Today's market is ripe for the well-prepared and focused job searcher. College graduates have more opportunities for better jobs where they can improve their status on the job as well as with continuing education.
What makes today's market a good market is twofold: The rise in the need for college graduates in almost every field and the improvement of technology, which continues to improve exponentially.
Time used to be when a job search was hard work. Only typewriters were available to provide letters and résumés in professional styles. Interview by interview was the only way to contact people to determine interest. Company profiles were hard to come by unless you knew someone inside an organization.
Job searching still is a difficult and time-consuming process. It requires full-time attention. However, the tools to assist with the search are more prevalent, easier to use, and the process is very professional, quick, and pervasive.
Do not be misled into thinking that job searching is a linear process today, anymore than it ever was. The process is a zigzag, back and forth effort on the part of the searcher. ''Zigzagging'' will happen if you implement the plan to see at least 40 people a week on a full-time search or limit yourself to a 20 people a week part-time search.
Example: research into ''business profiles'' will come into play:
a.when you are considering what companies may need your skills and talent;
b.when you look for Career Fairs to attend with your first (new) résumé;
c.when you identify management levels to consider your résumé;
d.when you consider just what kind of résumé posting firm you want to use;
e.when you decide where/when to store information for easy access when employers call;
f.and when they contact you by e-mail or some other electronic connection, you need to have your files in a ready access state.
''Career Fairs'' is another research item that reoccurs:
a.when you are considering which one to attend;
b.when you identify your purpose for attending--knowledge, connections, new information, etc.;
c.when you compare professional opportunities in a broader context;
d.and when looking for new fields and jobs potential.
Your need for reference and research materials constantly zigzags back and forth throughout your campaign. So do not be alarmed if you notice reference to various components of the process show up again and again in the text.
What this is telling you is, ''Format a clear and accurately named set of files.'' Examine the ''why now?'' in each case and you will notice a new focus for your use of the term. This will help expand your continuing breadth of information, job searching process, and counsel.
The subtitle of this book is Strategies and Technologies for Career and Life Balance. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week a job searcher must be visible in the marketplace in order to locate the choicest jobs possible given one's education, experience, skills, and talents.
The only way a searcher can be available at this scope and rate is with the use and extension the newest technologies provide. One must be computer and network literate or you will be left in the dust of your contemporaries.
This text emphasizes the need for constantly measuring career goals against life goals, and wherever possible combining the two to succeed in both. If you want a family, consider whether a traveling sales job/career may prohibit your participation a bit in your family's development. (See: Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman.) If you want to travel then do it before you start a family.
You need the support of your family and friends throughout your life so dismissing them for some part of your life while you leap to new heights in a career without considering them may produce a friendless and lonely life in your after work activities. It is lonely at the top. Booze is effective in killing the pain, but the pain manages to find you again in the morning. (See: Eugene O'Neill's A Long Day's Journey Into Night.)
Themes of the Text
The cycle of job searching is endless and constant. The major themes are research, marketing focus, résumés, interviewing, negotiations, politics, and financial awareness. Once a job option is accepted, the search begins for the next opportunity. This requires sensitivity to your own continuing education goals, knowing if and when your own career goals may change, awareness of the industry's options/problems/growth, and the needs of the market.
These areas are addressed separately in different chapters and infused into many other chapters for the searcher to make the connecting links in understanding the job market and this search process. The goal is to find the choicest job in your respective field that you can handle successfully.
The market's needs are global, no matter your chosen field. Below is a short summary of the chapter contents for an overview.
Section One clearly explains the steps to follow when preparing your résumé. Chapter 1 directs the searcher to follow a clear outline or plan of operation to prepare for assembling resume information that will enable a professional-looking representation of one's readiness for the market of choice, which will be obvious to those who receive this resume.
Chapter 2 focuses on the variety of forms that a résumé is now accepted in the marketplace. If you are searching in international markets, the curriculum vitae is explained with advice about how to proceed in another country where the language is not English. New formats for business cards are revealed. Searching for company profiles to augment your decision about where to search is also developed in Chapter 2.
Chapter 3 covers cyberspace résumés, which are hot in today's market. Cool design and killer content are imperative to make a good first impression. Your résumé reaches the decision makers before you do. CD-ROM business cards are introduced as résumé substitutes, and sites where these are available are listed. How to approach and submit résumés to résumé posting services are also described.
Section Two describes different types of interviews and prepares you to negotiate for the best salary and benefits possible. Chapter 4 describes the subdivisions of Internet use and career fairs' potential for the job searcher. These interviews are basically informational interviews, but can lead to more substantive job interviews if worked for their potential effectiveness. Working existing networks and forming new ones are both part of this chapter.
Knowing how to answer an ad so that you are considered for the position is an art, and the rules can be learned by anyone, as explained in Chapter 5. Importance of company knowledge before the interview is stressed. Understand that ''experiences'' in an interview situation refer to people, challenges, problems, options, and resolutions that have been a part of your past. To most interviewers, the best predictor of your future success with them is your past success with other employers.
Chapter 6 introduces the GAME theory of John von Neumann and John Forbes Nash, Jr. I have translated and processed their theory to apply to negotiations, and the 3-step charted process is in this chapter. Understand the financial options that are available for the now (what comes out of your check) and the future (what you have saved for retirement). Creative and imaginative ways that employers are figuring out to reward employees go beyond salary. They are more numerous and inventive among today's managerial options.
In Section Three you will learn what it takes to put your best foot forward in today's job market. To understand that looking for a job is essentially a marketing process is difficult for some to grasp as explained in Chapter 7. If you work it, marketing is to the advantage of the searcher. You are the product, the salary range is the price, your resume is the promotional ad, and the distribution is wherever you send the resume given 24/7 options to deliver the good news that you are available for the market.
Market potential is described as unlimited and global in Chapter 8. Using e-commerce, there are constant changes and unpredictability about tools and methods for designing an effective search. A market plan and strategy need to be designed at the outset so you won't be overwhelmed and thus unable to take advantage of the opportunities that will come your way with these suggestions.
Chapter 9 introduces entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship is for a few. Learning what a risk taker you are, what newness you may bring to the market, who will be there to assist you, and what success can you expect are all questions that need to be answered before you make this leap where only about 2 percent of the American populace ever goes. Knowing about Web page design and e-business techniques cannot be highlighted enough to prepare anyone for this leap of faith.
Chapter 10 delves into office politics: It is a big bear to some, an unavoidable menace to many, a mystery to a few, and an opportunity to the chosen. Defining terms, knowing a company's history as well as its culture, and understanding who has the power and wields it fairly or unfairly are all things one needs to know. You cannot avoid being in politics because you are in the business. So do your best to understand what is going on and learn how to cope most effectively for your own ends and desires. This section will prove enlightening to most, and the author hopes it will help those for whom business politics is a mystery. It really isn't very mysterious.
Section Four explains the concepts behind building a secure financial future for you and your family. Chapter 11 explains money and taxes. Know the definitions of terms. The charts illustrate the respective place in which one's accumulated stash of money and the corresponding privilege/burden of taxes are. Knowing how to grow money as well as spend money is more and more important as your life progresses to its end and your family needs develop into bigger and bigger monetary responsibilities. Know how to budget effectively the money you do have, reduce your debts no matter their origination, and develop insurance plans that are going to be helpful to you and your family. Each and all of these skill sets are hard-earned learning.
Chapter 12 will take some of the mystery out of 401(k), 403(b), and IRA investment strategies for your money. IRAs have myriad forms, pay out in differing ways, and you need to know the current possibilities while you watch what the Congress and in some cases state legislatures do to these benefits. None of the rules is carved in stone. These shelters are the most popular form of retirement option with most companies, so the more you understand them, the better position you are in to negotiate for yourself.
Chapter 13 is about your own or a family member's continuing education option as a good investment. The cost of going to school and the availability of loans and scholarships are charted. The availability of e-clinics and on-line education makes the process more comfortable; however, it does not reduce the cost of education that much, but it does add the convenience of going to school in your own home. In some cases it is more expensive than a traditional college education.
Chapter 14 explains retirement and what you need to have done before this time arrives in your life. What does retirement mean, how will you afford it, what responsibilities are likely to crop up in your advancing years that may cost more money than you have stored? Is traveling an option, continuing education, living on a fixed income, or beginning a charitable foundation if you have more money than you want or can spend? The real question is: are you prepared to retire to rather than from a previous life/career situation? Learn what the 4748-49 life charts have to say about retirement by 2024.
Appendices
As in previous editions of Career Development, the appendices offer valuable additional information. They include:
A.Entrepreneur's Quiz
B.Personality Inventory
C.Letters
D.Market Value Determination Charts
E.Procrastination Defined
F.Glossary
G.Résumé Skill Words List, Sample Résumé
H.Budget
I.You and the Law
Acknowledgments
Because this is the fourth edition of CAREER DEVELOPMENT: Strategies and Technologies for Career and Life Balance, there are more and more people to acknowledge as sources of help, ideas, implementation of processes suggested, and learning. Uppermost in my list would be those students, graduates, and professional men and women that have been clients, friends, and family members and have taken my ideas and suggestions to heart and succeeded.
Students were the inspiration for the financial literacy section. The crazy mix of words they all thought they understood well until it came time to negotiate are all related to finance. Understanding how to negotiate well is a very important lifetime skill, and one gets better at it with practice.
A special debt of gratitude is due Professor Sally Baker of DeVRY Institute of Technology at Kansas City for her insight and suggestions about the tax section of Chapter 11. Professor Lynn Schuchman, also from DeVRY, KC, contributed to the ideas about retirement and what that would mean to graduates who are just beginning their life careers. Working with graduating students is especially rewarding because they more readily see with application how well these suggestions and ideas do work. Sean James, a former student graduate comes to mind as he continues to climb the corporate ladder and dream his dream of
becoming a CEO. He is within two levels of that dream as I write this. Although he graduated February 2000, he continues to keep in touch and tell me about the successes that have come his way because ''he got started on the right foot.''
Most of all, my friends and associates who have understood on some level that 1 could not go to dinner, or to a movie, or off on a picnic junket, as I was working on my book, deserve a tremendous note of gratitude. It must be very frustrating to have someone become so unattainable and yet be so visibly present. Writing is not a group activity, and isolating oneself from others does not make and influence friends for the better, but it is a sacrifice 1 had to make and was willing to make to meet deadlines set by editors and others.
Although the mysteries of publication have eluded me these past 10 years of writing these texts, I would be sadly remiss if I did not thank Sande Johnson, the acquisitions editor, and assistant editor, Michelle Williams. They understand the labyrinthine ways of publishing. After this goes to copy, I am sure there will be others as there have been in the past; they just are not identified yet.
