Careers After 40: App Yourself!

By Ron Harding

Ron Harding is the author of three books, Making Creativity Accountable (on Amazon.com for twenty-one years!), Arts and Entertainment Marketing, and App Yourself! Your Skills, New Careers. This new book is your roadmap to successfully change careers at a later time in life or find work in todays new competitive marketing environment. Hundreds have found new satisfying jobs that fuel their passion and increases their salary. Find your new career with Careers After 40!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: Mar 14, 2013
• ISBN: 9781466985674

Ron Harding

Ron Harding is an award-winning author of two books. He has been a contributor to Advertising Age and Business Week. Harding has been profiled in the Boston Herald and the New York Times. He served as supervisor at Procter & Gamble for nine years and director at Gillette for twelve years. Additionally, Harding has been an advisor to nine Fortune 500 companies, career counselor, copywriter, entrepreneur, film critic, lecturer, marketing director, motivational speaker, small-business consultant, and voice-over announcer. For twenty-three years he has been professor of communication and marketing at Boston University, Curry College, Emerson College, and Northeastern University. Harding received the Distinguished Teaching Award in 2011. He is president of Harding & Company, a management training and career development center for eighteen years.

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© Copyright 2013 Ron Harding.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written prior permission of the author.

ISBN: 978-1-4669-8568-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4669-8567-4 (e)

Trafford rev. 03/12/2013

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Table of Contents

Preface

1  Your First Job

2  Loss and It’s Many Faces

3  Leading from Strength

4  Hemisphere Matters

5  From Dishwasher to Recording Artist

6  How Others See You

7  C, S and I People

8  An Inventory of Your Skills

9  What’s Your Passion?

10  Blue Sky Thinking

11  A Rich and Satisfying Life

12  Preparing to ‘App Yourself’

13  App Yourself

14  The Information Interview

15  C, S and I Success Routes

16  Some Success Stories

17  From Bartender to Hospital Manager

18  Secrets for a Successful Job Interview

19  References, Salary Negotiations and Contracts

20  Entrepreneurship

21  Company Size and Growth Opportunities

Copyright, 2012

About the Author

Ron Harding is an award winning author of two books. He has been a contributor to Advertising Age and Business Week. Harding has been profiled in The Boston Herald and The New York Times.

He served as Supervisor at Procter & Gamble for nine years and Director at Gillette for twelve years.

Additionally, Harding has been an advisor to nine Fortune 500 companies, career counselor, copywriter, entrepreneur, film critic, lecturer, marketing director, motivational speaker, small business consultant and voice-over announcer.

For twenty three years he has been Professor of Communication and Marketing at Boston University, Curry College, Emerson College and Northeastern University. Harding received The Distinguished Teaching Award in 2011.

He is President of Harding & Company, a management training and career development center for eighteen years.

App Yourself!

Your Skills… New Careers

Ron Harding

Preface

For those forty and older, App Yourself! is your road map to a successful future. Whether you have lost a job, or are looking for a new career that better uses your talents, "App Yourself’ has been written to help you focus on your existing talents and market them in today’s competitive market.

Job loss is perhaps as devastating as a divorce or the death of a spouse. I know because I have experienced both. My struggles in dealing with an unexpected firing lead me down several paths, none of them successful. This allows me to speak personally to you about my failures and my successes. I now have five careers going simultaneously, all of them based on past experience and new ways to market myself

I began career counseling with friends in my church who had lost their jobs because of age, off-shoring or new software programs that eliminated their position. Finding I had a knack for this, I began to formalize a program that investigated their personalities, talents and work history.

Using this program, I began working at it professionally. To date, over one hundred people have found new jobs with my counsel, in three to seven months. They include a part time polyurethane worker who became a designer of guitars for internationally known rock artists, a truck driver who became a successful pastry chef and supplier to some of the finest hotels and restaurants, a free-lance middle manager who signed on as a consultant to one of the nation’s biggest wireless telephone companies, an athletic coach at a small college who nearly doubled her paycheck by working as a salesperson for a large rehabilitation equipment company.

As successful as they became, most also point to their personal enhancement in renewed energy, passion for what they do, full use of their talents and greater self esteem.

Future career success is based on a simple idea. That is, the work experience, skills you already have are transferable to at least six other career paths. You don’t have to keep sending out resumes, get additional training, or go to ‘job fairs.’

What you need to know is that the marketplace has changed dramatically as have ways of marketing yourself. This book will help you re-examine your personality, your marketable skills and show you how to meet with decision makers who are eager to hire right now.

Read on…

Your Personality

Your Personality

1

Your First Job

How did you find your first job? Chances are your family played an important role in that decision making. If you were the first born, the family’s hopes, social status, real or imagined, were riding on you. From the earliest years, the first born are given to understand they are responsible for carrying forward family values, establishing themselves in a position that has a sense of importance both to the family and relatives. Were you the first born? You probably found yourself being interviewed by some mature friend of the family. You were treated like an adult, expected to achieve some prominence in a chosen field. (http://suite 101.com/article/does-birth-order-affect-your-personality-a241455)

You were expected to be conservative, follow orders, play by the rules. Many first borns are given little choice, often being expected to fulfill unrealized dreams of their parents. Sociologists call these ‘inner directed people’ meaning that the voice of a parent forever echoes in the mind. All the attention showered on you made you ambitious, responsible and yet measured by someone else’s expectations. The downside of this attention is that your own creative choices were limited. You may have developed perfectionist standards in attempting to measure up, and given in to bouts of anxiety about performance. The loss of a job, especially for the first born, carries with it a feeling of ‘a fall from grace.’ Men especially lose more than a job. They lose self esteem. Often their personality and their job title are self identifying characteristics. It is not just economic dislocation, it is a personal reappraisal. This reappraisal tends to focus on self imposed limitations. Supposed short comings in personality loom larger than a genuine inventory of skills, aptitudes, experience, positive characteristics and ingenuity, all the proven capabilities you have worked so long to establish.

Does this sound like you?

If you are the second born in the family, the older sibling represents a given path you may wish to avoid.

The second child sees the first born as ‘competition’ for their parents attention and will set goals for themselves that may be in direct opposition to where the first was directed. First born an ‘intellectual type? Second born may want to succeed in sports.

The second born child is probably a better read of family dynamics, often siding with one parent, then the other. Second borns may be ‘smoothers’ inside the family or overtly aggressive. They will tend to be more influenced by their peer group than their parents. They probably are greater ‘risk takers,’ and are ‘outer directed people.’ Outer directed people want group acceptance.

This can well promote anxiety. In his book The Lonely Crowd, Harvard sociologist David Reisman, refers to this group as ‘radar people,’ constantly sending out signals to their desired peer group, to discover what the group feels about current issues: politics, sexual ethics, abortion rights, authority figures.(‘The Lonely Crowd’ David Riesman, with Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denny,Yale University Press,1961, pages 24,25)

Without the restraints imposed by relatives, organized religion and traditional values, they are more suspicious of rules, laws, and established institutions. Think of recent demonstrations against Big business, Wall Street, Government. How many are second borns? They are certainly acting out ‘group think.’

Does this sound like you?

If you are the third or later born, you will probably be given a greater set of options. You are the ‘baby’ of the family, as much raised by your older siblings as your parents. You may be one of the ‘latch key’ kids. You are less predictable, often affectionate. You may also be more manipulative, less likely to accept blame and given to immature behavior.

Your approach to work is more adaptive. You are pretty sure ‘something will come along.’ If not, moving back in with the family is always possible. You are, after all, the baby of the family.

Does this sound like you?

Ask yourself where you fit into this equation. Now ask yourself whether your parents urgings set the dynamics for the job you first landed. Given your current analysis of your past, is this the job you would have picked for yourself?

What probably happened was that you were successful in your first or second job. You used those skills the job demanded. In a very real sense, you cut your expectations to be a good fit for the job you ended up with. You got married, had kids, gained more expertise in that job you were ushered into.

About age forty-five, you may have had a real wake-up call. You were fired, divorced, brought up short. Some like to call this a mid-life crisis. What it really may be, is a time of taking stock of where you are now. You suddenly realize you are not going to live forever. Your parents may be dead or you’re supporting them. You still have a long way to go in your working life and you may be asking yourself, "How