How to Find Work in the 21st Century - Ron McGowan Reference Series

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of the twenty-first century, but unfortunately it is one of the most neglected areas when defining effective career strategies. That’s because it’s not easy and it may be uncomfortable for you, but it’s the foundation on which every other aspect of being successful in today’s workplace is built.

      Chapter 3: How to market yourself

      Today’s workplace demands that you become adept at marketing yourself. Otherwise you will miss out on work opportunities or be bypassed by less qualified people who are doing a better job of marketing themselves than you are. The myths around selling yourself will be dispelled, and you will be given strategies and tools for selling yourself that will make the experience more effective and therefore more enjoyable and gratifying.

      You know more about selling than you think you do, and most people have false notions about how to successfully sell themselves. Many people are uncomfortable with this area, and the reasons for that will be explored. You’ll be pleasantly surprised at how effective you can be at selling yourself once you understand how the process works.

      Chapter 4: The role of the Internet and social media tools

      For many employment seekers the Internet and social media are becoming indispensable tools. But there are many misconceptions about how to effectively use these tools, and the changes going on in these areas are hard to keep up with.

      This chapter will describe, in a nontechnical way, what role these tools play, the rules you must follow in using them, and some of the pitfalls associated with them.

      Chapter 5: Getting started

      This section lays out the steps you have to take to begin to earn your living outside of a traditional job, and it provides strategies for increasing your chances of finding work. These strategies will increase your effectiveness and reduce the frustration that comes from an unfocused approach.

      Chapter 6: Guidelines for post-secondary students

      College/university students who are about to enter the workplace need to prepare themselves by being very cognizant of the changes going on in it. In this section, they will be given an action plan showing them how to market themselves with an objective of finding work before they graduate. They will also be given sample marketing tools specifically designed for college/university students.

      Chapter 7: Career counseling in secondary schools

      The place to begin preparing students for success in today’s workplace is in our secondary schools. This section provides secondary school career counselors with ideas on how to raise students’ awareness of what is going on in today’s workplace and what they should expect when they enter it.

      The section includes sample marketing tools specifically designed for secondary school students. These can serve as examples for students to follow in creating their own marketing tools.

      Chapter 8: Managing your career

      Taking charge of managing your career is something that you must pay more attention to in today’s workplace. In the past, your employer may have done this for you as part of the package that came with having a traditional job. Now, whether you have a traditional job, or you are a contract worker, it is in your own interest to take responsibility for this area.

      This chapter will outline what you have to do to successfully manage your career. It will focus on changes going on in today’s workplace that affect your career and personal life.

      1

      How The Workplace Has Changed

       A ship in port is safe, but that’s not what ships are built for.

      — Ralph Waldo Emerson

      Looking For Work Instead of a Job

      We have lived with the modern concept of a job for so long that we tend to think it has been around forever. In fact, it was introduced to the world about 150 to 200 years ago as nations began to industrialize. Before that, people earned a living by performing a variety of tasks, mostly in agriculture, in areas that were affected by the seasons, the weather, and the time of day. When the concept of a job was introduced to society back then, it caused just as much angst among our ancestors as it is causing us now that it is in decline.

      We also tend to assume, because it is the way the majority of people have earned their living for generations, that a job is the only way to earn a living. In fact, a significant percentage of the workforce doesn’t earn their living from traditional jobs. Take the construction industry, for example. For people employed there, their jobs are tied directly to the project that they’re currently building, and when it is finished, so is their job and they have to look for another project. The same could be said for people employed in the arts. If, for example, you’re an actor in a movie or a stage show, once the movie or show is over, so is your job and you move on to the next project. This is also true for musicians and other people employed in the arts.

      So the idea of your job being tied to the project that you’re currently working on is far from new. What’s new is that more people who have always had a traditional job are finding that their livelihood is now going to be earned this way. What is disconcerting is that most of us come from a background where our parents and grandparents made their living from a traditional job, which, for the most part, meant that their careers were stable and they had some security. Most of us still long for that security, but it’s getting harder to come by.

      The rise of the temporary or contingent worker

      The twentieth century was the century of mass production and large corporations, and the workplace was dominated by industrial giants like General Motors. At the end of the century, the biggest employer in the United States was Manpower, a company that specializes in temporary and contingent workers.

      In the manufacturing sector, one of the improvements that companies have made to make their process more efficient and economical is to employ a just-in-time approach to the inventory of parts that they carry. Instead of having large quantities of these parts sitting in inventory for long periods before they get used up, they access those parts from their suppliers at the time that they are needed in the manufacturing process and have thus eliminated the need for costly inventories.

      The same type of thing is happening in the workplace as companies increasingly view the work to be done in terms of projects and think of their staffing needs in terms of what they need for current and upcoming projects. The idea of a temp, or temporary worker has been around for decades, but it tended to be restricted to clerical and office staff like receptionists and data entry clerks. Now companies hire temporary workers at all levels within the organization.

      This is particularly true in the Information Technology or IT sector. That industry is very project oriented, and IT companies regularly hire people for projects with no expectation that their employment will become long-term. Even in Japan, the last bastion of the idea of lifetime employment, many companies where employees have traditionally expected to spend their entire careers with that company are now moving towards hiring temporary workers.

      A January 3, 2008, article in The Economist titled “Sayonara, Salaryman” points out that almost 40 percent of the workforce in Japan are part-time, contingent, and contract workers and that this category is growing while permanent jobs are decreasing. It also points out that today’s young workers are not interested in accepting the corporate paternalism of their parents’ generation, where work was the center of their lives and even led in some cases to “karoshi” or “death by overwork.”

      Outsourcing

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