It has been interesting to notice that one of the consequences of the Recession is the growing discrepancy between traditional management practices during belt-tightening times and the changing nature of talent acquisition. Recessions naturally cause a thinning out of businesses. Typically, we think of it as a Darwinian consequence of the weak giving way to the strong. However, it is worth noting that some of the survivors may have made it through this round of business closures but could be setting themselves for a loss of competitiveness in the longer term. 

Businesses throughout all sectors are looking for ways to do more with less. Layoffs, furloughs, and redundancies are resulting in a leaner workforce. Added responsibilities being given to the employees who remain, coupled with their fear and uncertainty about job security are beginning to compromise employee performance. 

Of course, there are ways to streamline processes, but in general reducing staff usually means diminishing productivity. How can management cope? One tactic being used is to double up positions. That is, taking two job positions, laying off one of the employees and giving the remaining employee much of the workload of the laid off employee. 

Money may be saved, but from a performance improvement perspective it is a disaster. At best, it is a short-term fix, but not a long-term productivity solution. And since there do not appear to be plans for mass hiring anytime soon, even with an improving economy, employers will be trying to do more with less for some time to come. 

Meanwhile, workers are receiving a harsh lesson in employment economics simultaneous with the ongoing information revolution. The Recession is accelerating the career development phenomena of workers relying less on organizations for full time employment and security. The Internet is providing increased opportunities for online training, research, and the means to enhance exposure and networking. 

Technology is making it easier for the ambitious to become entrepreneurial. This combination of a sour economy with a growing robust web is pushing the American workforce closer toward becoming a free-lance nation. 

Is management prepared to take advantage of this shift in workforce dynamics? This is what may separate the best performing companies of the future from the too-slow-to-change failures. 

I think it could very well be likely that the following scenario becomes commonplace: Optimizing employee performance and productivity will increasingly be focused on outsourcing by businesses to match the highest quality talent for the right job. Full time employees, who have been squeezed in with too many on-the-job responsibilities, will be replaced by targeted, on-demand, just-in-time contracted resources who will provide better performance in accomplishing specific tasks. 

As needs change, so does the specialized talent. Entrepreneurism grows and becomes increasingly focused in niche areas. Together, businesses and the new entrepreneurial class find each other through ever more sophisticated job boards and social network media tools. Innovative management and concentrated expertise forge a workplace that becomes more nimble, adaptable, and clever. 

Change is occurring. Which companies will be leveraging it for success, and which will not start becoming clear soon. 

Among the interesting disciplines to track, which can have some bearing on the field of career development, is urban studies and its cousin, demographics. Just as a demographic change in basic assumptions occurred fifty or so years ago, resulting in greater population mobility driven by employment opportunities, we are now possibly on the cusp of another such megatrend. 

This time, population mobility may be slowing down. Is this a back-to-the-future swing? Perhaps a bit so, but it is not entirely being driven by a regressive return to the good old days. Two significant factors may be at play according to Joel Kotkin of Chapman University, http://www.joelkotkin.com/ among others. 

One is that Generation X, the workforce cohort roughly between the ages of 30 and 45, appears to be placing traditional family values at high priority in that they elevate the importance of family to that of career. This is expressed to a degree very differently from the Greatest Generation and the Boomers who felt that work came first. 

If a better job offer came from Bakersfield, then kids help pack up the station wagon, because we are leaving Binghamton. Apparently, these Xers are finding that establishing community roots and multi-generational family ties has tangible benefits like reduced stress, anxiety, and social/familial isolation. 

The up-rootedness, high divorce rates, and latch-key acceptance of their parents have helped to push Xers toward stability, pragmatism, and the concept that makes Boomer managers everywhere cringe, work-life balance. 

And can you blame the Xers? An unintended consequence of trashing the traditional values of the Greatest Generation (and don’t get me wrong, many of them needed challenging) was that we pushed our kids to become socially more conservative in some deep ways. Some serious good has come out of the way Xers were raised. They were instilled with the desire to be good parents and it is not a big leap from that value to the one of wanting to be a solid member of a local community. 

I remember as young Boomer, we thought we were so gloriously liberated. We were the generation of change, quick to challenge old assumptions and antiquated behaviors. Well, as it turns out, living life free of the shackles of anyone over thirty inspired us counterintuitively to become workaholics. We worked more hours per day and more days per year than most industrialized societies. 

We have gained much wealth and ego fulfillment, but we do not seem to have induced our children to emulate us. Now, as we near retirement, the truth that we have not been as liberated as we thought we were has become evident. Yes, Boomers have redefined the workplace, but not as we envisioned thirty to forty years ago. 

Secondly, technology is allowing for reverse mobility. With advances in cloud computing, telecommuting, social media, and teleconferencing there is less need to physically travel when the contacts needed for work can increasingly be had at home or the local office. This in combination with the corporate trend toward decentralized workplaces allows productive, high-quality work to be done locally, if not at home. 

At some point soon, home-based employees or subcontractors will surpass the number of those taking mass transit to work, resulting in more availability to family, friends, and local businesses. Ubiquitous computing means that contacts can be ever-present. Face to face can still happen. It will just be remote. 

As Xers make their mark on the world it will continue to be interesting, if not entertaining, to see what kind of hybrid lifestyles they will make out of traditional and novel values. Perhaps, the result of their efforts to achieve individual work-life balance will be a more widespread and beneficial social balance between individualism and strong communities. Now, that would be an accomplishment. 

Your resume is a relatively short, but powerful document. I know that not all of you believe that, but really, it is. Face it, the number of ways to get a hiring manager to consider you for an interview is limited. So, you want a strong, captivating, informative, and achievement-oriented page or two that will open doors and give you a chance to present your case.

It is your concise and economic autobiography of your work history, accomplishments, brand, and most of all your potential and value. Taking significant time and effort to craft this all-important testimony cannot be over-emphasized. You may spend your entire career never marketing anything, but when it comes to resume writing, everyone is marketing themselves.

Now for those of you who believe me (and a million other career consultants) that the resume should be as I just described it, be aware of just how much enthusiasm you apply to the effort. Here is what I mean.

A key and consistent tactic encouraged by resume writers everywhere is to quantify your achievements. Data can help a benign description of a task carry more impact and make more of an impression. Take, for example, the following work history task:

“Managed a call center.”

OK. Now compare this terse sentence to:

“Efficiently managed a 24/7 call center employing twenty-five, having expertly handled a 31% increase in volume over a twelve month period.” Big difference, right?

Therefore, it is important to try turning the tasks that everyone writes on their resume into quantifiable accomplishments. It improves the impression you present of your work history immensely and may just show more clearly the value you can add to a potential employer.

But be careful. It is not that easy to do if you are trying this for the first time. If you have not been keeping track of your accomplishments in a quantifiable way, then it will be difficult to look back at your past and start revising your history so that it reflects how much good stuff you increased and/or how much bad stuff you decreased.

In fact, you may find it so hard to do this task you may be tempted to embellish just a little bit. Avoid that. It can lead to you becoming disingenuous or worse. It is like the PTO treasurer at your kid’s school who takes a $20 bill out of the till they are managing, because they are a little tight that week and after all, who will know? Before long, they may become a part-time and long-term thief.

It could work like this with the resume, too. You might start with a little white-lie about the amount of profits you helped a former company make and before you know it you’ve got an engineering degree from Dartmouth.

Assume that a background check will be conducted on your resume. The more responsible the position is that you are applying for, the greater the chance that a background check will be conducted on your resume, if the firm is serious about considering you. They may initiate a check using their own in-house resources or they will contract the investigation out to an employee screening firm. Does it mean they catch everything? Perhaps not. But why take the chance?

Most importantly, don’t fabricate who you are. Take pride in your achievements. Sure, there will be resumes that will sound more power-packed than yours, but you are who you are. Highlight what you have attained in a clear, dynamic, and honest manner. If it sounds sparse, then you may have just set some goals for the future of your career.

Juice your resume, don’t fluff it. You’ll sleep better knowing you have a compelling and forthright chronicle that puts you in the best light.

I recently read about some interesting career related results from a survey done in September to 1000 small business Intuit Payroll customers. Among them:

*44% reported planning to hire in the next 12 months.
*60% expect business to grow over the next year.
*Affording benefits to attract new talent will be daunting.
*90% believe offering a health insurance benefit will retain quality employees.
*New businesses are more bullish than old businesses.
*50% expect to be looking for multi-talent with soft skills, i.e., “people person” who is “Jack-of-All-Trades”.
*79% have hired a friend or family member.
*22% of them said it was a mistake.

I attended a “Speed Networking” event in Concord recently and I heard it again, “You’re a career coach and resume writer? You must be really busy during these times!”

How I wish. I hear this line, or some variation of it, frequently as I try to promote myself and my business Ryan Career Services LLC. After all, it makes sense to most people. There is a severe Recession going on with a lot of people either unemployed or underemployed. There must be a lot of folks looking to get assistance in such a constricted and competitive job market. But it is not the case.

My stock line in response to the “You must be really busy” exclamation is to say, “No, I wish I were busier. I am finding that it is really hard competing with people’s need for food and shelter.”

I guess that is what is going on. I can only fantasize about how many potential clients have my services on the back burner, just waiting for more secure times, so that they can make an employment move. I have seen several surveys recently indicating that large numbers of the currently employed are waiting for better economic times before venturing into the job search market again. And as for the unemployed… for them it is easier to understand. Their funds are very limited and it is hard for them to decide to allocate money to career development.

However, I would argue that for both groups, the unemployed and the underemployed, dedicating time and yes, some money, to reviewing their career status, and strategizing and preparing for the future are resources well spent. I am amazed that there are smart people out there who still think in this day and age that looking in the newspaper classifieds is a job search and that networking simply involves taking one or two former colleagues out for lunch.

The good news is that formulating a career enhancement strategy is not full time work for a client and it is not particle physics. It simply takes some focus with someone who is aware of the best practices in career development and who can tailor these conventions to the individual client. I love this work and cannot wait to help more of you!

So, here is my unabashed pitch. If you think you know of anyone (…and come on! You do!) who could use help figuring out how to navigate the rough seas of establishing their career or simply even rewriting their resume or a cover letter during these stormy times, then please pass on my name. I really should be busy and I really, really want to be!

When thinking about the future of America’s workforce I can’t help but think of any changes that may or may not be happening in the way this workforce is now being educated.

I have implied in past blogs, perhaps actually I have been more direct, of my angst regarding the nation’s public school systems and their general lack of progressivism. School systems, along with their government partners, seem to be more concerned with transforming themselves into test-prep academies rather than institutions committed to fostering the kind of wide-ranging, boundary free pioneers needed for this century’s workers. Having worked for two public school districts over a thirty-one year period I feel I’ve earned the right to talk.

America’s greatest strength moving forward in the world marketplace is our capacity for innovation, creativity, and willingness to work hard to pursue new and better ways to solve problems and to achieve a better world. Our public school systems are not set up to prepare today’s students for this kind of mission. Anchored in traditional practices that were more suited for preparing a hierarchical management-rank and file workforce arrangement means that we as a nation are missing a really big opportunity.

To be fair, many public school teachers are saints. They put up with a stressful job to perform a valuable public service when, let’s face it, many of you would not dare touch it with a ten-foot pole. Also, even though no one mentions it, because of the inadequate teacher student ratio the main task of the public school teacher is to manage large numbers of kids first, educate them second. A school administrator cannot keep the most astute pedagogical expert hired if they cannot keep a lid on a class of twenty-eight seventh graders.

So what’s the alternative? Believe me, I am not even close to having all of the answers, but every now and again I run into someone who is much further down the trail of progressive thinking on preparing the future workforce. James Paul Gee is just such a person. He teaches education at Arizona State and he gets it. Below is a link to an eleven minute interview with him that is fantastic if you care at all about the future of education, which is the same thing as caring about the future of the American worker and our place in the world.

He uses the context of video games to make some very interesting points. I don’t play video games (unless you count a few months of Space Invaders in the mid-eighties as being a player) and I am enthralled with the point he makes.

Check it out. I’d love comments on this one!

http://www.edutopia.org/digital-generation-james-gee-video

I have been sharing with you a series of pieces designed to get you to critically examine your current place of employment to see if it is meeting your individual career development needs. When you think about your job, is it consistent with the life role you want to be playing? Are you deriving professional satisfaction from your work?

I have seen more than one survey lately that indicates that as soon as the economy improves and there are more job opportunities again many workers are going to bolt from their current job for greener pastures. It is yet another indicator that too many of you are misplaced in the job you have now.

As a result, I have been suggesting specific organizational characteristics that you should be looking for to see if you can pinpoint the source of angst or conversely what makes your job a keeper because it provides you with a means for developing your career.

Two practices that I have written about recently are onboarding and performance reviews. For this piece let us look at the commitment your employer makes to have the workplace be a learning organization.

As an employee, you should have a clear sense of how important it is for leadership to attract and retain knowledge capital, i.e., smart and talented people. It should come as no surprise that a great number of talented employees often leads to a greater chance of organizational success.

Management that sets the acquisition and retention of knowledge workers as a priority is something to look for and to value. They understand the concept that smart people always want to keep on learning. Therefore, having embedded learning initiatives at work that advance both the company’s and your professional interests indicates a positive climate for career development.

Of course, learning initiatives at work should be an expression of organizational strategy, but ask yourself if they also contribute to your career improvement strategy.  A fit in this area is desired.

So, what do I mean by learning initiatives? To start with, they form the framework of making your workplace a learning organization. These initiatives can be typically judged by determining the quality of the training and development programs and the organization’s way of implementing knowledge management.

To be successful, there should be a high transfer of knowledge and competencies from those who know to those who do not. This can be accomplished explicitly through well designed manuals and structured practices or tacitly through the caliber of individual employees sharing and support. Superior training and development and knowledge management occurs when talented people are encouraged and rewarded for not only being the best, but by spreading their intelligence around. This must be evident at a cultural level. Organizations that encourage isolation and keeping effectiveness under lock and key, accessible only to a privileged few, will not do.

It is good if you are learning on the job while helping to address organizational strategy. For a true knowledge worker, gaining talent and competency while at work is an incentive to stay and grow. You feel more accomplished and experience greater satisfaction in your career.

However, none of this can be realized if you as an employee are not in sync with your employer’s business strategy. There should not be a big gap between this strategy and your career development. It is possible for the two to grow together.

Also, by having the attitude that capturing and sharing expertise is good for all involved, you contribute to making not just a learning organization, but a nice place to work.

What about your workplace? Are its learning and knowledge features enhancing your professional growth or not? If thinking becomes rigid and innovation discouraged career development will not occur. Know how your employer approaches this important topic.

In my last blog I began to examine methods that employees can use to determine if their current place of employment was meeting their own career development needs. To review, career development can be defined in two ways depending on one’s point of view. From an organizational viewpoint, career development is seen as the procedures necessary to advance employee value to meet organizational strategic demands. From the view of a worker, career development involves the integration of cognitive, behavioral, emotional, and contextual factors that determine employment decisions, work values, and life role, such that a profound satisfaction with what one does is achieved.

Of course, the employer knows that you work for them, but how well is the employer working for you? Last time, I wrote about whether a fit existed between the organization’s goals and yours, and whether individual advancement within the organization was based on true merit. 

This time, let us look at another evaluation point an employee can make about their employer. This involves evaluating their onboarding process. Onboarding refers to the way the organization brings new employees on board, i.e., assimilation or orientation. How this is done reveals some interesting information about a company’s treatment of employees. Think about it, at your work were you thrown into the fray or eased in gently with a measured flow of training and information? 

If done well, an organization’s onboarding process should encourage employee productivity and loyalty. It would inform the new hire about work processes and standards, benefits and other legal necessities, culture, logistics, performance expectations, mission, vision, and values. If this is crammed into one day and then you are on your own, the message to you becomes individual survival is valued more than group acculturation.

However, if onboarding is dispersed over time and in reasonable increments, hopefully including a one-on-one mentor, then you are left feeling that your long-term engagement and commitment to the organization is important to your new employer. It is simple really. If they care about you, then you are more inclined to care about them.

I like to see an onboarding process take up to a year or more. Naturally, the data dump would be more front-loaded, but over time there should be targeted check-ins with newbies to see that questions and other issues have been adequately addressed. Over this time, I would like to see that a trusted mentor has been assigned to shepherd you through the induction phase of your employment. This increases efficiency, while providing an emotional bond to the organization.

But this process also gives you a chance to see how other departments within the organization handle the treatment of new employees. Human Resources, Training and Development, and Management should all have a role to play in onboarding. Also, besides a mentor I would want to know what co-workers and immediate supervisors are like in their introduction to new hires.

Onboarding is just one of several areas that I will be highlighting in the coming weeks as I suggest ways for you to examine employers to see if they are providing you with career development opportunities. In most cases, there are not bad employers and there are not bad employees, but there can be bad fits. Avoiding a mismatch is one of the first steps to advancing your own career development while working for someone else.