Holding on to Unrealistic Salary and Benefit Expectations
You can help people deal with this by running a workshop titled How to Find Out How Much Jobs Pay and What Benefits They Offer. This could feature labor market information experts sharing resources, websites and other ways to get this information. You can also propose a strategy where people look for and take a lower paying job or a temporary job as a transitional employment strategy while they keep pursuing a better job.
You will often get pushback and resistance from dislocated workers when you give them the reality check about what lies ahead for them in terms of salary and benefits. No one wants to hear this kind of news. Customers may even get angry at you and “shoot” the messenger. It is frustrating to watch this happen, but with some people who are very resistant and in denial about labor market economics and realities, the best strategy may be to let the labor market be the teacher. I don’t prefer this approach, but in my experience the only way some people will adjust their expectations is by seeing that they can’t find what they want because it doesn’t exist. This is unfortunate and we don’t like seeing this play out, but with some people this kind of reality check is what it will take for them to get the message that they need to adjust their expectations to fit the reality they face. If they don’t do this, they will be making their job search much longer than necessary and they risk the problem of getting job search burnout which will make it even more difficult to get a job.
Resistance to Changing Careers
The one career lifestyle is a vocational dinosaur and these days very few people will only have one or two careers in their working life. Going through a voluntary or involuntary career change is a growing part of the reality of working in today’s labor market. Your program can run a panel presentation titled, Do You Want to Know How and Why I Changed Careers? This can help people learn how to make this transition and get the best outcomes. Sometimes our work with dislocated workers is filled with so much information it can be overwhelming especially when they have been traumatized by job loss. Instead of information, many dislocated workers will benefit much more from hearing from people who have already been through these transitions. If you can shift your work from being exclusively information based to exposing people to real life role models, the lessons of that experience will be a much more powerful teacher than just giving people information.
Helping people get informational interviews from other people who have already successfully made the kind of career change a job seeker is considering can also be a great way to help people adjust to the reality of the multi-career lifestyle. For example, a white collar worker thinking about pursuing a skilled trades career can really benefit from talking with someone that has already made a similar transition like going from being a data processor to a carpenter. Informational interviews with our successful program graduates are an under utilized strategy for helping people learn about the changes they are facing. Think about more ways to incorporate getting information from people with lived experience and you will be much more successful with dislocated workers.
Another way to help people think more broadly about how they fit into the world of work is to encourage them to do volunteer work or get internships that will expose them to other careers. Going on tours of workplaces and training programs can also help to open people’s minds about their future journey in the world of work as they see people do work they may have never imagined being a fit for them. Encouraging people to do some of the assessments that can be found online at https://www.onetonline.org/ can open their eyes to their potential to do other kinds of careers. The transferable skills tools on that website can also be helpful in expanding people’s awareness of their true career potential. The future of the world of work is unpredictable and the people who survive it the best are the ones that are the most flexible about what they will be doing.
Becoming Too Depressed To Job Hunt and getting Immobilized By Unemployment
This is a very common barrier among dislocated workers. Not only are people depressed about the loss of a paycheck and the uncertainly of their future, but they are also depressed biologically. We may not realize it but work often involves exercise. The act of getting up and getting ready for work involves physical activity. Shoveling snow to get the car out of the garage so you can go to work is a form of exercise. Walking from the parking spot to the workplace is physical activity. Even office workers with relatively sedentary jobs can actually often walk many miles in a day. Blue collar workers get a workout every time they go to work. It is important for people to replace the level of physical activity that they got from work with other physical activity that comes from exercise, playing sports, volunteering, walking a dog, jogging etc.
These activities release chemicals in the brain called endorphins that control mood. Exercise is an anti-depressant. You should help people incorporate exercise as part of their job search day and take this seriously. Many unemployed people will think that exercise is a frivolous activity that takes time away from job search, but that is not the case. Depressed job seekers frequently do not job hunt enough to find a job because rejection is too hard for them to take. Depressed job seekers lack energy in interviews, can’t sell themselves and what they can do and often do not come across as positive enough or highly motivated for employers to want to hire them. People who are depressed stay unemployed longer than people that use exercise for its mood altering potential. People should not think of this as wasting time. It is changing their body chemistry so they can fight the depression of being dislocated.
I have seen these strategies work for thousands of dislocated workers. They will help dislocated workers go from pink slip to paycheck in less time than ever. Do you have some favorite strategies for success with dislocated workers? Please send them to me at larry@larryrobbin.com so I can share them in future articles.
