Do you want to become CIO? There are things you can do whether you are tech savvy from operations or a tech guru from the IT team. In either case, you have to overcome some pretty big obstacles.
This story has the obstacles and the solutions. And it isn’t a long read.
Posted in Attitude, Finding jobs, Focus, Networking, Perseverance, Promotions, talent, Training
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away. (Philip Dick)
Each week someone says, “Bryan, I have applied for hundreds of jobs and no one even acknowledges my application!” That may mean it is time for a reality check. If they have 10 very good candidates, is it a waste of time for those companies to talk to you? Are you betting that no one else sees the same online ad that you do? Sometimes a reality check will tell you good things, sometimes bad things.
I only allow reality on my desk as a recruiter. I don’t “hope” that a client will overlook my candidate’s surly disposition. I don’t submit him. If I have a programmer whose references say he can’t get projects done on time, I withdraw his candidacy even when the company has made a job offer. A salesman who has 3 jobs in 3 years and no positive results won’t get a job through our agency. Reality rules my desk. I can’t work any other way and feed my family.
Bow to reality in your job hunting. Sure, apply for jobs you are only barely qualified for, but don’t be upset when your resume isn’t even acknowledged. If a company is laying off people, still apply for a job, but don’t wait with quivering excitement for a call.
Too many people think that The Power Of Positive Thinking says that self delusion works. It doesn’t. In that book by Norman Vincent Peale, he spends a lot of time dealing with reality. So should you.
If you really do deserve a 50% raise, hope for it, but acknowledge that raises that big are rare. Most people can expect a 5% to 20% raise. Most people get a job at the same level they are at and work their way up in their next job. Some do find a new job at a higher management level. They are exceptionally well qualified.
Become exceptional at your current job and reality is that you can get a big raise and a promotion into your next company. If you are very good, expect a raise and a chance to earn a promotion. If you are average, or less, no one is going to be in a hurry to hire you.
That is reality.
Something To Do Today
Keep a list of every job you apply for. Also list how well qualified you are for the job. Take a reality check. Are you over qualified, well qualified, barely qualified, or under qualified? Keeping honest track of that answer will help you if your job hunt takes longer than you expect.
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Tomorrow: Double your value, make more money
Later: Surveys
Please discriminate against me
How to get a friend a job
Posted in Attitude, Finding jobs, Perseverance, Recruiters, Resumes
Tagged applied for jobs, good candidates, hunt for a job, reality, reality check, waste of time
An actor asks himself, “What is my motivation?” The rest of us laugh at him. He’s trying to figure out which way to face on a stage.
Ice cream used to motivate me. I’d walk on hot coals to get it. I still like ice cream, but it won’t get me to detour 100 yards to a store now. Sometimes leaving work early is a great motivator. Some days a chance to go for a walk will get me to work hard. Winning is a great motivator at times. Sometimes letting my kid just barely win is a motivator. What motivates me changes hourly, daily, weekly and monthly.
Getting a job is often not enough of a motivator in your job search. To avoid pain, unmotivated people spend hours in front of a computer “playing” with job boards. There is no need to call people and admit you want a new job. Lack of real motivation is behind taking friends out to eat instead of creating a network by eating with more helpful strangers.
I have come to the conclusion that my subjective account of my motivation is largely mythical on almost all occasions. I don’t know why I do things. (Lloyd Dobens)
Use motivation in two ways.
Real networking is difficult for many. Calling up a company and asking for the manager, VP, CFO or President is impossible for many people. Try to figure out why that call is difficult, while a call to HR (Human Resources) is easy. HR knows less about jobs than the VP of Operations does. If fear or embarrassment keeps you from making calls to real decision makers, admit it. Talk about it with someone. Make some commitments and work your way through it.
Making a few MORE contacts can also be difficult. Find rewards that will get you to make a few more calls and submit more resumes. It can be that you will only watch your TV show if you get 3 more resumes out or make 3 more calls. Set a goal of only going golfing if you are taking a potential hiring manager from another company. Decide you won’t turn on the computer until you have made 4 follow up calls where you have submitted your resume.
Think of what motivates you today. Admit roadblocks and work around them. Find little incentives you can give yourself to do just a little more in your job search.
Something To Do Today
Choose one activity you avoid. Give yourself an incentive to do it. Now do it.
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Tomorrow: Waiting for the “help wanted” sign
Later: Networking
Calls to companies
Intelligent use of recruiters
Get famous, get a job
Sneaky no good cops set a trap for me
Posted in Attitude, Finding jobs, Job Boards, Networking, Perseverance, Time management
Tagged getting a job, great motivator, Job Boards, job search, motivation, real motivation
I couldn’t force myself to do this job. You do the same thing for hours on end, sitting on a bar stool or standing. You insert a small disk, pull a lever, and then do a quality check. It sounds horrible to me.
How do they get people to do it?
The way they get people to do it is by paying them over short intervals. They give them free drinks, breaks, flashing lights, and short term rewards. As a matter of fact, people pay to do the job. It is more commonly known as playing the slot machines at a casino.
How does this apply to my job search? My life?
No one would play a slot machine if they were paid nothing and got negative feedback and only frustration all day. Your job search wears you down if you only give yourself negative feedback all day.
In your job search, figure out how to reward yourself for a job well done. A job well done can be calling 5 businesses, sending out 7 resumes, going on one interview or having lunch with someone. Don’t wait until you get a job to celebrate. Reward yourself for small victories.
I am a professional job hunter. Every time I make a call to a brand new person, I get to toss a dollar coin into a cup and hear the ring of the coin. I really do. I get to go for a walk when I hit 20 coins. When I get to 30 coins, I have hit my goal for the day. I celebrate. No kidding. Every day.
Pick the hardest part of job searching. Reward yourself for doing something essential that you would rather avoid. You may not be able to make it fun and exciting, but I bet you can at least make it tolerable. Short term rewards can help you break through walls of resistance in your job search.
Something To Do Today
In your job journal make a list of things you need to do, but sometimes avoid.
Now make a list of rewards to make those activities more palatable.
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Next: What motivates me
Later: Waiting for the “help wanted” sign
Networking
Calls to companies
Intelligent use of recruiters
Get famous, get a job
Posted in Attitude, Perseverance, Time management
Tagged job search, negative feedback, reward yourself, short term rewards
Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with enthusiasm. (Winston Churchill)
Would you recommend someone for a job if you were sure they would fail miserably?
Do you want to work with someone who is unable to deal with problems?
No one else does either.
On the other hand, it is fun working with someone who is trying to learn, who goes the extra mile on the job, and who wants to do what they have studied.
If you are excited by your possibilities, your friends will be also. That’s how you motivate your friends, be excited. For example:
We place a lot of programmers in new jobs. The ones who are so excited that they create programs in their spare time always find jobs. It doesn’t matter if they ever went to college. Their enthusiasm gets them jobs. They love programming. Employers love them. Everyone who knows them is going to bat for them. People they don’t know call them up to see if they can help them find a job. Their enthusiasm is contagious.
On the other hand are programmers who took courses in programming in college. They passed their courses. Programming doesn’t excite them. It’s just a job. If their college degree can’t get them a job in programming, they’ll never look at a computer again. For them there is nothing exciting. Their friends and contacts hear them complaining about the jobs they supposedly turned down. There is no way they are going to get a strong recommendation for a job. Sure enough, the job market stinks for them.
Motivate your friends. Find out what is exciting about the jobs you are applying for. Do the job for free for a charity. If you are a computer technician, go looking for broken computers and tear them apart. Put together a network in your basement. Offer to teach at your library or a nursing home. Salesperson? Do what my partner did, became a charity “hit woman”. Get the job of calling on businesses for donations. You will talk to a lot of leaders of industry. And guess what? If you do a good job, they’ll be impressed. Your friends, family and acquaintances will see what you are doing. They’ll tell other people.
Be excited. Do your job for free because you love it. Help others and demonstrate your love of your desired job. You will motivate your friends and mere acquaintances to help you.
Something To Do Today
Really evaluate how you have been acting. Are you a member of the “beef and whine club”? Find something you enjoy doing that is related to the job you want. Do it with enthusiasm for free.
Posted in Attitude, Finding jobs, Focus, Networking, Perseverance, References, talent
Tagged deal with problems, find a job, motivate your friends to help, success
I almost committed career suicide. Here’s what I did.
“Why are there no blacks and only 3 latinos out of 1200 employees?” I figured there was a good reason, and the president of the 25,000 person company gave me one. However, my manager got me into his office and yelled at me. He really yelled at me.
I left his office, grabbed my coat and walked out. I had a choice to make as I got in my car. Should I replay the incident over and over and get madder and madder, or should I concentrate on something else?
I chose badly for 15 minutes. I got madder and madder. Then I realized what I was doing. I figured out that something must have triggered that outburst. The president was not bothered by my question. The manager that yelled at me was badly embarrassed. I forgave him and started concentrating on something else, anything else. In 10 minutes I was enjoying life on my terms again. And, yes, I found out three months later that they were now actively recruiting and training blacks specifically for that division.
Most jobs you apply for, you won’t get. That’s just the statistical truth. So how do you handle it when you lose? You certainly have to notice what happened. It is great to try to figure out what went wrong, if anything. After you’ve evaluated what happened, start planning your next job success.
If you keep replaying every negative thing that happens while searching for a job, you’ll go crazy. When you concentrate on what went well, you reinforce your positive behaviors. When you relive the things that went wrong, you reinforce the negative. You also feel worse. Work at feeling better.
To find yourself jilted is a blow to your pride. Do your best to forget it and if you don’t succeed, at least pretend to. (Moliere)
My wife is a good piano player. When she is learning a new piece she is careful NOT to practice known mistakes over and over. She slows way down and practices it right. Then she speeds up. In her mind and in her fingers she concentrates on minor victories. It can take her a month of practicing 2 to 4 hours a day to get a piece just right. She’d go crazy if she concentrated on her mistakes. She enjoys practicing because she celebrates every minor success. She can find a success every minute.
You need to look for successes in your job hunting. If there is something you know you did wrong, slow down. Instead of rehearsing the errors in your mind, mentally see yourself doing it right. Find a quiet place and relax. See yourself correcting mistakes and getting a positive response.
If someone else screwed up, slow down. Concentrate on what you did right. You can’t control the other person. You can’t change history. You can find a quiet place and relax. You can rehearse in your mind what you did right. In your mind you can practice correcting any mistakes you made.
Good mental hygiene is the difference between self improvement and self destruction. It also just plain feels better.
Something To Do Today
Get the book The NewPsycho Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz. It has a lot of great ideas about how to control your thoughts and happiness.
Job hunting triumphs come often. Getting a job is always the cumulative result of a hundred victories. Those victories should be celebrated over and over in your mind. Yes, you need to notice that you failed to finish the next step, but you shouldn’t focus on a defeat and exclude the victories leading up to that step.
If you send out 100 resumes and get 3 phone calls, you succeeded 103 times! You sent out 100 resumes, a feat many job seekers never equal. You also got 3 calls from your resume. It worked.
You called 10 recruiting shops and 1 invited you in for an interview. 10 calls is a great adventure, and one success in 10 calls is wonderful. Stock salesmen often make 200 calls in a day with absolutely no success. Getting one interview is great. Making 10 calls is a victory.
I had an executive make it to the final list of 3 candidates for a high level job. Another candidate was chosen. All he could see was that for the 7th time in 3 months he had failed to get the job. He could not focus on some delightful facts:
1. He was referred to me by his network.
2. His resume was very good.
3. I thought highly enough of him to recommend him.
4. He got the first phone interview.
5. An executive flew across the country to interview him.
6. He came to the facility he would lead and passed 6 more interviews.
7. He made it to the short list of final candidates.
What a monumental chain of victories! This was a phenomenal set of accomplishments. Yet, he couldn’t see his successes when the process was done. All he looked at was that he missed the final cut. He got depressed and self critical. It got so bad that I couldn’t recommend him to another company. He took a job he dislikes with a company he doesn’t respect. That job lets him stop the pain of focusing on his occasional failures. He was not desperate financially. He was desperate to win because he stopped seeing his successes.
Take the time to relive your successes every hour of your job search. You will find your attitude soars. You don’t make the cut? Relive every successful step getting there. Include finding out about the job, applying, getting a call, arriving on time, etc. All those are feats showing your prowess. Go ahead relive them in your mind. You deserve it.
Something To Do Today
Get your job journal out. List the 3 jobs you have gotten closest to winning. Even if it was just making a phone call or sending a resume. List all the steps you executed successfully to get to that point. Include all the little ones. Relive those successes. “You done good, little fella.”
Posted in Attitude, Focus, Perseverance
Tagged getting a job, job hunting, job hunting triumphs, Resumes
In absence of clearly defined goals, we become strangely loyal to performing daily acts of trivia. (unkn)
Are goals useful?
One famous study showed that people with written goals coming out of college earned several times more than people without written goals. But, look at yourself. If you still have the same written or unwritten goals you had 10 years ago, you are the exception.
Goals change. The real secret is to have specific written goals and expect them to change.
Goals that make the world bend around you
You will do better if you are striving to BECOME something much greater than you are now. The world reshapes itself around you when you refuse to take the path of least resistance. If you set 20 year goals that inspire you today, you will enjoy life more today and next year. Your goals will change because you have grown to the point that you can see more important goals. You will develop a vision of your future that is clearer and brighter than you have today. That is a good reason to change your goals.
A part of the goals secret is to have goals in the areas of your life that matter most. Money is important. Job and career goals are essential for progress. You also need goals about your family growth, social maturity, physical fitness, emotional strength and spiritual development.
For example, your goal could be to run 2 miles in 15 minutes in 2031. If you really think about that goal, you need to strengthen your legs and knees, not pound them into arthritis. That goal could inspire you to include bicycling, swimming or rowing in your fitness regime so that your knees will last throughout your life. That goal may change to being able to swim a mile in 2031 because of changes in your health.
A social goal could be to have a network of 1000 people who are leaders in their own field in 2031. To get there you will have to have intermediate goals of recognizing, getting to know, helping, tracking and staying in contact with those people. A goal like that would also be a great help to a career goal to become CEO of a company. Later your social goal may change to having a network of 2000 people who will help you fund medical research, and it may include all the same people as your original goal.
Remember, goals change. The 20 year goals I just mentioned would be great goals for a computer technician, salesperson or CEO. If you open your mind and see into the future, you will be able to pick out goals for the year 2031 that will help you now, and still matter in 2031. If your goals are important to you, you will find you achieve most of them in much less than the 20 year, 5 year or 1 year horizon you set.
Something To Do Today
In your journal first make a list of the most important overall aspects of life. I suggest: money, career, social, physical fitness, emotional and spiritual. Then list a goal you can work towards BEING in 20 years, 5 years and 1 year. Each goal should fit in with all the others. Goals are about becoming better as the world shifts around you.
Posted in Accomplishments, Perseverance, Time management
When I started at EDS I was learning at an incredible rate. Pay raises came quickly and easily. By my third year things slowed down. By my fifth year I settled into a dreary cycle of little new personal growth and cost of living raises. I managed to get assigned to a new team using a new technology and my growth accelerated for a year, then it dropped back to the dreary level. That’s an example of my personal growth curve.
How fast you are growing to get where you want to go is your personal growth curve. Once you stop growing you are flat-lining. In hospitals flat-lining means there is no pulse, you are dead. In your career, flat-lining means that your career has stopped completely and the business world is starting to pass you by.
To get growing again you need to learn, get new responsibilities and get recognized. At EDS I volunteered and pestered my managers for the chance to use new technology. Since no one else had a clue and I had read a couple of books on the subject, I got to become the “owner” of that technology. Preparation and repeatedly selling myself to my managers preceded my advancement.
Whether you want to grow as a manager, salesperson or technician, you need to follow these steps:
Step 1 and 2 can always be done at your current job. Often they will pay for the training and help mentor you. Step 3 should be attempted with your current company. Sometimes it just can’t be done where you are.
Companies have their own growth curves. At a company that is flat-lining, your chances to grow will be limited. While you are preparing to grow, open your eyes. Is your company ABLE to let you grow? Do you need to move to a company that is changing its growth curve while you change yours?
A job change becomes a career enhancing move when you move to a company whose growth curve will allow you to accelerate your own growth curve. If you are willing to learn and grow, you will have growth in your career. If you are willing to change jobs when necessary to re-accelerate your career growth, your future has no limits.
Something To Do Today
What is going to be needed in the future? What interests you? What will help you accelerate your growth curve?
Don’t expect your boss to magically know what you fail to tell him repeatedly. Expect him not to understand. Even if he sees you doing something new he may not recognize what it means or its usefulness unless you have told him five or ten times in the last six months.
Each Friday is the time to write down what you did this week and this month in your job journal. Give a report to your boss in a format he can use for his own reports to his boss. A written copy of your accomplishments will reinforce what you have told him
Posted in Accomplishments, Perseverance, Promotions, Training
Tagged career growth, growth curve, new team, new technology, pay raises, personal growth
The modern age has been characterized by a Promethean spirit, a restless energy that preys on speed records and shortcuts, unmindful of the past, uncaring of the future, existing only for the moment and the quick fix. (Jeremy Rifkin)
Lufkin is the premiere maker of the pumps sucking oil from Oklahoma’s prairies. In 1981 used Lufkin pumps were selling for more than new ones. Fancy business school graduates said Lufkin was nuts. They could sell the new pumps for much more. “Take your profit now!” they said. The owners of Lufkin said, “We’ve been here a long time. Demand goes up and demand goes down. We will service our customers the best we can. We won’t take advantage of them when they are desperate. When the bubble bursts we will still be here. We’re in this business for the long haul.” Today, after a 20 year recession in their business, they still make a solid profit.
In the recruiting business one recruiter said, “I take people out of one rut, and put them into a different rut.” Some recruiters don’t care. I do. I find people in good jobs who could do significantly better. I then place them in a job where they can more quickly meet their career goals. I help people shave years off of their career growth. I move them into a better long term opportunity.
Be mindful of how your resume looks. People who have changed jobs 3 times in 2 years have a hard time getting a great job. Later, even after 3 or 5 years in one job their resume is tainted. The manager hiring for a great job wants someone who will be there a long time. He knows he can attract bright stable workers. Why should he settle for someone who may be gone in 6 months?
A new job should give you a significant LONG TERM advantage. It should help you take charge of your career. Lance Armstrong won the Tour de France seven times. In 2005 he only won one day out of 21 racing days. On one day he was 20 minutes behind the fastest bike. But he was always mindful of where he was in relation to his competition. He made sure he had the best bike and the best team even if he wasn’t getting the glory of being first over the finish line. Looking for the long term advantage is how he won.
Find the best team and opportunity you can. Get in it for the long haul. Go win. You cannot speed up your career by taking 3 shortcuts.
Something To Do Today
Write down your career goals in your job journal. Where do you really want to go? Can your current team get you there? If not, time to change teams.