I’m about to offer probably the most abstract advice I’ve ever given, so if you’re reading this hoping to find something practical and mundane, like how many pages your resume should be, please go get another cup of coffee, get caffeinated up, and come on back.
Last week, in discussing things to think about over the next decade, one of the key points was about ideas dictating value. In fact, I used more space on that one thing than on any other of a dozen and a half points I thought were important enough to occupy your time. It’s not that I planned it being the most prominent; it’s just that, as it turned out, it was. And, in retrospect, it should have been.
When I went into this independent career coaching business a little more than 20 years ago, I benignly thought the extent of what I’d be doing would be writing resumes, prepping clients for interviews, structuring job search plans and other predictable things like that.
Here’s a typical scenario. A client comes into my office for an initial coaching session, more often than not because she or he is unemployed — sometimes not, but about to be — but one way or another, that’s about two-thirds of the initial meetings I have.
Within 15 minutes the other day, I received two identical phone calls, each of them from a 60+-year-old who had been laid off, was unemployed for a while and had just gotten the same turndown from two different companies into which they had been referred. They should have been slam dunks to be hired.
“The things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.”
No sooner did the Bureau of Labor Statistics release the September jobs report at 8:30 a.m. on Friday, Oct. 6, than my voicemail and email began getting flooded, mostly with expressions of concern, worry and even shock.
I’ll bet you saw today’s headline and figured you’d be getting one of those lists about which majors to choose in college — based on earnings potential — or which fields to transition into for the same reason. You know: “Ten Highest Paying Occupations” or “Where the Wages Are” (I actually saw that cheesy one recently).
If you’re getting all tied up in a knot because you think robots are going to take your job, calm down, take a deep breath, have a drink or do whatever you need to do to regain control. Now read on.
Let’s try an experiment. For a moment, let’s remove the following sections from your resume: summary, skills/expertise, selected accomplishments, work history, education (degrees) and community involvement. Now, how strong is your resume?
As true as the next statement always has been, it has never been more pressing.
When I submitted my recent column “Why is everything either amazing or awesome?” in which I ranted that two adjectives, amazing and awesome, now represent the extent of many people’s ability or effort to communicate and that there are career consequences attached to poor communication skills and practices, I was pretty sure I’d made a strong point.
An open letter to college juniors and seniors (and the parents of):
Saturday marked the 146th anniversary of the birth of Orville Wright. Yes, that Orville Wright, the younger brother of Wilbur. Yes, those Wright brothers, two men who changed the world and the history of it — no wait, the future of it — as dramatically, if not more, as anyone ever did.
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