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By Peter Longini
Whether you’re employed and striving to remain so, or between jobs and eager to reconnect with the workforce, your key to success lies in asking yourself some difficult questions and then doing something constructive with the answers. Honesty is critical in both cases. It’s just that the questions are a little different depending on which side of the employment equation you find yourself.
Linda Trevenen, who runs a newly created function at Philips Respironics that seeks to improve the skills of its marketing and product management staff, has some advice about what it is that companies are looking for and how their employees need to fit in. “If you’re currently employed, evaluate the activities you’re doing and ask yourself, first, are they providing value to the strategic plan?” Trevenen suggests. “Second, ask whether what you are doing is providing value to external customers? If you conclude that anything you’re doing is not value-added – which is defined here as being aligned with the strategic plan – then don’t do it.”
It’s also important to work on sharpening the skills that really matter and to make sure those skills and talents fit your job. “Are you in a position where there’s a mismatch?” she asks. “Because if your talents match well with your role, you’re most likely going to flourish. Then if something happens to you, it’s probably because it couldn’t be helped, or that you’re working on an activity that wasn’t needed by the firm.”
That’s because, in the final analysis, your own bottom line is actually the company’s bottom line and it’s your task to find acceptable metrics that connect the two. “Make sure you can draw a direct link between your work and the company’s revenue and profits,” she advises. “When we’re in crunch time, it’s all about measuring effectiveness. Think of your time as a resource; you want it spent well and you want others to notice that it is assisting them in achieving their work. If you don’t get buy-in to those metrics, it may not be worth doing.”
That may be easier said than done because at any given time, there may be dozens of initiatives which your colleagues are working on. “All those initiatives should tie directly back to the question: what is the contribution of that activity?” Trevenen says, even though she admits that some important activities are harder to tie unequivocally into the company’s top or bottom lines.
But you don’t need to do that analysis entirely by yourself. In fact, it can be a real help to call on someone who has perspective on you and your work. “Find a business colleague, somebody who’s seen your work and to whom you’re close enough to ask: what would they hire you for?” she advises. “Ask them: What do you think my skills translate to? Do you think I could work in other departments? If so, in what capacity?’ It’s a way of exploring how to expand yourself because if, for whatever reason, something happens and they had to lay people off, you’d know whether you could pick up a role in another function.”
However, let’s say your job has already gone away. What now? “Some people think the best thing that can happen to a person is being forced reflect on who they are, what they can do, what they want to do, and what they’re willing to do,” Trevenen said. “On average, we only take 20 seconds to read a resume. So if you find yourself out of work at this time, the very first thing you should do is develop a plan for yourself.”
That requires looking deep inside yourself. “Inventory your strengths and weaknesses. Write down your proudest moments and why they were proud or why you were most happy. What were the activities that surrounded the happy emotion? What do you get excited about? What was it about the activity that you most enjoyed? What made you happy as a child? When you were ten years old, what did you tend to gravitate toward in your spare time? What made you anxious?”
Then write your list: What do you want? What is an ideal position? What do you want to accomplish that makes you happy and matches your skills and natural talents? Do you want a big, small, or medium-size company? Do you want to stay close to home? Or to travel? And so forth. Then rank those attributes and sort them into what’s most important. Take the top six and use them to form the dimensions for your plan of where you want to go next.
“Ask yourself what companies fit this ideal profile,” she suggests. “If geography is Number One, then draw a circle and look for companies within that geography – and it may not matter what industry they’re in. If you pick something specific, just recognize why you’re picking it. But now, instead of limiting yourself to your former competitors, you’re thinking more broadly about where you could apply your skills.”
With that guidance in mind, the next task is figuring out who to network with that could help you get where you want to go. But never ask for a job in a networking call, she counsels. “Find out what’s going on with the person you connect with and how you can assist them. Networking is not about solving your immediate problem, it’s about solving your networker’s issue so that they, in turn, will be more willing to assist you. What you really want from a network connection is the name and number of somebody else that may be helpful. Thus, you write your plan before you network so you can be crystal clear about what it is you’re going after.”
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