Stay Upbeat During the Downbeat

As we all know, behind every dark cloud is a silver lining, right?  When one door closes, another opens.  Things happen for a reason. Don’t you just love cliches?  I met author Jim Atkinson last night and he enlightened me when he said, “Cliches are true.”  And when it comes to job transitions and managing your career, I believe it best to heed Jim’s advice on cliches.

In most cases, in the long run, we benefit from job transitions.  We upgrade our value, increase our breadth of experience, and learn more about the world and ourselves.  The key is to manage the transition and not let the transition manage you.  Looking for a job is not foreign to most people.  Often, it’s just a matter of reminding ourselves of best techniques or learning new ones.  Like riding a bicycle, you never completely forget how, but you can be wobbly at times.

Riding a bicycle is actually a good analogy for this topic.  I have been asked several times to teach friends’ kids how to ride without training wheels (I guess I’ve become a local expert).  During these sessions with kids, I have discovered there are many commonalities to job searches and career transitions. 

• You need to keep your balance  — keep going forward!
• You need to keep your eyes looking forward — look at the road ahead, not the ground.
• Don’t be afraid — if you fall, you’ll only get a little scrape, nothing life shattering.
• Once you gain momentum, don’t let up — if it feels right, it is right — pursue the opportunity with fervor.
• When you learn to go, you still need to learn how to stop — don’t get too cocky, there is always more to learn.
• Another key skill for both scenarios is changing direction — be sure to steer around obstacles, not into them.  The landscape changes fast.
• Most of all, in both cases, you need to have confidence in yourself.  You need to believe the cliches, and yes, the glass is half full.

OK, you’re motivated and ready to hit it in stride.  Now what?  Read all the blogs you can find on new and old techniques for managing your career.  Once the advice starts to sound redundant, you’ve probably become an expert.

Additional information:

For IT folks who are unsure how to navigate their career through a slow economy, here are some good insights offered by Computerworld.

How to stay up in a down economy

Laid off or overworked, IT pros still need to mind their emotional health. Here are six ways to keep your outlook bright in dark times.

By Julia King

March 17, 2009 (Computerworld) It doesn’t take a $250 visit to a psychotherapist to confirm what you feel in your gut each morning when you wake up — it’s depressing out there. Market volatility, economic instability, pink slips and the ongoing threat of yet another round of IT layoffs — no wonder you feel like diving back under the covers.

If you’ve been let go, you might worry that you’ll never work again. If you’ve escaped a layoff, “it’s very discouraging when you see colleagues leave because these people were your friends,” says Beverly Lieberman, an IT recruiter and career coach and president of Halbrecht Lieberman Associates Inc.

Employees may feel trapped in a company where “they’re sort of grateful to be still working, but they’re insecure” because virtually no employer is making any guarantees about IT or any other kind of job.

“Everybody is saying you can write off 2009 because there are no indicators it will get any better,” Lieberman sums up. “We’re praying for 2010.”

But that doesn’t mean you have to spend the rest of the year as an emotional cellar dweller. It’s not easy, but it is possible for tech pros to nurture themselves and even bolster their professional credentials during these tough times, whether you’re laid off and looking, or left behind and overworked.

So how exactly do you go about staying up in a down economy? Computerworld gathered tips from a quartet of IT career experts, including Lieberman; Boston-area career coach and author Naomi Karten; IT career expert, author and Computerworld columnist Paul Glen; and Nagesh Belludi, a professional software engineer and program manager at a large multinational company who also regularly counsels IT professionals. Their advice is to do the following:

Return to your roots

Remember why you first got into information technology? Bring back some of that enthusiasm — and maybe even master a new skill — by doing something you’d never be assigned to do on the job, just for the sheer technological challenge of it.

Write a new program, fix one that’s been broken and bugging you for ages, or master a whole new programming language. Or use your tech skills to connect with the world: Build a Web site, create and post an original video on YouTube, or start a blog to share your IT views or showcase your skills. Heck, learn the functions — all of them — of your smartphone.

Get the most from social networking

Building and maintaining a network is important even in good times, but being connected with friends and colleagues can be especially valuable now. So take full advantage of social networking opportunities via Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and other online communities.

A network of contacts can yield advance notice of a company that’s hiring — or laying people off. More broadly, social networking can help you read the tea leaves about the health of various vertical markets (for example, if several of your contacts recently found work in health care or switched out of manufacturing).

Finally, simple human interaction can be uplifting, even if it is electronic. Reconnecting with high school friends, college buddies and old co-workers won’t necessarily help your career directly, but it can do wonders for your outlook by reminding you who you were before you felt like you were nothing but a job or a job search.

Get out into the real world

If you live near a university, check out its technology-transfer center. These are official, university-supported incubators for technology research and start-up tech companies.

Personnel in technology-transfer centers excel at helping people sell the business benefits of technology — a skill that IT professionals could often use help with as well.

“People in IT do not know how to sell themselves. When you look at programmers’ résumés and how they interview, they talk about their skills in terms of C++ and other technical languages,” says Belludi.

“They don’t explain that a project they worked on saved their company hundreds of thousands of dollars or what the business benefits of a project were.”

Beyond that, if you’re thinking at all about striking out on your own or getting work from a small business, local entrepreneur clubs and small-business associations are also good bets. The beauty of smaller, local clubs and associations is the opportunity they offer for face-to-face contact.

Improve your soft skills

Working on your communication, negotiation, relationship-building and presentation talents — the so-called soft skills — can maintain your sense of self-worth now and help you nail a promotion or land a new job further in the future.

Courses are widely available at low cost at local adult education centers and, in some areas, through your local library. Practice the skills you learn as well. Write reviews for Amazon.com — reviews of IT-specific books or any other book or product that excites you. Think of your reviews as an opportunity to practice your writing plus get a little visibility in the process.

Or go a step further and submit a written proposal to speak at a professional association meeting, advises Karten.

These groups are always seeking speakers, and they can benefit from your wisdom and lessons learned.

Being on their agenda creates professional connections that can prove useful, and it also adds a credential to your résumé.

Get smart

Keep sharp mentally and position yourself for the economic upturn by pursuing technical certifications and learning new technical and business skills now. If you’ve been thinking about a bachelor’s or master’s degree, for example, now is the time to enroll. If you’re a manager and want to make it to CIO, enroll in an MBA program. If you have your sights set on being a chief technology officer, go after a master’s degree in computer science.

Another, more affordable, option is to attend webinars hosted by vendors, consultancies and research firms on a weekly basis, often at no charge. Doing so can help you feel less isolated and more in touch with the world outside your office. Webinars can help you stay abreast of the latest tech trends, and they’re an excellent option for the overworked IT pros whose company budgets no longer allow for formal training.

Don’t take it personally

This downturn is affecting companies in every sector and employees of every rank.

As companies cut costs, they’re forced to either overwork or lay off experienced, highly-qualified IT professionals who have done nothing but superb work.

For people still on the job who find themselves constantly worrying about when and where the axe will next fall, Paul Glen has this advice: “Worry about things that are in your control only. Don’t watch too much CNN. It just introduces hysteria. Look around your business to understand the real risks.”

If you’ve been laid off, remember, it’s not you; it’s the economy.

“Being laid off is never considered a negative when managers interview these days,” says Belludi.

“So IT folks should be candid about the fact that they were laid off,” he says. “We ask [candidates] what lessons they’ve learned and what take-aways they have from the problems they’ve experienced while being laid off.”