There was a telling article in The Wall Street Journal last week, http://tinyurl.com/kotph7. In a recent survey of 179 companies by consulting firm Watson Wyatt Worldwide, 52% said they expect to hire fewer people in the next three to five years than they did prior to the recession. 20% said they’ll make recent salary cuts permanent, and 46% said they’ll retain increased employee contributions to healthcare premiums. The lone bright spot in the survey is that 25% of the companies asked felt that their results had already bottomed out. That’s up from 13% just 2 months ago. That still leaves 75% of companies believing that the bad times are going to continue for a while. How long is the question.
I happen to believe that we’re in the midst of a paradigm shift in this country’s job market, not dissimilar to what occurred following the Great Depression. Recent events have been so dramatic and far reaching that I believe almost every aspect of being employed will be changed for many years to come. That includes unemployment rates (higher), number of incomes in each family (fewer), compensation packages (smaller), and most importantly, how we go about finding and landing a job. Here’s a few predictions.
Following the popping of the dot.com bubble earlier this decade companies found that with so much talent suddenly available, it was easy to lay workers off when business got soft and hire them back when things improved. The recent tsunami of layoffs has just solidified that practice. As so many of us have learned, no job is safe anymore. The lesson for people who still have jobs is to do everything necessary to hang onto it. This is what employment experts call “making yourself indispensable”.
And if you are thrown out of work, rest assured it will take longer to land your next gig than it has in recent memory. Obviously, a lot of factors will impact the amount of search time including profession, geographic location, salary requirements, etc. but the bottom line is you’ll need to work smarter and harder to land your next job. There is a wealth of material online that can help. Unfortunately, much of it is reheated lessons from books written years ago, when the job market was stronger and employment practices were much different.
Which is my cue to make a little plug for my newest book – “The 7 Deadly Job Search Sins” http://tinyurl.com/mzc7ut. In it, I detail the most common mistakes job seekers make in today’s treacherous job market. It exposes those old style practices that just don’t work anymore and I offer new strategies and approaches to get around these costly errors. You can purchase a PDF version for just $9.95, the cost of couple of lattes. But wherever you get your information from, make sure the practices you adopt are geared to today’s changed employment environment. It’s a whole new world out there and if you want to get out of the unemployment line you need to be ready for it.