7 Reasons To Recession-Proof Your Next Career – Now
Let’s look at seven reasons why you’ll want to recession-proof your next career reinvention—now.
1. Moore’s Law
Named for the co-founder of Fairchild Semiconductor and CEO of Intel Corporation, Gordon Moore’s prediction that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles roughly every two years has been used for decades as a guide for long-term planning. and to set goals. for research and development. But he can also use Moore’s Law to prepare for a down economy by using technological innovation every two years as a marker.
Act now: Visit a local coffee shop or library and start building or updating your career schedule for the next two quarters. By completing this activity, you’ll know when it’s time to start your next career reinvention and whether it needs to be ramped up (something to start in the next two weeks) or if you can pace yourself and start the process in the next two weeks. months.
2. Crossing the abysses of complacency
Too often, organizations allow complacency to seep into the cracks of the culture, creating blind spots that produce outdated products and services. This is how business leaders and managers kill innovation, slowly and almost methodically ignoring the death of creativity while punishing personal risk-taking within their roles.
It’s easy enough to expose complacency within your organization if you choose to remove your blinders. In fact, by strengthening your peripheral vision, you develop the foresight to anticipate problems before they happen. It’s like having the ability to see around corners, a kind of sixth sense, where you see early warning red flags waving before they go up on the flagpole.
Due to the importance of peripheral vision, especially in personal development risk taking and innovation capacities, we delve into this topic in two of our sowing change online shopping 30 days to a recession-proof reinvention and The Scrappy Corporate Entrepreneur.
Act now: What have you done to advance your career in the last two years? If he hasn’t taken courses, workshops, or classes at least every quarter, it’s likely that he’s becoming obsolete in his current position. This would also be a good time to update your resume as the job market continues to change.
3. Tipping points matter
Just as companies cannot afford to ignore strategic inflection points, neither can professionals afford to miss out on strategic inflection points. four critical signals indicating that it is time for a professional reinvention. By proactively managing your Personal Inflection Curve (PIC) stay alert to career opportunities and watch out for underlying organizational currents that signal early changes in business and in the workplace.
You want to avoid overlooking your personal tipping point and the red flags warning you of impending risk that you are heading down a downward slope. The amount of energy and effort required to reinvent yourself when you’re in the doldrums is much greater than if you proactively reinvent yourself before the curve.
Four Signs of Your Personal Inflection Curve (PIC)
- Intuition as a key navigation tool
- OCC- the optimal time for you to change
- Connecting the dots: bridging the old you with the reimagined you
- Peripheral vision: see around corners.
Act now: We guide you through these oven signs in our recession-proof reinvention online course. Check it out to see if it’s right for you!
4. Innovation advances
Technological advances did not stop during the Great Recession nor will they stop during the next recession. Business research and development units may not be fully funded for a while, but innovation cannot be stopped or contained for long.
In fact, innovative breakthroughs often occur at times of great stress: fear walks a fine line between stimulating our creativity or shutting it down completely.
Atlantic senior editor Richard Florida suggests in his 2011 article for the magazine that we look at recessions as an opportunity to “reset,” as innovations emerging from hard times will once again fill the landscape with economic decline. Reboots can be seen as repeat opportunities.
In the case of the US auto industry, the Great Recession turned out to be a laboratory for innovation.
Act now: Innovating on demand is a differentiator, and companies want to harness the entrepreneurial energy and creative thinking that can make this happen. On a scale of 1 to 10, how innovative would you say your performance has been in the last 12 months? Map out your short-term (3-6 months) and medium-term (9-12 months) plan to leverage your existing capabilities and enhance your entrepreneurial skills.
5. Economic recoveries take longer
Let’s not forget that it took the US economy five to six years to fully emerge from the Great Recession that officially only lasted from 2007 to 2009, mainly because households and institutions had to get out of economic debt financially.
One of the topics I deal with in my book Innovation in a Reinvented World: 10 Essentials for Succeeding in the New World of Business (John Wiley & Sons, 2011) is the idea that the wider gaps that exist between a recession and an economic recovery can negatively affect both potential employers and employees due to skills misalignment and therefore , possibly prolonging the employment recovery.
The companies I profiled in my book recognized that skills gaps existed just as the economy was coming out of the worst recession since the Great Depression and hiring was starting to pick up.
Searching for professionals with advanced technological knowledge and experience after a two-year employment gap meant that for a large portion of unemployed career professionals they were no longer seen as competitive in a rapidly changing field. So unless a professional was able and willing to finance their own enhanced training, they would be out of luck given the limited government resources available.
For some generations, it may be hard for people to imagine another prolonged economic recovery given that in 2019, the US and other countries are now experiencing low unemployment numbers. This could be why “ghosting” has become such a big phenomenon in recent years, as recruiters deal with the rebuff of candidates who initially accept an offer, only to back down or not show up. absolutely.
According to recent research of 1,202 US managers by recruiting firm Randstad US, more than 43 percent of Generation Z employees, those 22 and younger, say they have misled a recruiter or employer. . This figure drops to 26 percent for millennials (ages 23-38) and Gen X-ers (ages 39-54), perhaps because these generations remember the economic pain of the Great Recession. Millennials are likely to face the side effects of GR and pay disparities for decades to come. On the other hand, the ghosting effect of baby boomers (ages 55 to 74) was only 13 percent.
There is no hard data on whether ghosting will have a negative impact on professionals after the next recession hits, especially for Gen Z workers who were too young to have experienced the pain of unemployment after the Great Recession.
Act now: Build relationships in areas that spark your curiosity: new role, new project, or even a new industry. Rebuild relationships where you may have burned a bridge or your reputation may have been sullied, for example, by misleading a potential recruiter or employer.
6. Leaps in technology
Going back to Moore’s Law, let’s take a look into the near future and consider how industries, businesses, and organizations might change if technological leaps occurred every two years. Advances in artificial intelligence, automation and robotics are already altering the way businesses operate today and will transform the way functions are performed and the way professionals collaborate within the workplace with intelligent humans and machines. .
We hear about how millions of jobs will be lost due to these advanced technologies and that many more jobs will be created. But the biggest challenge right now is that no one can say for sure what skills these replacement jobs will require.
This makes planning to close “job gaps” and planning for the future a bit risky, unless you are dealing with more obvious tech roles like AI engineers or machine learning designers. A good rule of thumb, no matter how fast these technologies advance, is to strengthen their foundational capabilities, such as adaptability and complex communications, as well as develop or hone skills associated with project management and change management.
Act now: Take a look back at reason #5 about economic and jobs recovery taking longer during deep recessions. You want to be as prepared as possible for potential training gaps as emerging technologies take hold. Would you be willing to finance your own training to remain competitive? Does your employer offer you opportunities to improve gold reconsider? If so, have you taken advantage of this training? What are the industry trends for your line of work? If your job disappeared in sixty or ninety days, what would reinvention look like for you?
7. Planning career pivots
Don’t underestimate the amount of time career pivots could require if economic conditions quickly go south. Optimism will serve you well in most situations; however, pragmatic optimism will serve you even better. What-if planning is never a bad thing, and if you’re a project manager or change professional, you can never go wrong by having a Plan B, a Plan C, and if complexity warrants, a Plan D.
Planning for the future is not the same as being afraid of the future. You don’t want to be so careful with your choices in life that you never gamble or take intelligent and informed risks.
Career success in today’s fast-moving environments and market ups and downs is about reinventing yourself before and ahead of the next economic tipping point. Personal Inflection Curve (PIC).
Act now: It’s time to get back to #1 about visiting your local coffee shop to work on your reinvention timeline, and while you’re at it (it may mean another cup of your favorite coffee or tea), you’ll want to start developing a more comprehensive reinvention plan using he act now activities in this article.
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