Let the tiptoeing begin. As of July, companies worldwide had already shed more than 1 million jobs this year, and with London, Hong Kong and the Wall Street’s recent financial woes, that figure is sure to grow. Chances are, someone you know will meet this unpleasant fate in coming months; while outright avoidance may work when it’s junior’s Little League coach, handling a relationship with a friend or coworker who’s recently suffered such a blow needs a delicate touch. Below is an edited version based on interviews with several hundred laid-off employees of an edited version of Baber’s ins and outs of lay-off etiquette1 .
If the person is… Your colleague: Baber: Let’s assume this is a person you know has done a great job, because, as we all know, the axe falls on the worthy and the unworthy. At the very moment, say “I’m going to stay in touch with you.” Then what you can say is, “Sit down with me, go through your resume with me” and, as a co-worker, point out your successes as a team or projects that person has excelled at. The key thing you can offer is to introduce your coworker to the people you know, because you can bring to your coworker circles of people your coworker will never be able to enter except through you. So you have a great gift to give.
Bob from down the block: Baber: Again, two-thirds to three-quarters of white-collar jobs are found through networking. For a neighbour, you can introduce him to different people and get his resume to different companies that he would have never had a chance to find on his own. Ask about what he’s done in the past and about what kind of jobs he’s interested in, so you can go through your Rolodex and see if there are contacts that he might benefit from meeting. Also, if you’ve ever lost a job, tell him. Misery loves company. Remind him that it happens to a lot of good people.
Your spouse or another family member: Baber: You hear all the time about the people who put the suit on and go to the office because they can’t stand the idea of trying to talk to their spouse about losing a job. So never say “You should have” or any of the blaming stuff. It’s over and you can’t change anything, so you have to say “I’m upset and I’m worried, but we’re going to move forward.” And take the time to talk.
You: Baber: Do not race around to contact people. Take 20 days before you start to job hunt again. Eat healthy, exercise and take the time to reassure your significant other. Getting laid off can lead to a series of emotions not unlike mourning, and spouses feel that, too. You have to get through the emotional reaction. This is advice based on research of people who took 20 days and wrote daily about their feelings. By doing that, you can get rid of the toxic stuff that will leach out in your conversations with other people. You can fulminate or say “why didn’t I” or call your boss names, anything you want. And then at the end of the 20 days, burn what you wrote. And you’re ready to get on with your new life.
Good luck to all those concerned with getting a new job and hope your perspiration never fail you.
1 – TIME Magazine Kathleen Kingsbury sought the advice of Anne Baber, co-author of How to Fireproof Your Career,
I saw this on a website and thought I might as well create a British version of what I think could make a good and insightful straightforward good-humoured reading; enjoy.
University is a great place to learn and have fun. But let’s not kid ourselves, some degrees are as useless as the plot in a Jennifer Lopez film. Here’s a list of 10 degrees that I think may be interesting, but might not do jack-shit for you in the real world.
Why It Won’t Help You Get a Job: With an art history degree you could maybe curate an art gallery or work at a museum or….yeah, that’s it. That’s all you can do. And seeing as how every art gallery and museum I’ve ever been to have exactly one dude sitting quietly at a desk reading The Sun and eating a food that requires chopsticks, I’m going to go ahead and assume there’s not a lot of positions open in the field. That means you’re going to have to venture out into the corporate world. And let me inform you, when you’re interviewing with Bob from the HR team at Asda who’s wearing a multi-coloured tie that has no clue of what stress you went through to get that not-needed degree of yours, he’ll be pissed off if you ask for anything more than a shop floor role.
What Job You’ll End Up With: After your parents boot your ass from your bedroom to make room for anything that’s not your bedroom, you’ll wander towards the nearest coffee shop and get a job there, which will allow you to meet artists who will thank you for allowing them to put fliers by the cash till that inform people of their upcoming show that touts “the combination of art and flute.”
Why It Won’t Help You Get a Job: This isn’t ancient Greece: No one is going to pay you money, or allow you to sodomize their attractive son, in exchange for your knowledge of existence. Never has there been an employer who’s said “Man, we’re having all kinds of problems, I wish we had someone on our team who could reference and draw conclusions from the story of Siddhartha that would pull up our fourth quarter numbers.” I took many philosophy classes and it involved reading and smoking a shit pile of weed. You don’t need to pay 3,150 pounds a year to do that. All you need is twenty pounds and a library card.
What Job You’ll End Up With: Thanks to your extensive knowledge of philosophy, you’re now self-aware enough to know that most jobs out there will make you totally miserable. So most likely you’ll wait tables part time and hope someone starts paying you for the bi-monthly entries on your blog.
Why It Won't Help You Get a Job: If you're not named Achmed or Xiang or Ying ,Mate this isn't a degree, it's the last 18 years of your life. If you really want to study Chinese, Russian or Arabic you don't need to go to some stupid class, you need only to sit back and watch a two-hour block of Must-See TV to understand these countries. After doing my own research, it seems that this would just be a waste of time reading about all these countries (Vietnam, Thailand, Tibet, Indonesia, Korea etc) while thinking at the end of a 3-year course, you’ll be employed ahead of some people who have been able to get their heads down to do some serious studies in more challenging degrees. Come on, get a grip. Oh and you can probably travel to Thailand for free while doing your degree and get some proper tan and learn to make some Thai cuisine other than that it’s juts a bloody waste of your personal resources. I think I have just recited all you need to know about the degree in like, 20 seconds. OK, now give me my degree.
What Job You’ll End Up With: To take these degree studied one step further, you will be qualified to do 40-50 years of “graduate work” cleaning tables and taking orders and doing deliveries in Chinese and Thai restaurants as there’s a lot of them sprung up in a lot of countries. Oh, and you might be lucky to get a 2minutes slot with BBC during the news (provided there’s a major political even that has sprung up) but you’ll have to be praying constantly for negativities. God help you. Or possibly you might just end up spending your money building their economy travelling the world while you think you’re learning something.
Why It Won’t Help You Get a Job: I didn’t even know this was a degree major until I found it on the UCAS website. According to their actual explanation of this degree: “BA (Hons) Music Practice is a course that allows students to concentrate on composition and performance of original music without relying on the approaches of traditional music education. It is designed for those who want a complete, practical and vocational music course and who are creative, committed and innovative musicians.” Which is a big, fancy way of saying “We’ll teach you how to make a mixtape.” I guess I, too, am a qualified music “practician” because nowadays when you tune into Radio 1 and check out the charts, all you see are these new comers who cannot more than sign their own signatures and the likes of “Umbrella” staying on the chart for more than 6weeks. The NME magazine have been crediting the likes of Dr. Dre, Coldplay Take That with 5stars in creativity and I bet that does not come with a degree. How you want to go and waste three to four years of your life in the university to make creative music that people could dance to is beyond my imagination.
What Job You’ll End Up With: After realising that yoga studios and elderly homes don’t pay people just to come in and set mood music, and you realise after graduation that you would not end up on many people’s list when it comes to being invited to Glastonbury’s Festival, then you’ll realise how far you’ve gone in wasting your life. You might probably sadly end up putting your degree towards burning a fire to keep warm because you are homeless.
Why It Won’t Help You Get a Job: Go into a communications class on any given day and it’ll smell like dried semen and booze. Reason being, communications is the degree for anyone who wants to graduate, but doesn’t want to stop getting totally wasted on weekdays. Here’s the bad news, if an employer is going to hire someone to help decipher how human beings communicate, he’s going to hire someone with the letters “Dr.” before their name, not the person who first checks to see if a class is offered online, then when they find out it’s not, let’s out a “gaaaaay bro.” This degree in the other sense should be free because you just need to test yourself on how well you could chat up a lady and draw a table and out of five ladies you try your luck on see how much you succeed. Repeat this for a period of 5 weeks and you’ll realise whether you are a failure or not. See, all it takes to earn this degree is a couple of pints in the pub and BANG – you’re a communications guru.
What Job You’ll End Up With: You’ll go to several job interviews that turn out to be pyramid schemes, even though at first you won’t realize this and come home and tell your parents, who you still live with, “They said I’ll probably be making six figures in less than a year just by selling these beer cozies.” – Well said!!!
***The next 5 will follow soon. Thanks for reading. ***
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