The economy is in the toilet. If only the job market were that good. Employment is somewhere between the septic tank and the leech field. If you haven't lost your job, chances are someone you know has. If not, you are either lucky or next in line for the pink slip yourself.
Jobs are important to people. If the jobs themselves are not important, the things the income provides--food, shelter, TP--are, and losing them can be every bit as traumatic as any other big loss. The five stages of grief have been exhaustively studied, so expect psychologists (the ones still employed, anyway) to move on to the Five Stages of Unemployment.
Stage 1: Panic
Don't listen to the people telling you not to panic. It is perfectly normal. All part of the process. Panic all weekend long--and it will be a weekend For some reason that is probably analyzed at length in MBA programs, Friday tends to be the day to get fired, right before anyone who could possible hire the newly-unemployed person head out for a weekend packed with not looking at resumes. Stage 1 is marked by a fear of what is going to happen, imagining of worst-case financial scenarios, a general sense that the world is falling apart, and mental tallying of all the purchases you have made recently that, in light of your new economic situation, seem downright stupid.
Stage 2: Obsessive Math
This stage is marked by a frantic tally of just how much income you need to keep the necessities going and how long your current liquid assets will allow you to keep a roof over your head. While this stage does not do much to alleviate the panic of Stage 1, it does hone your spreadsheet skills. Remember to insert "Excel proficiency" in the resume.
Stage 3: Throwing Yourself at the Job Market
Once the initial wave of "Holy Crap" subsides, it is replaced by irrational exuberance. Stage 3 is marked by sending updated resumes to any biped with a pulse. Careful here, or you may find yourself working for the emus. Working with the emus is fine. Working for the emus is just asking for trouble.
Stage 4: Assess the Skills You Did Not Realize You Got On The Current Job And Consider Changing Careers
Pretty self explanatory. Sometimes it works, sometimes not. Here, you can expect to remain irrationally exuberant, but with some direction, just as long as you didn't get trapped into a long-term contract with the emus.
Stage 5: Develop A Plan
This is the part where rational thought starts to creep back in to the process in earnest and you start to figure out a strategy for job prospecting, making ends meet until some of the prospecting pans out, and dealing with the realistic worst-case scenarios imagined in Phase I (amazing how many of them seem a bit overblown in retrospect).
In the spirit of bad qualitative sociology, the above is not backed up by any research more rigorous than my own experience and that of friends and family who have become economic roadkill.
1 comment:
I recognise these stages, and have experienced them. I remember one time, going out knocking on doors seeking work, and had prepared resumes for different skills, like engineering, storekeeping and driving. None of it did any good, and our Jobcentre was worse than useless. That, because they had so many dead-loss people on their books that local employers would not use them much.
Try networking,
Nimrod
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