By Joyce Lain Kennedy, ChicagoTribune.com
Special to Online Career Tips
DEAR READERS: Here's my annual best-advice column refreshed for 2013.
DIG DIGITAL MOVES. Assuming you don't want to be left by the side of yesterday's road, update your computer-related job search skills. If you're a little shaky on computer, smartphone, tablet and social media skills, look for catch-up resources, including community colleges, senior centers, job clubs, online tutorials and smart teenagers. The clock is ticking.
DEVELOP STRONG TOOLS. When competing for responsible jobs, create customized resumes that match your qualifications to a position's requirements. For hourly jobs, all-purpose resumes still work. The selection job interview remains the make-or-break factor. You may have mastered same-room interviewing, but are you ready to interview by video?
FIGHT FOR MONEY. Learn ever-more-critical salary negotiating skills. If you don't know market rates for your work, you can't fight back a lowball offer. Cruise salary websites.
RECOGNIZE STRATEGIC ZIG-ZAGGING. Consider fertilizing your career climb by judiciously changing employers every few years when opportunity knocks. Job changing isn't high risk if you make quotable, measurable accomplishments for each job, as well as competently check out each potential destination.
TAKE A LONG VIEW. Look at your career as a whole. Don't force yourself into a round hole if you're a square peg. Stay true to your personality and preferred lifestyle -- if you're a water lover, taking a job in the desert won't satisfy your inner sailor. Look at personal timelines for promise, momentum and harvest. If you're still in the promise stage at 45, something has to change or momentum-followed-by-harvest will slip beyond your grasp.
PREVENT OBSOLESCENCE. The only job security you can count on is the transportability of your skills. Do whatever it takes to keep your qualifications mint-fresh and marketable. Caveat: Beware of too much student debt. Check for-profit school prices against public and nonprofit school prices. Remember the "taxi" principal: "Find out the debt cost before you get in the transporting vehicle."
NETWORK FOREVER. Never has it been more important to participate in professional organizations and to network with other groups and individuals -- even parents you meet when driving your kids to school. Contacts you nurture over the years are the people most likely to return your calls and open doors for you when you're in employment distress. Calling only when you need something doesn't motivate others to assist you.
REFLECT ON SELF-EMPLOYMENT. Certainly not everyone should open an enterprise, but if you have strong entrepreneurial traits, running your own business may prove more secure and rewarding than being at someone else's call. Tip: Middle-aged managers who strike out on their own often discover that they lack the risk gene and are cut out to be wage slaves after all. Or they run out of money. Or they find out that it takes a whole lot more to succeed than doing what they love and hoping the money will follow.
PAY ATTENTION. Take time to seriously evaluate where you are and where you want to be. Remaining alert will keep you from being blindsided if your job suddenly disappears as capital chases cheap labor across the globe. That can happen in nearly any field, especially when the work can be digitized, including medicine, law and accounting. It's a myth that only low-end manufacturing jobs are being sent overseas.
In cost-control mode, employers are supplanting permanent employees with independent contractors, temps, consultants and freelancers. And there's no end in sight to the rush of galloping technology that's changing the content of jobs, or eliminating them altogether. The emphasis, subtle but important, has changed from "holding a job" to "doing a job."
This is a historic juncture for American workers and not all will benefit from changes.
AIM FOR FUSION. Whiz-bang technology is everywhere, but some things haven't changed. Don't lose memory of the myriad of decades-long lessons that job seekers have learned through opportunities won or lost, such as being likeable, or never interviewing just before lunch. Wisdom is a stubborn thing.
(Email career questions for possible use in this column to Joyce Lain Kennedy at jlk@sunfeatures.com; use "Reader Question" for subject line. Or mail her at Box 368, Cardiff, CA 92007.)
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