Grizzled veterans can find job change daunting

Feb 27th, 2005 | By Bill | Category: Employment News



Grizzled veterans can find job change daunting

Can staying at the same job for most of your career cause problems?

Last week, I wrote about the symptoms and cures for an interrupted career path. That’s a career in which the worker left the work force to take care of someone or to tend to a personal illness or injury, creating a long period of unemployment.

As sometimes happens, in the week after filing that column I had conversations with several job seekers that made me want to write a second version. These people had not been out of work at all; rather, they had been at work at the same job in the same company for most or all of their work lives. Their careers weren’t interrupted they were uninterrupted. And that was causing many of the same problems experienced by people who had been out of the work force for several years.

As a refresher, here are the issues often shared by people trying to re-enter the job market after being away for a while:

Out-of-date skills.

A lack of useful contacts for networking.

A decrease in confidence, at least pertaining to an ability to do the job.

An uncertainty about how to get back into the work force.

Notice anything? With very little revision, the same issues also apply to people who have worked for one employer for a number of years. This is especially true if the worker held the same position for most of that time.

At first this might seem counterintuitive. If you’ve been working 25 years, wouldn’t your skills naturally be up to date? Maybe, but they’re also probably very narrow, as they’d be specialized to the workload at your company.

For example, the equipment or software you can operate is probably whatever the company has had in place. If your department has been underfunded (which may be the reason you’re looking for a job), there’s a pretty good chance that things haven’t been updated. So not only are you confined to knowing only one type of process, but it’s also one that other companies haven’t used in a decade. Not good.

The same is true of contacts. Over the years, you’ve probably built up a good list of people to talk with about the work at hand. But if your primary link is this workplace, they might not be as well connected to other companies as you would like. Or, worse, they might be on their way to retirement, leaving you to start over on your networking.

It’s easy to see how these first two issues can lead to the second two. If you fear your skills and contacts are out of date, you will also wonder whether you can handle a different job and you’ll certainly wonder how to go about getting that job.

You can get off this treadmill of worry and start answering these questions for yourself. The sooner you do, the sooner you can make a plan to protect yourself.

Talk with colleagues in your department or in other companies to help you take these basic steps:

1. Do a job analysis. Review the responsibilities of your job and the skills needed to do them. What is your job called in other companies? Are the same skills and responsibilities expected elsewhere, or is the job configured differently?

2. Compare your skills. Can you do the things that your counterpart in another company would do? Are you using comparable tools and software? Are the gaps serious or superficial?

3. Watch the trends. Are other companies bringing in new processes, while your company is standing still? Are you falling behind others in your field?

Depending on what you learn, your next step is to take action. If you find that your work is too narrowly focused on one area, you’ll need access to other kinds of training or experiences. If, on the other hand, you find that you’re a “jack of all trades, master of none,” now might be the time to delve a little deeper into a key area to give yourself a specialty.

You might be able to correct these imbalances through new assignments at work, but the stronger solution might involve an outside class or project. This would help you make new contacts as well, which you will appreciate when it’s time to switch jobs.

Be sure to update your resume with your new projects and skills, and join an outside work group or professional association in your field. Even if you’re not planning to switch jobs, your new contacts and ideas will bring something extra to the job you have.

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