Are you as relevant as you should be?

I read a recent post that talked about how ageism was being widely practiced and that the percentage of over 40's was the target. The participants went on to discuss how at recurring networking events the age of attendees visibly under age 40 was minuscule, and this seemed to support their position. While I'm sure age discrimination is occurring in many places across the country, I also propose that the relevance people feel they have might actually be on the wane. "We have all these valuable skills" I hear people say; but are these skills really prized by the new leaders of companies today? Are you giving your employer the skills they want/need or are you giving them what you think they need? Much like professional sports, no matter how many championship titles you've helped your team win, regardless of how many Superbowl rings you have in your possession, as soon as someone that can deliver more for less, and for longer, is available, they'll likely take your starting spot. I submit that as a work-force we're becoming victims more of consumerism than ageism. To support this theory with a fairly commonplace example, it can be more cost effective in many cases to replace an average-performing piece of equipment with something that is newer, faster, and with more bells and whistles (not to mention more memory) than to spend the money upgrading what you have for potentially zero ROI. Not coincidentally we're either becoming (or have become) the "older" people we used to talk about replacing, and the only way to avoid being categorized as obsolete and expendable is to be as current and relevant (redundancy intended) as the people who want your job.

I don't mean to drone on about relevance, but how relevant are you? Take for example the 20-something CEO of Facebook; 15 years ago he would have been a gross anomaly, but the leaders that were his age in the dot-com days are now in their mid to late 30's and for them networking doesn't necessarily mean spending an hour or more (plus travel time) to be somewhere in-person for the sake of networking. IM chat, Email, text messaging, social networking sites, Second life, smart phones, iPads...these are the venues for the new networking meetings taking place and, with the technically saavy, they can all be occurring simultaneously! I'll occasionally hear derisive comments regarding this multi-tasking, labeling it instead as A.D.D., an obvious lack of focus, or something similar, but these are the skills that current leadership seems more likely to purchase and promote, so my encouragement is STOP labeling and START LISTENING to what your employer/client is telling you is important to them, even if they're not telling you directly!

I'm not suggesting you give up on what you do well or that you try to be other than who you are but, on a regular basis, you should at the very least be asking yourself if you're connected to what you employer wants or if instead you're offering what you want them to have or feel they need. If it's the latter...you run the risk of failing the relevance test. To personalize this further, if you purchased something expensive and it had all the features you needed at the time, but then the time came you no longer needed all these options (wanting other or different options) and could find them in a newer model for less than the cost of an upgrade, what would you choose to do? ...vinny

Light at the End of the Tunnel...it's HERE!

I wrote this in March of 2009 but wanted to re-post for those of you who may have missed it:

So if you're one of the recently unemployed, are you out there pounding the pavement, scouring the job boards, maybe spending way too much time on Facebook and at pity-party lunches while simultaneously trying to figure out where your next mortgage payment will come from? Give yourself permission to...STOP! Having been both a Corporate and Agency recruiter for a dozen years and having prepped, coached and counseled hundreds of job seekers through the dot-carnage, I believe good will ultimately come from this mess too. Companies doing business will continue to hire new employees, just maybe not at the rate to which we grew accustomed, and the World probably isn't coming to an end any day soon...if it is, unemployment should be the least of your worries. Leverage your network of personal and professional contacts, put pride aside and let everyone you know that you're actively looking for your next engagement. Try not to look or sound desperate, regardless of how you may actually be feeling because, well, because you know how that will be received. Chances are good that you were good at what you were doing, else you wouldn't have been hired in the first place, so keep your optimism alive and open your eyes wide to what may be around you. (oh, but if you weren't good at your last job, start thinking about why that was and then take steps to either make changes or choose a different path!) Ask people close to you what they see as being your strengths and I repeat, keep your optimism alive! The hardest question for most people to answer (in any economy) is, "what do I want to do?" You might start by listing things you have a passion for doing and then listing the the things you're good at doing (e.g. listening, writing, building, coaching, training, working with children, writing software applications, etc.). Can you connect the dots? When you're passionate about what you do, you simply do it better, regardless of how difficult or easy it may be. People will frequently confuse what they've done for years with what they're "good at doing", and that may not actually be the case. Find your passion and pull out all the stops to see where that may take you. Clearly there's never been a better time than now to do this exercise and understand that you have all of the power necessary to change your own life. There is no "silver bullet" solution to the problems we face and neither magic nor the government is likely to deliver us from where we are, but know that YOU can be the "silver bullet" as well as the magician capable of delivering yourself from where you are to the where you want to be...vinny