Your Career for the “New Era”

When President Barack Obama, fresh from his inauguration just a few minutes before, told Americans that this was a “new era,” he wasn’t telling anybody anything they didn’t already know. With nearly every institution that has been at the center of our lives for as long as we can remember ripped to shreds, you don’t have to be a president – or a genius – to realize that a “new era” has begun. Mainly because so many of the institutions of the “old era” have more or less ceased to function in the ways we all go used to. Real estate, finance, big business, banks – they’re still there (for the most part), but things are just different now. How could they not be, after the shocks of 2008?

And in 2009, it appears those shocks are hitting home, as businesses begin the business of laying off workers in earnest. If you’re a victim, I feel your pain; it’s a hi-tech road I’ve been down before. And as many of us learned in the last downturn in 2002-3, things change after a major industry crackup; new companies demand skill sets you may not have, and while retraining is always an option, you don’t want to spend months learning some new skill only to find out that it has a limited shelf life. While there might be many jobs in requiring X skill right now, the question you have to ask is – what happens in five years, when you’re of a “certain age” – the age where computer industry bosses think you’re “overqualified” (i.e., too old and too expensive) for their business?

Even if you do do have the option of remaining in the same industry, you’ll still want to choose the right employer, one who will be around for the near and mid-term, at least; you may get a job now, but if you find yourself having to look again a year from now, you’ll be a year old, and a year more “overqualified.”

For many people right now, the immediate question is how to pay next month’s mortgage, and hopefully most of us will figure out how to keep going in “survival mode” for as long as it takes. But you still need a long-term plan that takes into consideration the day after tomorrow. Where do you see yourself – where would you like to be – in five years? Maybe a better question to ask is, will the industry you decide to get involved in still be there in five years? It’s probably a question that in a million years would not have registered on the radar of the 2004 MBA grad crowd, but as they – and the rest of us – have so painfully learned, anything, even the impossible, can happen.

There are no shortage of sites that claim to tell you what the “hot” areas of the economy are going to be – which is probably where you would want to be, if you can get there. I’m not talking about general predictions, like how people are going to be scared of real estate or stock market investments for a long time to come, but professionally researched predictions that claim to have a fix on the up and coming business and industry trends. In the computer business, for example, the best-known “industry prophet” is the Gartner Group (http://www.gartner.com/), which watches trends in all areas of the computer industry. At http://xrl.us/beemod, for example, you can see Gartner’s predictions for the Eight Mobile Technologies to Watch in 2009 and 2010, and at http://xrl.us/beemrv, you’ll find Gartner’s Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2009. Gartner makes its money by producing reports that predict trends for companies and industries (reports that cost a lot of money), so the Gartner “top tens” are pretty general.

Besides Gartner’s professional predictive systems, there are many sites that rely on “the wisdom of crowds” (www.randomhouse.com/features/wisdomofcrowds/) to give you a clue on what’s in store, the theory being that the many are wiser than the few. Ziitrend (http://www.ziitrend.com/), for example, is a site where anyone can make a prediction on anything, with site users voting on the likelihood of the event happening.

For most of us, both these approaches are a bit thin; they may be useful as water cooler talk, but we need something a bit more solid on which to build a future. If you’re being pushed into a career shift, you want to make sure you pick the right career to shift to, after all. We need a little more insight on where things are going.

If you thought I was building up to introducing a site that can predict the future – well, I apologize; nobody knows what is “really” going to happen. But: I can help point you to sites that will give you ideas on how to make those predictions for yourself – the potential areas you should be looking at, based on your skills and interests. Assuming you are in touch with your own experience, background, skills, etc. (if you’re out of practice on how to write a resume, interview, etc., by all means check out http://www.jobhuntersbible.com/), the ideas here will hopefully give you some insight about how to think about the future, thereby making it easier for you to make a decision on investing your time, helping you to figure out what stable industries and businesses are out there that you qualify for.

If we’re in a new era, it’s time to think differently, and one way to learn how to do this is to check out different “thinking methodologies” – like Triz, a Russian acronym for the “Theory of Inventive Problem Solving.” The system was developed in the former Soviet Union between 1946 and 1985, by Soviet engineer and researcher Genrich Altshuller and his colleagues. Boiled down to its basic core, Triz has two general principles: “1. Somebody, someplace, has already solved your problem or one similar to it. Creativity means finding that solution and adapting it to the current problem”; and, 2. “Don’t accept compromises. Eliminate them” (http://xrl.us/beemve). There are all sorts of Triz success stories out there (http://xrl.us/beemvp), with companies employing the 40 principles of Triz (http://triz40.com/aff_Principles.htm) to solve industrial and business problems. At (http://triz40.com/), you’ll find the “Interactive TRIZ Contradiction Matrix,” which demonstrates the system as applied to real problems.

Triz certainly qualifies as “thinking differently,” but can it help you figure out where you’re going? I believe it can. First of all, just getting exposure to different approaches to problem solving helps jog the brain, and pushes you to get more creative about solving your problem. Problem solving is what Triz is all about, and there’s no reason Triz problem solving methodology can’t be used to figure out employment and career problems, not just industrial production problems. That, in fact, is the theme of an article (http://xrl.us/beemxn), on the Triz Journal site (http://www.triz-journal.com/), probably the best resource online for insights into how to think Triz (note that there are many “professional” Triz sites that charge money for their services; the Triz Journal is completely free, and has at least as much information as the others, from what I could see).

Remember, we’re taking a long view here, so it stands to reason you’ll have a better chance of getting to where you need to go – and figuring out where that should be – using a scientific approach. Finding a job – one that you can be reasonably sure you’ll still have next month, much less next year – is a “job” during normal times, but in today’s economy, it’s more akin to rocket science. Actually, maybe we should make that “Triz science!”