JibberJobber is officially 4 years old! May 15 was our anniversary, celebrated with cake and brownies and hurrays! This week I’m taking a break from normal blogging to share some thoughts I brainstormed yesterday as I had a new challenge presented to me – a challenge which I’m quite emotionally involved in.
In the last four years I have talked about how to find a job, job search tactics, job search strategies, guerrilla job search stuff, etc. Because of my bias I tend to write about and for white collar PROFESSIONALS, just because that’s what I am. I also tend to ignore then career counseling question of “what do you want to be when you grow up,” because that usually hasn’t applied to me.
Yesterday, however, I sat down with a good friend who is in a job search. This is a guy who can fix anything, and has spent his entire career working with his hands. I’ve seen his work first-hand and it is wonderful. He’s an artist, a craftsman, broadly talented, and takes considerable pride in his work. He recently transitioned out of the direction he was headed in his career and is in a step job right now to make ends meet – but it’s not where he wants to end up.
He told me that he has worked the last 14 days (night shift – yuck) and looked exhausted. I asked him what he was doing in the job search and he shared a bare-minimum strategy with me. It’s hard to do a job search when your step job is so exhausting, but the bigger problem was, it seems, he didn’t know where to start, or what to do. He was doing “job search stuff,” but it is the normal stuff that isn’t enough.
We chatted for about 20 minutes and then I spent the next hour brainstorming what I’d tell him, or help him with.
That’s what this blue collar job search will be about. I bet it will go into next week and I’ll probably make an ebook out of it.
Please contribute your own ideas and thoughts and tactics as I blog about…. tomorrow we start with what I think might be the first step… any guesses on what it is?
The JibberJobber Blue Collar Job Search Series:
- Blue Collar Job Search – How To Find A Blue Collar Job (5/17/10)
- Blue Collar Job Search – What Do You Want in a Job (5/18/10)
- Blue Collar Job Search – Identify Target Companies (5/19/10)
- Blue Collar Job Search – What Job Titles Do You Want? (5/20/10)
- Shame (5/24/10)
- Blue Collar Job Search: Your Elevator Pitch (5/27/10)
- Blue Collar Job Search – Personal Values Propositions (5/28/10)
- Blue Collar Job Search – Job Seeker Newsletter (6/3/10)
Happy Birthday! You know this is one of my favorite blogs to read…. I use it to share solid advice mixed with a little inspiration 😉
Wouldn’t the first step be what it generally is for “white” collar work? See who your friends know. That’s how a lot of my college buddies got jobs.
Kate, I would have thought so, before Sunday, when I really started to think about it. Not sure if it’s a blue collar thing or just someone who is so stressed with keeping his head above water, but I really got involved emotionally with my buddy’s dilemma.
What I realized was:
– he is NOT computer savvy at all. He can fix any motor or build a house from scratch or fix any problem in my house/yard, but he’s not an email/internet guy,
– he is at a point where he is showing signs of being desperate (I’ll take anything)… I was there, too, but the types of jobs he’s talking about are not career-level jobs that are appropriate for him. He already has a step job, now he needs to focus on his next career-level job. he’s not sure what that means, or what questions to ask…
Based on these two things, especially the second, I had to think in a way that I haven’t really thought before. I found my process for him was more detailed and more step-by-step, and the first few posts don’t even go where I would have gone before.
There are a number of organizations/churches that offer help for job seekers. They could set him up with an email account, show him how to use Monster, CareerBuilder, Indeed.com, etc. Those organizations are often great places to start networking.
I would also encourage him to reach out to all his former customers and network with them. (I second Kate’s suggestions.)