We've heard about networking, information interviewing, tapping into the hidden job market. Chances are you have used all these strategies, or at least heard of them.
Last week I talked about the trend towards insecurity in employment, so this week I want to tell you about a less well-known, but important career development technique called environment scanning, which can assist with the career decision making and subsequent planning processes. This actually started as an organisational development tool, offering businesses and other employing entities new ways to look forward and plan for a future that is characterised by many unknowns. In career development today, this term makes sense, as these days we are all trying to 'best fit' ourselves for futures that cannot be guaranteed. We have all heard the news that most of the jobs we will be doing ten years from now have not been invented yet, and those that will continue to exist will be carried out quite differently, thanks largely to technology and the increasingly global nature of work.
The kind of environment scanning I want to talk about bears some similarities to what career practitioners have traditionally called 'opportunity awareness', 'understanding the world of work', or just 'labour market awareness', but these are not quite the same. Let me explain.
'Opportunity awareness' is part of Career Development 101, it is the other side of the coin to 'self-awareness'. Broken down, this means that in order to have a meaningful, self-directed career, you need to understand yourself in a work-sense (your skills, talents, interests, motivations, core values and drivers, your social context, also your perceived and real limitations), as well as what opportunities exist for you. Sounds fair enough, doesn't it? Unfortunately, though, what this implies is that there is a job out there with your name on it; that there will be something just right for you and all you have to do is prepare yourself and it will come.
The thousands of law, medicine, education, engineering and accounting graduates working in non-related and often low-skilled jobs should be evidence enough that simply doing a course and graduating does not guarantee a job in that field. More than ever before, the labour market is far from being an =SUM equation.
The fact is, there may be a large number of jobs you can apply for, or, there may be just a few, or in fact zero opportunities. There may be a hundred jobs you would be more than happy to undertake, and which you feel at least somewhat qualified for, but for one reason or another, you are never going to get thanks to the increasing knowledge of creeping credentialism and the multiskilling hangover (to be the subject of another blog post). Understanding the world of work generally may be useful in developing your theoretical knowledge, but it is not going to get you a job and could, quite possibly, be a source of disillusionment. In any case, even if you find the contemporary labour market a fascinating field of inquiry (as I do), this is a field of constant change, and I doubt that many people, even career practitioners, have the time or energy to keep up to date.
This is the basis for the mistakes parents and other adults with good intentions make when they advise young people to become a this or a that. Their knowledge is, quite simply, limited and flawed. This is why people believe, truly, that because there are well-paid jobs as a doctor, accountant, lawyer, therefore studying to become one of these will mean you will in fact become a well-paid doctor, accountant or lawyer. In most cases, this is really bad advice, on a number of levels, but most of all, because unless you are truly gifted and passionate, you will only ever be an average doctor, accountant or lawyer and the really good jobs will always elude you.
So, what is environment scanning and where does it fit in? It is a number of things.
1. Firstly, it is an active process, or should I say a pro-active process. You are not passively reading the Job Guide or listening to an industry group paint their field with a coat of gloss. You are actively engaged in finding out the information you need to make the right decision for you.
2. Secondly, environment scanning is unique, because you are unique and your career needs and goals are unique. So, every single person will develop a unique and different view of their environment.
3. Thirdly, environment scanning puts you in the driver's seat. You are actually making decisions about the environment, whether it is friendly or hostile, open or closed. This helps you adopt an analytical approach.You determine the parameters for your scan: how far will you search geographically, how in-depth, and over what period of time. In fact, if you are properly engaged, environment scanning is something you are doing, to a greater or lesser extent, all the time.
4. Placing this in fourth position does not mean it is less important. Environment scanning is a holistic process: it engages the spirit, the imagination, your creative core. You need to, firstly, imagine one or more possible futures for yourself - you want new information, not old data. You are adopting a stance of curiosity, which enables to you discover new possibilities inside organisations, or perhaps in a business idea for yourself. Does that sound exciting? This process is akin to 'job crafting', in which you work towards creating your own 'best fit' job, perhaps by showing the leaders of an organisation how you can assist them to achieve their goals, or maybe in starting a business yourself to fill a gap in the market.
5.Lastly, if the last four elements are taken seriously and implemented, environment scanning is profound, creating a lifelong interest and the motivation to achieve. You have, in essence, found your life's work.
Does this all sound a bit new-agey and creepy? That's OK, you don't have to engage in any of these activities. In fact, I predict that less than 5% of people will ever be brave enough to really embrace this technique, which makes it all the more likely that the 5% minority will succeed.
If you are part of the 5 % and want to know more about how to undertake a successful environmental scan, along with other contemporary job search techniques, you'll be able to do so very soon, by reading my books, 'Who's Who in the Zoo? and 'What's New in the Zoo?'; both will be out later this year.
Comfort Zone
Tuesday, April 15, 2014
Wednesday, April 9, 2014
The latest job trend - insecurity!
Is your job on the line? It probably is, whether you are working on a permanent, casual, or contract basis. I wasn't around during the Great Depression, and it sounds like it was pretty bad for a lot of Australians, but I think the outlook for workers today is equally grim, but in a very different, twenty-first century way.
I've seen a lot of change in the Australian labour market since I was a fresh, bright-eyed nineteen year-old clerk in the Federal Department of Employment (then it was tied to Immigration, interestingly). This was my entry point into my own world of work and my initiation as a budding career development practitioner. While I thought I was just having fun working with larrikins in the Commonwealth Employment Service I learned the ropes of social security benefits, government funded employment programs, jobless statistics and industry reports, and, even more importantly, I learned a lot about people and what they want and need from jobs.
I have often made predictions about what was going to happen in the labour market, with some accuracy, but mainly to myself and family members, or to colleagues and friends during philosophical discussions. I have never thought to put out a prediction publicly. I have never seen the value in it, especially when the outlook does not look good. However, I am going public with this prediction, actually, in the hope that it does not eventuate.
I predict that, for the average Australian worker, real wages will fall significantly over the next five years. Tony Abbott wants Australians to earn less, and, like it or not, what Tony wants, Tony seems to get. One way or another, he is definitely not the Australian worker's friend. The 457 visa floodgate has opened and willing workers are pouring in from overseas. Didn't you notice all those people flying in while the Liberals have been so busy announcing their successes in stopping what was always a paltry number of boat arrivers? Anyway, these 457 visa holders are very happy to work in crummy conditions for far less than the minimum wage, as recent 'alleged' news stories about Koreans working for a certain mining company illustrate . Unions have shown little grunt or ability to change or end this situation and will not, at least as long as we have Liberals in power.
I'm obviously not happy with our neo-conservative political situation but I am going big picture here, way above the blame game. So, back to the prediction. Wages will be cut for Australians who want to compete with the incoming workers, but so will jobs for Australians. Like manufacturing, white collar jobs are heading overseas. Health care and insurance claims are processed in India and Japan, while your call centre is in the Philippines.
Alongside this, I predicted a while back that as the 21st century advanced, more and more Australians would be working casually or under contract; that there would be less jobs in large organisations and more need for outsourced labour. This is already becoming obviously the trend. Cutbacks and retrenchments (or is that right-sizing) are everywhere.
We want all of our young people to get good vocational training, but where will they find jobs? Australia is a living conundrum. On one hand, we already have far too many graduates than there are available jobs.On the other hand, we need more teachers, nurses, doctors, paramedics, but we have education systems that fail to supply these in the right proportion, and career opportunities at the end do not match our actual need.
For the seventy-five percent of us who don't have a degree, plus those who do not work in the area in which we qualified, one of the chief barriers to success in job search is that 'demonstrated skills' drives the whole recruitment process. This means, people are competing with hundreds, possibly thousands of others, for jobs that have an extremely 'tight' set of required skills (which is heavily enforced by the Applicant Tracking System) - unfortunately the notion of transferable skills has not penetrated the minds of most recruiters and hirers. For example, a client came to see me recently, she had worked as a bookkeeper for many years using a range of software, but not MYOB. She had absolutely awesome bookkeeping skills. After more than 200 applications she was still not hired because, rather than asking questions that would identify her ability to use MYOB, the questions stopped after 'Have you used MYOB?' and her truthful answer was, 'No'. I sighed, gave her a free copy of MYOB I had lying around and told her to go home and set herself up a home accounting system. She did. We wrote on her resume that she had used MYOB. She applied for a job. At the next interview, able to answer 'Yes, I have used MYOB', she got the job. Interestingly, they did not ask one more MYOB-related question.
One of our big problems is the mismatch of qualifications and available jobs. We have a large pool of workers trained for jobs that don't exist.We have jobs going that people could actually do well, but the selection process begins with a particular qualification (even for lowly clerical roles, older workers with years of experience are shut out because they don't have a Certificate in Business Administration).
Does the answer lie in retraining? Retraining for what? Besides the fact that spending 6-12 months studying something you already know is ludicrous, how do we know that next year the benchmark for entrants will not be a Diploma, that the Certificate in Business Administration is all but useless? How can we be sure jobs will be available in any other current line of work?
Retraining is simply not an option for many people, especially if it means sacrificing opportunities to job hunt. Studying is far less palatable when you are fighting to keep a roof over your head, and with funding cuts to training programs anyway, it's not hard to see why most people aren't warming to the prospect of undergoing lengthy self-funded training programs with dubious employment possibilities at the end.
Not long ago, employers used to train people on the job, nowadays they will be more likely to purchase a product and leave it up to the person operating it to work it out, or if they are lucky, they may get a few hours of vendor training thrown into the purchase price. When they hire someone new, it becomes a requirement to already know the product - the employer is not interested in wasting time training a new person, they want them pre-manufactured.
So, in summary I further predict that within the next five years we will have a large pool of workers with outdated or unusable skills that do not match employers' requirements. This is a safe prediction, because it is already happening. But this situation will get much, much worse as no one, not even me, can guarantee what course a person should do to ensure any level of job security.
A also predicted a while back that as the 21st century advanced, more and more Australians would be working casually or under contract, that there would be less jobs in large organisations and more need for outsourced labour. This is already becoming obviously the trend. While for some of us, the jobs we had are still needed, we are just doing it another way, more Australians are becoming, effectively, itinerant workers, at the mercy of the on-hire process. Those of us who want to take some control are opting to go into business for themselves. These new-age entrepreneurs are often reluctant business people, and are ill-equipped to handle the rigours of financial and business management, not to mention marketing, administration and tax accounting.
We currently have a labour market in chaos. It is disconnected, unpredictable and constantly shifting. My prediction is that it will get a whole lot worse, and that there will be many casualties. For individuals who find themselves in the middle of this maelstrom, unsure which way to go, I offer this advice: Stop and breathe, accept that many things are out of your control, then accept that you must take control of your own life. This is your anchor. This means not rushing into anything, especially not because someone on the TV or radio tells you that you too can have a career in aged care or personal training (some of us will, but most won't). Take stock of your successes, and eliminate from your thoughts the bits of the 'old you' that are hampering you in the present. Times are changing; you are reshaping yourself. Look around with fresh eyes at what is happening in your local area, or in a new area you might want to move to, and try to identify some areas of interest for you. This is called 'environment scanning' which is the topic of my next blog.
Adios for now
Julie
I've seen a lot of change in the Australian labour market since I was a fresh, bright-eyed nineteen year-old clerk in the Federal Department of Employment (then it was tied to Immigration, interestingly). This was my entry point into my own world of work and my initiation as a budding career development practitioner. While I thought I was just having fun working with larrikins in the Commonwealth Employment Service I learned the ropes of social security benefits, government funded employment programs, jobless statistics and industry reports, and, even more importantly, I learned a lot about people and what they want and need from jobs.
I have often made predictions about what was going to happen in the labour market, with some accuracy, but mainly to myself and family members, or to colleagues and friends during philosophical discussions. I have never thought to put out a prediction publicly. I have never seen the value in it, especially when the outlook does not look good. However, I am going public with this prediction, actually, in the hope that it does not eventuate.
I predict that, for the average Australian worker, real wages will fall significantly over the next five years. Tony Abbott wants Australians to earn less, and, like it or not, what Tony wants, Tony seems to get. One way or another, he is definitely not the Australian worker's friend. The 457 visa floodgate has opened and willing workers are pouring in from overseas. Didn't you notice all those people flying in while the Liberals have been so busy announcing their successes in stopping what was always a paltry number of boat arrivers? Anyway, these 457 visa holders are very happy to work in crummy conditions for far less than the minimum wage, as recent 'alleged' news stories about Koreans working for a certain mining company illustrate . Unions have shown little grunt or ability to change or end this situation and will not, at least as long as we have Liberals in power.
I'm obviously not happy with our neo-conservative political situation but I am going big picture here, way above the blame game. So, back to the prediction. Wages will be cut for Australians who want to compete with the incoming workers, but so will jobs for Australians. Like manufacturing, white collar jobs are heading overseas. Health care and insurance claims are processed in India and Japan, while your call centre is in the Philippines.
Alongside this, I predicted a while back that as the 21st century advanced, more and more Australians would be working casually or under contract; that there would be less jobs in large organisations and more need for outsourced labour. This is already becoming obviously the trend. Cutbacks and retrenchments (or is that right-sizing) are everywhere.
We want all of our young people to get good vocational training, but where will they find jobs? Australia is a living conundrum. On one hand, we already have far too many graduates than there are available jobs.On the other hand, we need more teachers, nurses, doctors, paramedics, but we have education systems that fail to supply these in the right proportion, and career opportunities at the end do not match our actual need.
For the seventy-five percent of us who don't have a degree, plus those who do not work in the area in which we qualified, one of the chief barriers to success in job search is that 'demonstrated skills' drives the whole recruitment process. This means, people are competing with hundreds, possibly thousands of others, for jobs that have an extremely 'tight' set of required skills (which is heavily enforced by the Applicant Tracking System) - unfortunately the notion of transferable skills has not penetrated the minds of most recruiters and hirers. For example, a client came to see me recently, she had worked as a bookkeeper for many years using a range of software, but not MYOB. She had absolutely awesome bookkeeping skills. After more than 200 applications she was still not hired because, rather than asking questions that would identify her ability to use MYOB, the questions stopped after 'Have you used MYOB?' and her truthful answer was, 'No'. I sighed, gave her a free copy of MYOB I had lying around and told her to go home and set herself up a home accounting system. She did. We wrote on her resume that she had used MYOB. She applied for a job. At the next interview, able to answer 'Yes, I have used MYOB', she got the job. Interestingly, they did not ask one more MYOB-related question.
One of our big problems is the mismatch of qualifications and available jobs. We have a large pool of workers trained for jobs that don't exist.We have jobs going that people could actually do well, but the selection process begins with a particular qualification (even for lowly clerical roles, older workers with years of experience are shut out because they don't have a Certificate in Business Administration).
Does the answer lie in retraining? Retraining for what? Besides the fact that spending 6-12 months studying something you already know is ludicrous, how do we know that next year the benchmark for entrants will not be a Diploma, that the Certificate in Business Administration is all but useless? How can we be sure jobs will be available in any other current line of work?
Retraining is simply not an option for many people, especially if it means sacrificing opportunities to job hunt. Studying is far less palatable when you are fighting to keep a roof over your head, and with funding cuts to training programs anyway, it's not hard to see why most people aren't warming to the prospect of undergoing lengthy self-funded training programs with dubious employment possibilities at the end.
Not long ago, employers used to train people on the job, nowadays they will be more likely to purchase a product and leave it up to the person operating it to work it out, or if they are lucky, they may get a few hours of vendor training thrown into the purchase price. When they hire someone new, it becomes a requirement to already know the product - the employer is not interested in wasting time training a new person, they want them pre-manufactured.
So, in summary I further predict that within the next five years we will have a large pool of workers with outdated or unusable skills that do not match employers' requirements. This is a safe prediction, because it is already happening. But this situation will get much, much worse as no one, not even me, can guarantee what course a person should do to ensure any level of job security.
A also predicted a while back that as the 21st century advanced, more and more Australians would be working casually or under contract, that there would be less jobs in large organisations and more need for outsourced labour. This is already becoming obviously the trend. While for some of us, the jobs we had are still needed, we are just doing it another way, more Australians are becoming, effectively, itinerant workers, at the mercy of the on-hire process. Those of us who want to take some control are opting to go into business for themselves. These new-age entrepreneurs are often reluctant business people, and are ill-equipped to handle the rigours of financial and business management, not to mention marketing, administration and tax accounting.
We currently have a labour market in chaos. It is disconnected, unpredictable and constantly shifting. My prediction is that it will get a whole lot worse, and that there will be many casualties. For individuals who find themselves in the middle of this maelstrom, unsure which way to go, I offer this advice: Stop and breathe, accept that many things are out of your control, then accept that you must take control of your own life. This is your anchor. This means not rushing into anything, especially not because someone on the TV or radio tells you that you too can have a career in aged care or personal training (some of us will, but most won't). Take stock of your successes, and eliminate from your thoughts the bits of the 'old you' that are hampering you in the present. Times are changing; you are reshaping yourself. Look around with fresh eyes at what is happening in your local area, or in a new area you might want to move to, and try to identify some areas of interest for you. This is called 'environment scanning' which is the topic of my next blog.
Adios for now
Julie
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