Finding Work and Keeping Work

Hello again.

Many of you may have known: I was laid off last year. I am far from the only person this happened to. I was laid off in May from what was at the time my favorite job I had ever had. Working for a great company (Leo Burnett, in their digital ARC Worldwide division,) working with great, very smart people, working for great clients and companies (Kelloggs, primarily) and then: gone. It was unfortunately a purely numbers decision. Everybody was cutting costs, and my salary was a big enough cost that it warranted cutting. I get that.

I did get a severance package but it only covered me for maybe an additional two months. I didn’t find work again until the last week of August. When I did, it paid roughly 1/3rd of what I had been making for the past eight years. (Note: I will not name names or figures. Just because.) This meant that as the months wore on I fell further and further behind on bills, rent, the ability to afford food, the ability to afford transit, etc. Add to this that transit fare also rose in the past few months. This would prove to be an additional burden.

Many of you may be aware that I finally did secure a decent new job which puts me essentially in the same kind of position (Tech Lead / Senior Developer) at a company I genuinely love (6 Degrees, working in their Real Interactive division) working with some more extremely smart, funny, talented people. I started in January and it’s been great.

Why I say all of this is: finding work has consistently been something I’ve been good at, and something I’ve been good at assisting others with. I’ve personally written cover letters for just over 30 friends of mine, and assisted with editing and prepping their resumes.  I pre-set a time limit for how long we take at massaging the resume or the cover letter, and depending on who it is or what industry it is, I may take a stab at a few kinds of resume. (Functional versus historical, etc.) It’s been very educational for me because it takes me out of my own personal work history and familiarity with my own work background and instead forces me to examine this as “net new” content. I have been successful with all but three of these resumes, and until last year I was very successful with my own resume.

Last Summer’s events nearly broke me both financially and in other ways, and it made me question everything about how I look for work, and how well I do what I do. It also made me question whether it was time to find something completely different to do for a living.

My reason for mentioning all this is that I know many people who are on the fence about completely changing their career path. Some work in quasi-entertainment industry (I can’t really refer to it strictly as the music industry anymore,) some in design, some in advertising, etc. Those kinds of decisions excite me because I actually really enjoyed my career transitions. I have had three so far. First was retail, but always tied to entertainment. Second was music industry in all its facets, spanning three cities and at least ten job descriptions. Third was interactive / web / digital, where I remain despite the derailment of last Summer.

If I want a more extreme example of a very drastic career change, I need look no further than Brainrub founder Kim Stewart (Stewie, The Stoob, etc.) In the 15 years she and I have been friends, she has been a journalist for a couple of different US dailies,  a copywriter for a variety of online magazines including MSN in its very early days, a travel writer for Expedia, and – most recently – a paramedic, recently working with the US International Medical Surgical Response Team (IMSRT) where she was deployed in Haiti for two weeks, working in a tent hospital.

I strongly encourage you to read her personal blog where she accounts her experiences there. This story, especially, is worth a read.

I guess the point I’m trying to make is that especially if you’re unemployed right now, and especially if you’re discouraged, do not give up hope. There is work to be had, even if that means taking a huge pay cut. (I can’t say that was a necessarily wise decision on my part, but it’s one I made, and I survived it. I’m not alone in that.) If you think you may need to switch careers, there are support systems to help get that going too. In my case I was considering becoming (no joke) a carpenter apprentice, something I might still do in the future. I also debated going back to cooking, something I did for a very brief stint between 1990 and 1992. (But I do cook all the time.)

The work is out there. It may not be the work you want, but it is some work, which at least can take your mind off of the stresses of having no work.

More importantly if you’re in a job you despise, and you wish you could be doing something you feel you aren’t qualified to call your main source of employment, you might be surprised at some of the support methods out there to get you started. If you’re younger than I am (note: just had a birthday) you have an even greater chance of receiving support since it’s mostly younger workers who gain these benefits.

Another thing is: I think we could all agree that the concept of keeping the same job for decades is from a bygone era. I used to know people who worked for Eatons, a century-old department store that went bankrupt in 1998. Before the bankruptcy was even on the horizon (and this was a shocking event in Canada. Eatons was an institution,) the people I knew who worked there had supervisors who were on their 30th year of employment in whatever position that was. I can’t imagine that at all today. I don’t know anyone who can. I’m sure they exist, but their days must be numbered.

So I embrace the fact that even my shiny new job that I love could still be vapor in a few years. That’s no statement about my confidence in my own work, or the strength of the company I work for. It’s just… the facts. GM declared bankruptcy last year. In fact they did so the very day after I was laid off. If I needed an example to complement my personal life-change, that would have to be it. (Leo Burnett does quite a few TV ad campaigns for GM.)

I’ve been working steadily since I was 16. I find that there has really never been a shortage of jobs out there. The shortage is in great companies, smart people and great clients. (In my case anyway.) There are ways to find those also, and fortunately or not that involves a great deal of effort and diligence.

Personally I’m still striving for my ultimate career switch: astronaut. I doubt that will happen anytime soon, but then I never expected to be in the field I’m currently in either.

Thanks for reading.

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