Practice ever preached. Almost over night, they created the Quality
Industry in the United States. But, all
those cries for continuous improvement - the heart of TQM, were focused on
processes, not people.
Even
today, the tools of TQM are more readily adapted for use on the plant floor
than in software engineering. Anyplace
you have a process, you can easily apply these tools. But, how do you apply tools for measuring continuous
improvement to a human being? The
question is not easy, yet it is essential if we are going to survive and thrive
in this Knowledge Based Society.
The
point that many people miss when they think about applying TQM in their company
is that a company is nothing more than a collection of individuals working
together for a common purpose. The
individuals themselves are the greatest key to productivity and
prosperity. Without the individuals, the
company ceases to exist. It becomes
simply a legal entity; a creature which exists only on paper and which produces
nothing for anyone.
But,
if you apply this one tool of TQM to individuals, the concept of continuous
improvement, then any company can become a world class performer. It won’t happen overnight, but it will happen.
The
same is true of yourself. If you apply
this principle of continually striving to be better and what you do, and learn to
do more, you will be a world class performer.
You will be recognized as a top performer, a key contributor, a valuable
team member. You will find that your
career is secure, even if your job goes away.
“The kind of
life you want to lead five years from now requires that you begin to learn new
things now.”
Continuous
Improvement for an individual is called Life Long Learning.
There
are two broad vehicles for learning: formal training and informal
training. Both are equally valuable and
you should actively use both in formulating your career insurance policy.
Planes, Trains and Automobiles – Just pick one and start moving ahead!
Vehicles for Learning – Formal Training Programs
Company Provided Training
Take advantage of every educational opportunity your
company provides you. Every training
course they offer, every learning resource they provide, every educational
benefit they will pay for you need to use and wring out the maximum
benefit. This is some of the cheapest
training you will ever get. Learn
everything you can about every part of your company’s business. Learn to use every tool available to
you. The more you know about the company
you work for, and the business they are in, the better you can do your own job,
and the more qualified you are for another job if yours goes away or if a
promotion becomes available.
College Courses and Degree Programs
When taking college courses there are two things to keep
in mind: Degrees help open doors, but knowledge is what allows you to excel. Focus on courses related to what you are
currently doing, or on what you want to begin doing. A degree program provides a structured
curriculum and recognizable certification of your efforts. But, even without a degree, enrollment in
college courses shows your employer and prospective employer that you are
serious about keeping your knowledge and skills current.
Many employers will help pay for your degree if it is
related to your job requirements. If
they will pay any part of it, go for it.
If you become unemployed, there are often extensions to unemployment
benefits if you are taking college courses.
Vendor or Training Company
Courses
These typically focus on a particular topic or skill
and take a few hours or days to complete.
They are great ways to sharpen or
acquire initial skills and understanding of new topics. Sometimes these are provided free from product
vendors. Often your company will pay for
you to attend these courses if you gain prior approval.
“People who made
it big in money, power, prestige, or achievement have always educated
themselves in what they need to know.”
Social Historian
Vehicles for
Learning – Informal Training Programs
On the Job Training or Cross
Training
Work actively to learn to do other jobs. This immediately makes you more valuable to
your current employer, and to your team mates.
This usually doesn’t require any extra time on your part, just extra
effort. Most companies would rather move
employees rather than fire them and hire others. Learning to do someone else’s job makes you
better prepared to change jobs if your current work goes away. It also helps you to better understand how
the parts of the company work together to succeed.
Empowerment is a popular buzzword these days. Many people think it means they have more to
do for the same pay. In fact, it means
learn and do your the job your boss is doing, your coworker is doing, and your
subordinate is doing. In the age of
empowerment, no on can safely hide behind the old platitude, “It isn’t my
job.” Everyone is expected to do
whatever it takes to get the job done, regardless of who is officially
responsible for what.
Self directed learning is potentially the most
rewarding and least expensive of all learning activities.
+
Determine what you want to learn about.
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Set a goal or a measure which will show you when you have mastered the
subject.
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Keep a record of what you learn along the way.
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Use the public library, the corporate library, college libraries,
television, and knowledgeable friends or associates.
+
Find a mentor.
There is a wealth of
resources all around you. Take advantage
of them.
Do you have the skills you
need to compete and be hired elsewhere?
Are you marketable?
If your company went out of business today, could you get a job
tomorrow?
Getting Started
Ultimately, it doesn’t matter if you take a plane, a
train, or an automobile. What matters is
that you get moving in the right direction, right away. The first, and most essential step is to
start.
If you haven’t established a goal or envisioned that
perfect job you are aiming for, start learning anyway. Pick any subject you would like to know more
about, find out what resources are available to you to help you learn about it,
set a date, establish a goal, make a plan, and start working on it.
However, to get the absolute biggest benefit from
your efforts requires that you start with the end in mind. You need fix your sights on a goal that you
have a burning desire to attain. Then,
lay out a plan to achieve that goal, identifying the things you need to learn
to succeed and overcome the obstacles in your way. In this way, your learning becomes a servant
to your life, not the purpose of your life.
Remember the ACTION
acronym for goal setting [for more info
on this see "Come Out On Top: Goals to Live By" by Tom Sheppard]. .
Attainable.
Goals are measurable and reachable. If you can write it, you can measure it.
Compatible
with your mission. Will this goal move you closer to where or what you want to
be one year from now, three years from now, five years, ten years?
Time
specific. Set a deadline for achieving
the goal. Remember, someday never comes.
In
writing. To be real, you must write your
goal down. Otherwise, it is just a wish.
Ink it, don’t just think it.
Ownership
of your goals. You must take
responsibility for achieving your goals.
You cannot plan for someone else to deliver your destiny to your door.
Negotiated and agreed upon. If your goals involve other people, as they
often do at work, they must be agreed upon with anyone else who may be affected
Working backward from the time specific deadline,
and identifying the obstacles between where you are and where you are aiming
for, you can turn these goals into manageable, daily activities. You can create
a work plan which will take you where you want to be.
Many years ago a study of Harvard Business School
graduates, ten years out of school measured their level of financial
success. Eighty-three percent of these
graduates had no goals when they graduated.
Fourteen percent of them had goals, but they weren’t written down. This fourteen percent were three times more
financially successful than the group without goals. The remaining three percent had clearly
defined, written goals. This three percent
were ten times more successful than those with no goals. And, the three percent
had a financial net worth greater than the entire ninety-seven percent of their
classmates combined.
A recent advice column in the Wall Street Journal
recommended that you manage your career like you would your own business [for more info on this see "Come Out OnTop: Goals to Live By" by Tom Sheppard]. It advised that, just as any good business
man develops a business plan, so too should you develop a career plan.
When you develop a business plan, you identify your
strengths and weaknesses, check out the competition and how you compare,
evaluate the market, and outline your plan for attaining the market position
you desire.
These same steps can easily be applied to your
career plan. Candidly evaluate your
strengths and weaknesses. Determine how
to play to your strengths and strengthen your weaknesses. Check out the competition. Who and what do you have to compete with for
jobs in your career path? How do you
measure up against the competition?
Evaluate the market? What are the
needs of your company today and in the future?
What changes are occurring in the marketplace? What skills are in demand today, and
tomorrow? Finally, outline your plan for
attaining the position you desire, and put it all in writing.
With this kind of a career plan in front of you, a
burning desire to achieve it, and the will to persist in spite of any setback,
you will overcome all obstacles and you will succeed.
When setbacks happen, and they will, remember what
Henry Ford said,
“Failure is an opportunity to begin again, more intelligently.”
Although you may fail at some things, as long as you
keep at it, you are never a failure.
Visioning Your Perfect Job.
Unless you know where you want to go, what kind of
job you are looking for, much of the effort you put into your job search is
wasted. Take time now to figure out
where you want to go with your work life.
For most people, work is the single largest piece of their waking hours
for the majority of the years of their life.
If you are going to invest that much of your time and energy in
something, it should at least be something rewarding to you. But, if you just drift along from position to
position, company to company, the likelihood of you stumbling onto the perfect
job is extremely low. You probably have
a better chance of getting hit by lightening.
So, take charge of your career and
your life. Take some time to think about
how you want to be remembered when you have left this life. What part does work play in that legacy? For most people it will play a significant
role in how they are remembered. Enjoy
life, enjoy work.
Work is an eternal principle. Even before Adam and Eve were kicked out of
the Garden of Eden, they were told to work as gardeners. Afterward, the curse they received was that
they would have to work harder than they had before to get the same fruits of
their labors. But they still had to
work, before and after the Fall.
In today’s world it is just as true. When we lived at home, our parents provided
for us and we lived off the fruits of their labors. As adults, we forge ahead in our own lives,
separate from our parents and we must provide for ourselves and our
families. As the work world changes
rapidly, it can quickly become the reality that we have to work harder tomorrow
for what we earned more easily yesterday.
There is no substitute for hard work.
But hard work along with a good plan will move the world.
Undoubtedly there were many great commanders before
and after Alexander the Great. But he
alone among them had the vision and the plan which, coupled with hard work,
forged an empire spanning the entire known civilized world of his day. We too can create a great legacy by having a
plan and working hard at it.
You are Responsible
Regardless of which methods you use, and you should
try them all, the bottom line is this: You are responsible.
“Personal responsibility is our greatest evolution.”
Anthropologist
+
Make sure that you are fully prepared in today’s market place. You cannot count on your company to take care
of you. You can at any moment find
yourself unemployed through no fault of your own.
+
Keep your skills up to date. You
are responsible for your own career.
Companies get bought or go out of business every
day. When they do, many valuable, loyal, and competent people are
forced out, regardless of their skills and talents. When this happens, they have to compete for
their next job. Getting laid off is a
question of job security. The odds are
it will happen to you at least once in your career, maybe several times.
Maintaining steady employment, even though it passes
through a number of employers is Career Security. Keeping your skills and accomplishments up to
date with the demands of a changing market is your Career Insurance Policy.
This is your challenge -
+
Keep your Career Insurance in full force and protect yourself from
layoffs by improving your skills and learning new skills.
+
Improve your earning power by improving your skills and learning new
skills.
+
Take charge of your career by taking charge of your self improvement
program. No one else can do it for you.
The Bible tells an illuminating parable about ten
virgins who are invited to a wedding.
Five of them were foolish and brought only the only which could be
carried in their lamps. Five others were
wise and brought extra oil with them.
The groom was late and the oil lamps had begun to
run out of oil when he finally arrived.
The wise virgins quickly refilled their lamps from their extra supply. The foolish virgins asked the wise ones to
let them have some of their oil. The
wise virgins knew that if they gave away some of their oil, they would not have
enough for their lamps to continue burning throughout the whole ceremony and
they would be embarrassed when their lamps ran out of oil and darkened the
celebration. They told the foolish ones
to run and buy themselves some extra oil in the market place.
The foolish virgins, rather than being embarrassed
by having their lamps run out in the middle of the festivities, rushed to get
more oil. But, by the time they
returned, the wedding had begun and they could not enter the hall and disturb
it.
Knowledge and skills fill our lamps and allow us to
illuminate the paths of our careers. If
we allow them to stagnate and fail to replenish them in a timely manner, when
the crunch comes - such as a layoff, we will not have the skills we need to
compete in the job market. And, we will
not be able to borrow those skills from our more diligent coworkers. What skills they possess are their own and
cannot be transferred to you. Likewise, what skills and knowledge you possess
are your own and cannot be taken from you.
You will succeed or fail depending upon how well you can learn and apply
your knowledge and skills to improve your position and your company.
Knowledge is power. Empower
yourself.
For additional helpful information, see:
And
Topics Related to This Post
Success, Goals, Goal Setting, Entrepreneur, Inspiration
Books Related To This Post:
- Goal Setting: 13 Secrets of World Class Achievers by Vic Johnson
- SMART Goals: The Ultimate Goal Setting Guide by Jacob Gudger
- How To Set Goals: Your Goal Setting Bible For Maximum Personal Achievement (Goal Setting Success Series) by Darrin Wiggins
- How To Set Goals: Ultimate Goal Setting Guide to Having Your Best Year Ever by Craig Ballantyne
- Goals!: How to Get Everything You Want -- Faster Than You Ever Thought Possible by Brian Tracy
The Home Finders blog was created by ADB Properties and The Gold Seal Homes Group to provide a resource for people in the greater Charlotte, NC area to find peace of mind through quality, affordable homes. This blog features properties that are currently available to rent or buy from affiliates of The Gold Seal Homes Group (www.GoldSealHomesGroup.com). All affiliates of The Gold Seal Homes Group agree to abide by high ethical standards and certain operating procedures that make it easy for people to do business with all affiliates.
© Copyright 2014 by Thomas K Sheppard
All rights reserved. No part of this document may be copied or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the author.
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