How to Find Work in the 21st Century

Preface

We’re a society that knows how to apply for a job. The challenge for employment seekers today is to become proficient at finding work. That’s a much more complicated process than applying for a job.

— Ron McGowan

The vast majority of employment seekers, be they college/university graduates or experienced people who are losing their jobs, have no idea how to find work. Like most of society, they’re stuck in the twentieth century and focus, almost exclusively, on finding a traditional job. Those jobs, which have been the mainstay of our economy for over 100 years, are in decline, yet our society, governments, and institutions are still structured as if they were the norm. In trendsetting California, according to a study by the University of San Francisco, only about 30 percent of the workforce have traditional jobs. This reality is where we’re all headed — and we’re not ready for it.

Like it or not, employment seekers need to face the reality of today’s workplace and be willing to accept temporary or contract work without reservations. They also need to accept the fact that there’s no guarantee that anyone will offer them employment. They may need to create their own employment. That doesn’t mean they have to give up looking for a job, if that’s what they want; it means recognizing how the workplace has changed and understanding that the path to a traditional job today is often via the temporary or contract work route. Today it makes more sense to look for work rather than look for a job. But that is a huge psychological shift for people to make in their approach to finding employment considering how entrenched the traditional full-time job model continues to be in our society.

Today’s employment seeker must be more entrepreneurial and enterprising in his or her search for work than previous generations, and needs to be better at selling himself or herself. Acquiring self-marketing skills is a must as is the ability to find hidden employment opportunities, since at least 80 percent of employment opportunities today are never advertised. Finally, employment seekers need to learn how to approach employers in a strategically effective way rather than the reactive, mostly passive approach used by people in the twentieth century.

Misleading Unemployment Statistics

The official unemployment statistics published by governments in western countries are a sham. They don’t come close to measuring the true state of unemployment. These official monthly jobless rates only include people without jobs who are actively looking for work. A more realistic jobless rate would include the proportion of people without jobs with the qualifier that some of these do not want to work. At the beginning of 2011, the official jobless rate in the US was around 10 percent and the unofficial rate, increasingly being referred to in the media, was between 17 and 19 percent. In Canada the official jobless rate was around 8 percent and the unofficial rate between 12 and 14 percent. The mainstream media are doing a better job of reporting on these rates than they have done in the past. For too long they simply parroted the official jobless rates published by governments. Now they often include the unofficial rate as well, which gives the public a more accurate reading on what is going on in the workplace. They should take this one step further and lead each month with what the unofficial unemployment rate is followed by the official rate being published by the governments. Over time, this would diminish the significance of the official government jobless rates, which is long overdue.

The publication of monthly, sometimes conflicting surveys on employment, further cloud the issue of what is really going on in the workplace. An example of this was given in a November 5, 2009 report in The Canadian Press. It pointed out that the official report from Statistics Canada said that 27,000 jobs were created in the workplace in August 2009 while a lesser-known industry survey that is closely monitored by economists said that the workplace shed 110,000 jobs in the same month. This led to economists cautioning Canadians to take the official monthly data with a large grain of salt.

Part-time work and full-time work are often combined in reporting the number of jobs being created, which can give a misleading reading on the health of the economy. An example of this was given in a June 7, 2008 Canwest News Service article on Canada’s job growth, considered to be pretty robust at that time. It pointed out that in the year prior to the article, part-time employment had risen at nearly twice the gains had by full-time jobs. The headline statistic for the previous month had shown that there was job growth in Canada, which on the surface was true. But that growth was derived from a gain of forty thousand part-time jobs and a loss of thirty-two thousand full-time jobs.

In a series of articles in February 2005 in Scotland’s Sunday Herald newspaper that looked at how unemployment statistics are produced there, a Glasgow University lecturer who studies this area commented that This country is very good at hiding large chunks of the unemployed through statistics.

The Economist magazine ran a feature in September 2006 on Sweden. As part of the coverage on what was going on there it stated that Sweden is a world champion at massaging its jobless figures. From July 2008 to July 2010, Irish unemployment rose from under 6 percent to over 14 percent. This number would be much higher were it not for the large number of Eastern Europeans who have headed home because of the weak job market in Ireland and the thousands of Irish who are leaving the country, reminiscent of what happened for much of the twentieth century.

Kidding ourselves that the employment situation is better than it is in reality is the worst position we could take in dealing effectively with the challenges in today’s workplace. Unfortunately, this is exactly what we are doing. We need to overhaul the methodologies we use to produce our monthly unemployment statistics, because they are giving us a false reading. We must expand our approach to this area. We need to know how many people are underemployed, including all the college/university grads and qualified, downsized workers who can’t find decent jobs and who are working in service jobs to make ends meet. We need to know how many people have given up looking for work because they can’t find a decent job, estimated to be over 3 million in the United States alone. And we need to focus more on the quality of work that people are engaged in and less on the simplistic approach that tells us that x percentage of the workforce is employed. How many are working for minimum wage? How many are working part-time? How many have temporary work? How many are contract workers? How many are self-employed? If you dig hard enough you can find occasional reports that give a better reading of what is going on behind the headline statistics. An August 31, 2010 report in The New York Times under the heading New Job Means Lower Wages for Many showed that the job expansion which has taken place in recent years was skewed towards industries with wages that are low to middling. This is adding to the ranks of the working poor who are increasingly showing up at food banks and contributing to overall weakness in consumer confidence in the United States.

Unemployment Benefits

The unemployment benefits systems in western countries were designed for a time when even moderately skilled people who lost their jobs would find another job fairly quickly; college/university students literally fell into decent paying jobs when they graduated; and professional, well-educated people were rarely unemployed. While all of those conditions have changed, the unemployment benefits systems have not. And in some countries it’s getting harder to qualify for these benefits. According to a report in the March 13, 2009 issue of The Globe and Mail, only 44 percent of the Canadians who were unemployed were drawing unemployment benefits. That figure in 1989 was 83 percent.

The number of weeks that people can collect benefits has become a political issue in several countries with European countries offering longer periods of eligibility than in the United States and Canada. US President Obama has faced major opposition in Congress getting approval to extend the number of weeks that the unemployed can collect unemployment benefits and that opposition continues into 2011.

Traditionally, unemployed people could expect their government to provide some training to upgrade their skills and get them back to work, but this area needs an overhaul too. If you look at the training courses offered by western countries, you’ll find lots of these for unskilled and low-skilled people but few, if any, for people at the other end of the spectrum. Well-educated and unemployed professional people and unemployed college/university graduates are not being well served by the current system, which isn’t designed to accommodate them. And the government workers who deal with unemployed people are ill suited to deal with workers of this caliber.

Challenges For Educators

The fundamental challenge for colleges and universities is that for generations they’ve been turning out employees. Now, increasingly, they will need to turn out entrepreneurs, or students who have an enterprising approach to finding work. This doesn’t mean students have to start a business when they graduate, though those who want to do this should be encouraged and given as much help as possible to succeed. It does mean that graduates must have an entrepreneurial mentality in terms of marketing themselves and meeting the needs of employers. We tend to equate anything related to entrepreneurship to be the domain of business/commerce and MBA students. We need to change that thinking and recognize that this also applies to graduates in the liberal arts, social sciences, and every other sector in post-secondary education. Like all other employment seekers, today’s graduates must acquire self-marketing skills and be right on top of what is happening in the sectors they want to work in. The key question is, who is going to teach them these skills?

The biggest weakness in the post-secondary education sector in all countries is the lack of experience in today’s workplace by those who are responsible for education policy, funding, administration, and delivery. How do these people who live in the land of the steady paycheck and traditional benefits relate to the challenges facing graduates who will make their living from contract, temporary, and part-time employment with few if any benefits, including a pension?

There’s a huge disconnect between these bureaucrats, administrators, and educators and their students in terms of their own work environment and the workplace their students are entering. That disconnect will exist into the foreseeable future.

Going forward, we must find ways to educate those already in the education system about the challenges of earning a living in today’s workplace and hire people at all levels who have this type of experience. Only then can we realistically align the educational system with the needs of today’s graduates.

The area of career counseling needs a major overhaul and more resources need to be allocated to it. This area has never been a high priority within the education system, and that has to change. While there are a few examples of innovative thinking in this area, in the main, most colleges and universities are doing a poor job of preparing their students for today’s workplace. And some of the career counselors who do recognize the need to update and improve the services they offer to their students are not getting the resources they need or the support of senior administrators.

Effective career counseling must be a part of the curriculum, not an option, as it currently is. Before they can graduate, all students must be required to take workshops and courses provided by the career counseling department that educate them about today’s workplace and show them how to succeed in it. However, this is based on the assumption that the people who are teaching these workshops and courses are themselves experienced in today’s workplace and have earned a living outside of the twentieth century, traditional, full-time-job model. We also need people in these departments who are entrepreneurial, have operated their own businesses, and can adequately prepare students who want to pursue that option. According to a January 29, 2010, report from the UK Institute of Career Guidance, the UK Government announced the creation of The Careers Profession Taskforce to modernize and improve our careers profession and the service it offers, and to ensure that the next generation of careers professionals can deliver our ambition that all young people get the best advice so that they unlock their potential.

The Taskforce will focus on the secondary school system and look at:

• The recruitment and retention of well-qualified careers professionals.

• Ensuring that the profession is diverse and reflects the make-up of the working population.

• Whether all career specialists should hold a specialist qualification.

This is the kind of bold, forward-looking initiative that all western countries’ governments should undertake, not only in the secondary school system, but in the post-secondary education system as well.

A New Era

Our ancestors must be having a good laugh as they watch us struggle to wean ourselves off the traditional, twentieth-century job. If you look at your family tree, you’re likely to see that you’re descended from self-employed people who earned their living as contractors, tradespeople, craftspeople, and small-business owners.

When the concept of full-time employment working for someone else became widespread with industrialization, many of our forefathers thought it was a crazy idea. It was seen as unpleasant, unnatural, and an inhuman way to work. It’s the ultimate irony. The job, that thing that our ancestors saw as abhorrent, is the thing to which we’ve become addicted.

The workplace is currently going through one of the most significant changes to occur in the past hundred years. But it’s a mixed bag. While many workers are facing real hardships in trying to cope with these changes, others are sailing along virtually untouched by them.

There is work available, but a lot of it is not packaged in the form of a job, as we traditionally understand that term. The onus is on those looking for work to find the employment opportunities that are out there, or in some cases, to create their own. This is a new role for most people, and our education, training, and in some cases our upbringing does not prepare us for it.

Those who are unable or unwilling to adapt to this reality will find themselves competing for a dwindling number of conventional, full-time jobs. Those who aren’t afraid of a freelance career, who can adapt their job-search strategies and market themselves effectively, will have more options, offer more value to employers, and best position themselves for twenty-first century success.

Here is a fundamental fact that our society, politicians, senior bureaucrats and senior college/university administrators need to accept: For an increasing number of workers, the era of the traditional job that has served us well for over 100 years is over — and it’s not coming back.

Acceptance of this fact will be a positive first step in recognizing that we are in a new era and that we have to stop trying to solve today’s problems with yesterday’s solutions.

In This Edition

Throughout this edition you will find updated commentary and insights on key happenings in today’s workplace and where informed professionals are suggesting it is headed. A new chapter, The Role of the Internet and Social Media Tools, has been added. College/university students, graduates, and experienced people who have lost their jobs don’t have the luxury of waiting for governments or the education systems to catch up with the needs of employment seekers in the twenty-first century. They need to take ownership of this issue themselves, as do people who are underemployed or who want to prepare themselves for the possibility of losing their jobs.

Thousands of graduates and experienced people in the US, Canada, the UK, and Ireland have already benefited from the earlier editions of this book. It provides a blueprint for finding employment opportunities in a strategically effective way. This book doesn’t provide any easy answers. There are none. But for those who are prepared to do all the work required and who are prepared to move out of their comfort zone and take some chances, the payoff will be that they will be miles ahead of the average employment seeker. They will be on a solid foundation to succeed regardless of the upcoming challenges in the workplace.

Introduction

There’s a lot of confusion, ignorance, and denial going on with society’s attitude toward today’s workplace. For people who are losing their jobs, or college/university students about to enter the workplace, accepting the reality of what is going on is difficult. For several generations the foundation of most people’s economic stability has been a steady job. Notwithstanding the fact that millions of people have been losing those jobs for several decades, the idea of having to earn a living in other, far less predictable ways is disconcerting to many people. The transitions occurring in the workplace today are among the most significant since the high unemployment during the Great Depression.

Disappearing Benefits

When you come from several generations who took for granted that their job automatically included things like a health benefit package and a pension on retirement, accepting the fact that these will no longer be included with your job is scary stuff. The cost of having to provide these things yourself has a major impact on your standard of living and how you will survive when your working days are over.

Some companies are eliminating benefits entirely. Some are offering health benefits but no pension. In the United Kingdom, 80 percent of the companies with pension plans have closed that option to new employees. Even in large successful companies like IBM, Motorola, and Lockheed Martin, a traditional company pension plan is no longer part of the compensation for new employees. In Canada in 2006, 38 percent of employees had a registered employer pension plan according to a Canwest News Service report on July 4, 2008. In Ireland, 54 percent of workers have pensions, according to a report in Business Plus Magazine, September 3, 2008.

You can see how much the workplace has changed in some of the agreements that unions and employers are signing today. Unions now commonly agree to cutbacks in benefits and even wages in return for some job security for their members. This would never have been acceptable as recently as ten years ago.

It’s not that the union representatives are any less concerned about the welfare of their members than they have been historically; it’s more a question of them facing up to the reality of what is going on in the workplace today.

Facing the truth

Adding to the anxiety and confusion about the workplace are the empty promises being made by some politicians that, in their eagerness to get elected, are playing on people’s fears. Some suggest they will reverse the outflow of good paying, steady jobs to countries like India