The New Job Security, Revised (Electronic book text)

Introduction
Career Whiplash
Any changes in your work life lately? You might be laughing right now, saying, “Where do I begin?” Whether you’ve been let go from your company, chosen to leave, are looking for something new, want to grow within your current company, or just want to hold onto what you have, the dynamics of the job economy have changed dramatically in recent years. Career whiplash is now a preexisting condition for most of us.
 
Despite this new job economy, with its sharp transitions, intense competition, and high churn rate, too many of us are using old career management skills. Regardless of your age, it’s easy to have picked up old expectations, old habits, and old mind-sets. If people around us are looking for work, we assume that how they’re approaching it is correct, right? Bad habits are contagious. Ask yourself:
 
• Do I look primarily for approved job openings, typically through the Internet?
 
• Do I keep my head down at work, doing my job without tracking marketplace trends and developing skills I’ll need to be in demand in the future?
 
• Do I strategically stay in touch with those in my network and help them even when I don’t need anything in return?
 
• Do I negotiate win-win situations to get the money and working conditions I want?
 
If you answered “yes” to the first two and “no” to the second two, you have old job skills with the attendant career risk. In the new job economy, learning the 5 best strategies will put you out in front, making sure you’re in charge rather than unemployed or stagnating. Out in front is where you want to be.
 
This book is your guide to the new rules for career management. Using current research and information gathered from more than thirty years of experience as a national career management consultant, I have identified and integrated results-driven approaches for people who want to develop their own New Job Security. Contrary to popular opinion, there is job security out there; its location has just moved. The New Job Security is centered in you, not in a company. It’s portable.
 
 
Creating Your Neck Brace for Career Whiplash
It’s a good thing that job security is portable, because we’re moving a lot The statistics in ExecuNet’s Executive Job Market Intelligence Report (2009) bring home our dramatic lack of stability. Executives expect to hold a job for 5.6 years and end up doing so for only 2.3 years. We think that we’ll work for the same company for 6.6 years, but we remain employed by that company for 2.8 years. What we plan for and what happens are two different things. The call for our own independent plan for job (or career) security is clear. Is the idea that you’re in charge new? No. What’s new are the ways that people find jobs, whether they are looking for a new position within the same company or trying to break into a company from the outside. What’s new is the economy, in which you’re a hot commodity one year and yesterday’s newspaper the next. What’s new are the demographics: boomers are finding themselves searching for jobs at middle age, and Gen Xers are discovering that the start-ups have stopped. What’s new is th