Practical Career Advice for a Turbulent Working World

By Craig A. Edlin and Lauren R. Edlin

Practical Career Advice for a Turbulent Working World is a unique and practical collection of fifty-six inspiring short essays on how to successfully navigate a career through todays turbulent workplace; and find peace, some sense of comfort and contentment in the process!

Drawing on the inspiring words of many of the worlds most preeminent authors, lecturers and business leaders, this book provides you practical career management and job search advice. But more importantly, it also provides a much-needed dose of humanity, compassion and understanding to the sometimes cold, impersonal and grueling career management and job search processes replete in todays turbulent work place.

This book can serve as a career planning and reference guide with specific essays pertinent to your unique career situation, or as an overall idea and inspiration source that can change your career and your life. Essay subjects include;

Finding Peace through Career Turbulence
Can Optimism be Learned?
Be Practical, or Pursue your Passion?
The Art of Career Wisdom
First Things First When Downsized

and many more!

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Nov 7, 2010
• ISBN: 9781452072517

Craig A. Edlin

Craig A. Edlin is a businessman, newspaper columnist, author, lecturer and trainer/educator with over thirty years of B2B sales, marketing, operations and teaching experience. He started his career in factory automation systems consultative sales and marketing. As his management career progressed, he developed and delivered business skills and technology training to a variety of audiences. He also developed and delivered technology presentations, earning the reputation of an accomplished public speaker and trainer that has presented to an extensive variety of industry and academic groups. Later in his career, he applied his knowledge and expertise in the supply chain, industrial distribution and logistics industries, and created and taught masters-level university courseware on these subjects. Throughout his extensive career, he continually captured and documented ideas and concepts about business and life skills gleaned from his reading, his academic training and his experiences. He decided to publish this collection of wisdom in a weekly business column in his local newspaper. Much of this material was also presented by Craig from the speaker’s podium in a series of career workshops titled, “Finding Peace through Career Turbulence.” Friends and associates urged him to collect his writings into this book as a means of helping others who are encountering challenges in their careers, particularly in these turbulent times. Craig is a 1978 graduate of Valparaiso University, where he earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering and he is a 2003 graduate of Texas A&M University, where he earned a Master of Science degree in Industrial Distribution (MID). He and his wife are current residents of Zionsville, Indiana and have three grown children.

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© 2010 Craig A. Edlin. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

First published by AuthorHouse 9/30/2010

ISBN: 978-1-4520-7249-4 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4520-7250-0 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4520-7251-7 (e)

Printed in the United States of America

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any Web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

This book is dedicated to my wife Becki and to our children

Scott, Lauren and Mark.

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Part One:

Today’s Turbulent Working World

1

What’s Behind All of This Career Turbulence?

2

The Myth of Permanence

3

The World of Work Is Change

4

The Positives of Career Transition

5

Work the System

6

The Need for Life Long Learning

Part Two:

Practical Job Search Practices

7

First Things First, When Downsized

8

Start with What You Know

9

Marketing and Selling Basics in Career Transitions

10

An Alternate View of Networking

11

What Hiring Managers Want

12

Congratulations! – You Got the Interview

13

The Art and Science of Good Decision-Making

14

How to Change Industries

15

Service Businesses Differ from Product Businesses

16

Moving from a Large to a Small Company

17

Dealing with the Age Issue

Part Three:

Managing Morale

18

Can Optimism Be Learned?

19

Finding Peace through Career Turbulence

20

Dignity through Career Turbulence

21

Career Search Is a Team Endeavor

22

Get Out There!

23

We All Need To Be Inspired

24

The Goal or the Process?

25

Staying Positive among the Naysayers

26

Big Questions and Tough Answers

27

How to Support a Job Searcher

28

When at Wit’s End, Return to Fundamentals

Part Four:

Practical On-the-Job Advice

29

Getting a Good Start in the Workforce

30

Communications and Handshaking

31

Let’s Not Lose the Art of Conversation

32

Advice to Those Embarking upon Their Chosen Career

33

Proverbs for Business and Career

34

Words and Phrases to Avoid in Business

35

Counter-Intuitive Lessons in Life and Business

36

The Harder Right

37

Following a Great Leader

38

Constructive Criticism Techniques

39

Winning and Losing

40

The Importance of Thinking

41

The Importance of Having Good People Skills

42

Work from Your Strengths

Part Five:

Practical Career Management

43

Managing Oneself – And One’s Professional Life

44

Elements of Strategy

45

Strategies and Tactics of Career Management

46

The Art of Career Management

47

The Art of Career Wisdom

48

Career Planning by Serendipity

49

Adjusting Dreams to Reality

50

Contemplating a Management Position?

51

Considering a Job in Sales?

52

Does Intelligence Guarantee Career Success?

53

Using Your Aptitudes Provides Career Satisfaction

54

Be Practical, or Pursue Your Passion?

55

Career Lessons from My Friend Al

56

It’s Never Too Late!

Final Thoughts

A Romance and Festival

Acknowledgements

I’d like to say thank you to;

My wife Becki; for her love and ceaseless support throughout my years of career turbulence, and for her enthusiastic support of this project all along the way. I could not have done it without you.

My daughter Lauren; for her collaboration on this project and her support and skill exhibited through her wonderful illustrations.

Karin Hamilton, a wonderful big sister and consummate professional educator; for her belief in me, her wisdom and her many ideas used throughout the book.

Andrea Hirsch of the Zionsville Times Sentinel; for allowing me to initiate my writing career, providing me nearly total free reign with my articles, and for her encouragement to write this book!

Paul Burch; for being a loyal friend during the good and tough times and always taking an interest in my career goings-on, including this project.

Harry Curnow; for being a good friend, a great boss three times over and for teaching me the importance of people and relationships in business.

Dr. Scott Robison; for his encouragement in the early days to keep on writing when topics and inspiration were sometimes tough to come by and doubts were plentiful.

And to all the readers of my weekly newspaper column, who continued to stay with me through good and not so good columns and offered up comments of encouragement when I needed them most.

Introduction

This book is an eclectic mix of essays on topics that have the common theme of practical career navigation strategies and tactics in extremely challenging (or turbulent) times.

These essays began as weekly business columns in my home town newspaper. Many of my comments are directed to active or potential job seekers trying to make sense of the career turbulence happening around them. I hope that you will find them interesting and beneficial, whether you are out of work and looking for a job or are currently gainfully and happily (or perhaps unhappily) employed.

I want not only for this to be a good learning experience for you, but also to serve as a source of support and encouragement through what has become an era of extreme career turbulence.

What do I mean by the term career turbulence? Think of the analogy of encountering turbulence at an altitude of 30,000 feet while traveling along in an airliner. Regardless of the weather conditions of the day, the ride can suddenly become quite bumpy and erratic due to the encounter of pockets of turbulent air. Other aircraft traversing the same airspace ahead of you can report experienced turbulence to flight service personnel that will warn your pilot of an impending rough ride. But sometimes it comes along unanticipated, and it is always unpleasant and certainly unwelcomed. The good news is that the aircraft is designed to be strong and resilient enough to survive the worst of the turbulence, not to mention an inordinate number of rough landings! But one must keep the proverbial seat belt buckled, hang on, and ride it through to the destination.

These bumps in the flight are found in the working world in the forms of dead-end jobs, dramatically changing professions, downsizings and rightsizings, firings, the rise and fall of entire industries, and the commoditization and de-personalization of jobs, to name just a few. And the rough landings? They are represented by landing in a job that is not all you had hoped it would be, or a less than ideal interim position taken to pay the bills until the right job comes along.

The reason this book was written was to offer some help to those that must deal with daunting career turbulence. However, it was also written in response to a dose of some personal guilt that hit me a couple years ago!

Throughout my thirty plus years of work in the field of industrial B2B sales and marketing, I have attended countless business and personal improvement seminars, listened to audio recordings, kept learning journals, collected famous quotes, and read interesting books. I have traveled on business in Europe and Asia, earned a bachelor’s degree in engineering and a Masters degree in business and attended a wide variety of professional development workshops. In the course of engaging in all of these activities, I kept copious notes, to the extent that I have piles of journals and notebooks of great material. But so what? The guilt set in when it dawned on me that all of this valuable knowledge was helping no one! It really wasn’t even helping me – as these piles of journals and notes were seldom read or consulted.

Dr. Edward Free made the following comment on the subject of unused knowledge; The saying that knowledge is power is not quite true. Used knowledge is power, and more than power. It is money and service, and better living for our fellow men, and a hundred other good things. But mere knowledge, left unused, has not power in it. It only makes sense to share my knowledge in order to bring about practical use and application in others’ business lives.

The thought hit me to voluntarily write a careers column for my local newspaper, with the idea that I could help others navigate through career turbulence via what I had personally encountered and learned along the way. My personal career history has been one where I experienced two downsizings, two significant recessions, company ownership changes, mergers and acquisitions, and dramatic industry changes. As a result, I have personally experienced all the career searching and soul searching activities associated with severe career turbulence. Coupled with my collection of journals, lecture notes, etc., I had the knowledge and experience to speak with some authority about tough career turbulence issues. A very kind and willing editor of my town’s newspaper gave me the opportunity to do so. I started a weekly column in the throes of the recession of 2007-2010.

One day, a lady walked into the office of the newspaper and asked if she could purchase a copy of Mr. Edlin’s book. Her daughter was going through career turbulence and an associated job search at the time. She had been sending copies of my articles to her daughter for advice, ideas and moral support. When informed that no book by Mr. Edlin had existed at that time, she purchased a copy of all the newspaper editions where my column appeared. When the editor informed me of this, it became a logical and reasonable idea (and inspiration) to create this book out of the material that has been published in my columns. You are reading the result.

If you, or a friend or loved one, are experiencing any sort of career turbulence, this book is for you. My desire is to be a helper – to give you ideas and advice surely, but to also offer up some support – some comfort and compassion. Career turbulence can be a grind for sure, but there is hope and a way out if one crafts and follows a good plan and keeps a good attitude about the whole endeavor.

Through my career turbulence, I found that resources for managing a career and a job search are prolific. There are countless how-to books and internet sites concerning such things as determining your values, drafting a personal marketing plan, writing a killer resume, etc. But I found that managing one’s morale, which is a matter of the heart, is not as well covered out there in the turbulent working world. Hence, although my book is intended to be a very practical guide, I devote a considerable portion to the softer side of things – to managing thoughts, priorities, attitudes and even one’s demeanor through the struggles one may encounter.

I proscribe to the tenets of andragogy, or adult learning, as proffered by Malcolm Knowles and other educators. And as such, I don’t serve as much as a teacher as I do a helper or facilitator. You bring your experiences, education and point of view to the reading of this book. My ideas are just that – ideas, and I know there is room for interpretation and debate. It is my genuine hope that through this book, I can also serve as an equipper – providing information, knowledge and a unique point of view that creates a framework by which you can assess your career and derive strategies to survive in the midst of what has become and probably will always be a turbulent working world.

This book is a labor of love also from a family perspective. My daughter Lauren provided the illustrations. It is our hope that they add some spice and characterizations to the book that makes it more enjoyable and coherent!

So buckle up and join us as we seek and discover practical career advice for this turbulent working world of ours.

Craig A. Edlin

Part One:

Today’s Turbulent Working World

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1

What’s Behind All of This Career Turbulence?

We must drop the idea that change comes slowly. It does ordinarily – in part because we think it does. Today changes must come fast; and we must adjust our mental habits, so that we can accept comfortably the idea of stopping one thing and beginning another overnight. We must discard the idea that past routine, past ways of doing things are probably the best ways. On the contrary, we must assume that there is probably a better way to do almost everything. We must stop assuming that a thing which has never been done before probably cannot be done at all. – Donald M. Nelson

No doubt about it, careers are under tremendous stress. Countless professionals are either dissatisfied in their present position, or have been subject to downsizing and are seeking a new position, perhaps in a new field of work. Unemployment is at a twenty five year high in this country, and the commentary from the business press, as of this writing, portends more.

Welcome to the working world of 2010 and beyond! Whether you attribute it to globalization, bad policy, or normal economic cycles, we are in the midst of extreme change and we must learn how to manage our careers through it.

Recently I had the pleasure of meeting with a fine gentleman that had unfortunately been downsized from a prominent local non-profit organization. He was in senior management and the board decided that they no longer needed his services.

What a bright and capable guy he is, and with a fabulous resume! He has extensive experience, great skills, and a wonderful ability to communicate. He had been downsized from a differing employer years ago, so he knows the drill. I am therefore sure he will find a suitable and prominent position elsewhere.

Now, in all fairness, I certainly am not privy to the whole situation and perhaps there were things going on unique to this situation that forced the company’s hand in taking this action.

Nonetheless, I wondered how on earth anybody would let someone of his caliber go. There seemed to be no logic or justice to it. Companies appear to do things that make us scratch our heads in amazement. Many companies seem to be in a perpetual downsizing, repeating the process on an annual basis with no end in sight. How do we explain this, particularly to youngsters that someday will enter the business world?

Obviously, the current global economic recession is forcing companies to dramatically reduce operating expenses in order to remain profitable. However, downsizings, rightsizings and other forms of corporate re-engineering have been underway since the 1980’s. Something else has been happening in the business environment to cause all this job turbulence.

Business Professor and Author John Coyle describes this phenomenon in his book Supply Chain Management as follows; all businesses operate in a very dynamic environment in which change is the only constant. Characteristics of consumer and industrial-buyer demand, technology, competition, markets and suppliers are constantly changing. As a result, businesses must redeploy their resources in response to, and in anticipation of, this ever-changing environment.

And what’s the cause of all this constant change? It may sound a little cynical, but its progress. Change, in the form of innovation, has always been an element of business and it is a driver of progress. Industrialist Charles Kettering said; "Research is an organized method of trying to find out what you are going to do after you cannot do what you are doing now. It may also be said to be the method of keeping a customer reasonably dissatisfied with what he has. That means constant improvement and change so that the customer will be stimulated to