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When you're looking for either a new job or entirely new career, your focus is on yourself. You aren't worried about me and my happiness right now.
This falls under my Minor/Major Surgery Rule: If you have surgery, it's minor. If I have surgery, it's major. Right now, you're having major career
surgery.
So, on one level, your situation is a Turning Point Of Your Life, while my problems are whining annoyances. I have no quarrel with your
categorization, and I understand completely. But I just hope you're not so self-absorbed you follow the lemming in front of you off the cliff.
The plan here is to help you deal with this Turning Point Of Your Life with humor, unconventional thought, good and bad examples, and occasional facts.
I am not an expert in job placement, career choices, or recruiting. I am, however, happy in my career, reasonably successful, and an expert on
getting fired.
Life Lesson: When you call the manager an idiot, make sure he's not behind you.
You might think getting fired from my job
as a dishwasher in a Holiday Inn restaurant was a blessing, but it bothered for some time. My friend's mother had helped me get that job, and I let her
down. Since I was only 15, the experience was new and frightening. Then I got a better-paying job selling clothes in a department store. The new job
did not involve scraping dried food from plates while being sprayed with hot water.
Life Lesson: Learn to fail upward.
Is "learn to
fail upward" a cliche yet? I'm not sure. I do know that upward is generally better than downward, especially when talking about careers, and that
failure is an ingredient in modern life. Not the defining ingredient, but a part of life nonetheless.
Why should you care about how I got here?
Because smart people learn from their own mistakes. Wise people learn from the mistakes of others. Let me offer you some wisdom.
Going the
independent consultant route requires careful planning, a network of potential clients, and six months salary in the bank to live on while you get
started.
Independence Day for me was in October, 1985. I was selling high-end network equipment for a small company in Dallas. The two
owner/managers kept saying they wanted to start a consulting service. I found a bank looking for help. They turned them down. I found a government
agency looking for help. They turned them down. No longer content to be just owner/managers, they had become owner/manager/idiots.
The single
largest push into self-employment: "No boss could be as stupid as my boss." Jump into self-employment the wrong way and you'll find your new
boss is far stupider than your current boss. But that's a story for another time.
So I set out on my own. I had no plan, no money, one customer,
and a wife in and out of the hospital six times with a rough pregnancy. Sweat dripped constantly from my furrowed brow as desperation choked my days
and nights.
Everything I could do wrong, I did wrong. Everything I could do right, I ignored. Not only did I lack wisdom, I wouldn't even
classify myself as smart.
But we lived through it. Time went on, things got better, and fourteen years later, I'm still self-employed. I'm in a
completely different field than I started in fourteen years ago, but that is also another story for another time.
Life Lesson: Things change. Always.
Now for the important point: your situation. Things are changing. Whether you sought change, or change
sought you, change is now your companion. What was can no longer be.
Thousands of links from this Web site will help you manage the upcoming
change. If you accidentally found this site, and you weren't actually looking for a new job, you are now. The subconscious act of looking made your
life change while you were clicking aimlessly and found this column.
Now for one of those occasional facts: the Manpower Inc., Employment
Outlook Survey says "firms planning active hiring through year-end." The trend line is up, as it has been since it scraped the bottom in
early 1991. Mining is the only industry category projected to do less hiring, and expectations are for a loss of two percent after being seasonally
adjusted (although I don't think mining is a big Christmas activity).
Nationally, 25 percent of construction firms are expected to be hiring.
Logically, manufacturing of goods, durable and non-durable, should follow, and both do. 23 percent of durable good manufacturers expect to be hiring,
while non-durable goods firms hiring should be up 22 percent. Overall, 22 percent of companies across all industries will be hiring.
Technical
jobs are abundant, depending on qualifications. For this we should be thankful: If computing wasn't so wretchedly difficult, we'd all have to get real
jobs.
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