Phil-osophy | Workplace realities today
Well, here we are again, the start of another new year and the advent of everyone making their resolutions for better behavior and opportunities as the calendar flips. In part this blog entry is the manifestation of a resolution of my own – to begin my very own blog. So, it begins….
I won’t lie, part of my motivation for doing this is in order to draw attention to my professional website, but at the same time I do feel as if I have some marginal amount of original thought to impart. However, I choose not to flood Facebook or LinkedIn timelines with my ramblings, I will let folks decide if they want to come to my corner of the Internet for my pearls of wisdom. 🙂
One of the subjects that I am very passionate about is accessibility to quality career opportunities through economic growth. Recently, I read a very interesting article in which, yet another journalistic prognosticator gave his prediction for ten workplace trends to expect in 2016. In that vein I would like to comment on some of the realities I see regarding the current state of the workplace in this country and what it means for those of us that view retirement from afar:
1.) Workers are still a mere commodity – The first reality that we all must face is that workers in this country are still considered a mere means to an end for the business world. I have tasted that reality twice in my career, having been laid off by one company after 13 years of loyal employment and another after 10 years of the same. I don’t state this with bitterness, but rather as a cold, hard acknowledgement of life in the professional world today: job security, in ANY industry is, and will continue to be, a mere illusion. Gone are the days of “30 years and a gold watch”; employer loyalty no longer exists. The job you have today is not the job that you may have tomorrow, no matter how indispensable you think you may be.
2.) Marketable skills are key – So, how do you combat #1? – simple – you keep your skills perpetually marketable. Obviously, there are numerous ways to accomplish this. While increasing college tuition costs and rising student debt have called into question the value of a college degree in this day and age, one cannot dispute the long-term benefits to earning power over one’s lifetime if he/she possesses a degree, especially in a technical field. I earned my degree over 26 years ago in the field of information technology and it continues to serve me well to this day. That being said, I won’t state that that particular strategy is the silver bullet for career success, but surely developing an attitude of life-long learning and being open to educational opportunities (training, new job duties, etc.) definitely provides a means to garner a diverse skill set valued by employers. According to fairly recent statistics, workers only last at one job an average of 4.6 years, so if one does the math and assumes a (roughly) 45-year career span (22 to 67), that is a change of job roughly 9 times during the course of a career. Is your skill set diverse enough for 9 job changes during your lifetime?
3.) Online job boards – the enemy of job seekers – If you anticipate being in the market for a new job this coming year, keep this in mind: online job boards should NEVER be your preferred means for locating a new opportunity. Online systems are useless for several reasons: a.) when you apply for a position online, you are usually doing so with 250 of your closest friends (on average) b.) online systems are driven primarily by keyword searches, with roughly 75% of applications typically being filtered out before even being seen by human eyes c.) oftentimes, the screening criteria is current salary, meaning that if you currently exceed the range they are willing to pay, you won’t get a second look, even if your skill set is a perfect match. It is difficult to circumvent this issue as current compensation is usually a required input field on online applications.
Keep this in mind as well: employers that rely heavily on this method for recruitment tend to be looking for the rare “purple squirrel“- a candidate that exquisitely meets any and all requirements for a particular job, including the desired compensation range. As the name implies, this find in the labor pool is rare, but usually leads to protracted and drawn-out job search. For this reason alone, an online job search should never be your go-to job search strategy.
Fact: I have never gotten a single job offer in my career through the use of an online system. Of the last four job offers I have received, two were as a result of a professional referral from a former business colleague (each of which resulted in me getting the job offer after a 30 minute phone interview) and one was the result of a recruiter contacting me due to matching to a job requirement from my LinkedIn profile (more later on the importance of maintaining an appropriate social media presence). Your best bet: networking and plenty of it. A great majority of jobs available are never even posted. Build your network and talk often to those who work in careers and/or for companies that you would like to get into. Your best job leads will always come that way.
4.) Employers still hold the upper hand – In this day and age, companies hold unprecedented leverage in the hiring process. As this country still struggles to recover from the Great Recession of 2008 , the inescapable fact is that jobs lost (especially high-paying jobs) have been slow to come back since that dark economic era, leading to an increasing squeeze of more and more people out of a middle class lifestyle. Despite what the mainstream media and the current presidential administration will tell you, the unemployment situation in this country (currently reported at about 5%) is not nearly as rosy as the government would have you believe. Chew on this fact for a moment: “The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that a record 94,610,000 people (ages 16 and over) were not in the labor force in September. In other words they were neither employed nor had made specific efforts to find work in the prior four weeks.” With a population of approximately 320 million in this country, that is a staggering statistic. This brings two harsh realities to realization: a.) There is still a large labor pool out there from which employers can tap , which means fierce competition for each and every job opening available and b.) given the economic laws of supply and demand wage growth in this country (as it as for the 14 years) will continue to move in a negative direction. The fact is that companies have little incentive to either hire quickly or pay increasingly competitive wages. As the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics figures (2014) bear out, over half of the people in this country make less than $30K a year. It is worth mentioning here as well that those same statistics show that roughly 23% of people in this country earn below the federal poverty level ($11.7K). That’s almost 1 in 4 in this country folks. Sad indeed.
5.) Carefully manage your online presence – It goes without saying that the social media usage in this country is wildly ubiquitous, with almost everyone (especially those in the Millenial generation) getting in on the act. Whether your choice is Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn or some other form, everybody has their preferred flavor of sharing the details of their life via the World Wide Web. As with any tool, social media in of itself is amoral, neither good nor bad. However, like with so many other things, how we choose to use it can either greatly enhance our lives, or, in worst cases, send us on a path to destruction and misery. This is no less true as it pertains to our professional goals and aspirations. My belief is that it is of utmost importance, as a professional to maintain an up-to-date LinkedIn profile, as an increasing number of companies and recruiters use this as a tool for identifying potential matches for employment opportunities. Conversely, if we are not careful regarding the life details that we expose on any social media platform, it may hinder our ability to find (or,for that reason, even hold onto) a good job. Be mindful of what you share as an increasing number of companies monitor the social media activity of future (and in slot of cases, current) employees.
If your wish is for a new career in the new year, I wish you nothing but the best. Hopefully some of the thoughts I have shared with you here may be of assistance to you as you pursue new opportunities.
Best wishes for a happy and healthy 2016!