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It's completely normal to grieve for the loss of your job when you get laid off. But, as difficult as losing your job may seem right now, it can lead to something positive.
Everything happens for a reason. Getting laid off might give you the fresh start you didn't know you needed.
In this training, you’ll learn how to:
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For the majority of us, our social fabric is created through work. We see these people every day. We have work in common. We get to know them in ways the spouses and significant others simply don't. When we leave these people due to job change, it can be painful.
Yet, despite all this social goodness that work can bring, what happens when it doesn't happen to you? What do you do when you don't have friends at work? No one to save you space at a meeting or light up when you enter a room? It happens, and when it does, there's no lonelier place to be. It can be so impactful that it can cause a person to look for another job.
Here are situations you may be facing and what you can do about them:
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You may think you're past due for connecting with people in a deeper way at work. Sometimes the dynamic is such that it simply takes a while and ongoing persistence to break through.
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It doesn't matter if you were misinterpreted. Somehow you did something right off the bat that got you sideways with many of your peers. If you did do something wrong, make amends and don't do it again.
Being the bigger person takes courage, but you will win friends. If there is nothing to make amends for, stay friendly and ignore the undertow. It will eventually fade.
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Just like high school, there are work situations where you are the outsider and will stay that way for an indefinite period of time. Most likely these people have worked together for a while and the bond is tight. They probably don't realize how unfriendly they may seem.
You need to be friendly and make efforts to get to know each person at an individual level. It may take some big work event, like a year-end close, to be the final catalyst that forms the bond. There's nothing like being in the trenches with people to nail the trust and support.
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That feels like a hard message, but it truly is not personal. We all have values and work styles we wear like a suit. They are out there for everyone to see and experience. Many times, when we aren't a cultural fit, we are out of step with the people we work with.
This makes it hard to form friendships. If you aren't a cultural fit, you need to admit it and move on. It not only won't help form friendships, but it won't help your career either.
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For an introvert, it can be tough to push yourself toward people you don't know. When an introvert is surrounded by 'strangers,' it's easy to retreat even further. You could appear kind of wonky and unapproachable, making it difficult for co-workers to approach you.
You've set up your own lonely situation and only you can make your way out. To make it less overwhelming, simply focus on one or two people with whom you feel some form of affinity, and focus on getting to know them. It will help you overall and will become a catalyst for forming more relationships.
Workplace relationships can make or break a job. They can nourish you and help you excel in your career if they are healthy workplace relationships. When those bonds are not forming, it can make you feel very lonely. But there are things you can do to improve the situation. You need patience and a friendly smile.
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This article was originally published at an earlier date.
I have been getting a ton of questions lately on the subject of age discrimination, and I want to start by breaking a huge misconception—the fact that it's not technically age discrimination that you're experiencing. It's experience discrimination.
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What do I mean by that? Well, let me give you a little history. Right now there are about 40 million baby boomers in the workforce. These are people in their fifties, sixties, and beyond, and all of them have decided to stay in the workforce a lot longer than the generations before them.
The problem is that, over the last 10+ years, 70 million people from younger generations have also emerged and entered the workforce.
Millennials and Gen Z make up over half the workforce today, and many of them are now in their late twenties and early thirties. This means that they have enough years of experience to be relevant in the marketplace, and given the fact that they cost a lot less—and oftentimes have fewer bad habits and are more technologically savvy—more and more employers hire them over older, more seasoned, more experienced workers.
Again, it's not really age discrimination. It is a case of the law of supply and demand. If you think about the world of business, there is too much supply—too many seasoned workers—and not enough demand for their skill sets (even with low unemployment rates).
So, what do you do about this?
Well, first understand that this situation isn't only affecting baby boomers. Eventually, millennials are going to get impacted by this as well. This is due to what is called "globalization," and every single day the geographic and economic boundaries to getting affordable help are lowering around the world.
In fact, I was working with a client recently who told me how he could hire one PhD here in the U.S., or hire three PhDs for the same price in Europe. This trend is going to continue. Believe it or not, here in the U.S., we all live in the 1% in terms of income and opportunity when compared to the rest of the world.
So, start thinking about how you're going to change your strategy with respect to your career and your relevance in the marketplace. Again, it's a supply and demand concept. What you want to do is build a way where your skill sets and expertise are in less supply, so that you are higher in demand.
Now that you understand this whole concept, what you want to do is focus on the fact that you are no longer an employee. You are a business-of-one, and your job is to sell and market your services to employers.
For a business to stay in business, it has to stay relevant in the marketplace. And there are three specific things that we suggest people do in order to make that happen for themselves.
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The first thing you have to do is define your personal brand.
You have to understand what you're the go-to person for, what your specialty is, and specifically what problems you solve/what pain point you alleviate. This is because employers can only hire you when you save or make them enough money. When you solve their problems, you alleviate their pains to justify the cost of hiring you.
So, it's on you to get very clear about what your value proposition is, and to do so I suggest that you take our free "career decoder" quiz. This is going to show you what your workplace personas are—the things that you like to do, the tasks that you like to accomplish, and how you like to deliver value in the workplace.
Understanding your workplace personas is the first step in building a very clear personal brand that will help people understand why they should hire you.
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The second step in the process is to follow a smart career strategy. Today, every job is temporary, and we know that school has taught us everything except how to manage our careers.
Now that the marketplace is always changing, you can't build a 5, 10, or 20-year career plan. You can really only do one or two years out at a time. Your career strategy has to be agile, but it has to be very succinct and focused at the same time.
So, at any given time, you should know exactly what you're trying to achieve, both in your career overall and specifically with regard to relevant skills that you're trying to grow and leverage.
What you don't want to do is plateau. Again, I've seen a lot of seasoned workers in their fifties and sixties who got to a certain level in their career and thought, "This is good enough; my skills are good enough." Meanwhile, the whole world around them was changing.
This kind of works like a bell curve. They go up, they plateau, and they start to go down. Now all of a sudden they're trying to get any job they can—but they've also outpriced themselves in the market.
So your job is to always keep focusing on growing your skills, and being able to tell the world specifically what you're doing to upskill every single year.
The third step is for you to work on your career as much as you work in it. The truth is that we can easily get caught up in the day-to-day aspects of our job and kind of grind through our week, our months, and our years without ever really thinking about the strategy of our career.
One of the biggest components of this is networking. These days, your network is your net worth. It's all about who you know.
There are tons of studies that show the best way to get your next job is through a networking connection. If you haven't checked out our video on this, we've got some great resources on networking that can really help you start to understand this—especially with regard to online networking tools like LinkedIn.
A lot of people don't understand that there are protocols that you need to follow in online networking that are very similar to offline or in-person networking. Unfortunately, people have been short-cutting these protocols and making some terrible, terrible mistakes in the process.
So, please make sure that you're digitally networking the right way—growing your network, nurturing your network, serving your network. This is the best way for you to have a healthy network, should something happen and you suddenly need to look for a new job. You'll be able to tap into your professional network without having to start from scratch.
No matter your age and experience level, building these skill sets and having these strategies in place is vital to a successful career. And it's especially important if you're trying to overcome experience discrimination.
Again, you are now a business-of-one, and you need to stay on top of these trends in order to stay relevant. Remember these tips and you'll successfully overcome age discrimination in your job search.
Need help staying relevant in today's job market?
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