Finally, some media outlets are starting to notice: Not only is this a Boomer Recession; it’s also a Guy Thing.

Just by the numbers, it would appear to be open season on persons of the Y-chromosome persuasion, who comprise about three fourths of the layoffs. It made headlines a couple of weeks ago when the U.S. unemployment rate, despite administration promises to the contrary, jumped to 10.2 percent.

What wasn’t reported was that for persons of the X-chromosome persuasion, the rate was only 8.8 percent. For the rest of us, it was 11.4 percent. God golly, Miss Molly.

“Since the U.S. became the world’s dominant economic power, no downturn has fallen more disproportionately on one gender,” wrote Paul Kuhn of the Wall Street Journal http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704576204574531453974382142.html. “We now have the largest jobless gender gap since tracking became possible in 1948.”

Or as a senior executive at my former employer (Focus on the Family) used to say, “pale, male and stale.” (Didn’t America used to have laws against this sort of thing?)

OK, for some perverse reason, the graphic absolutely refuses to link here.  So, instead I’ll offer this: Just prior to the recession, the female percentage of the workforce was 49.1 percent. Considering a half million new unemployed persons per month–75 to 80 percent male–over such a protracted period, is there any doubt that we now have a predominantly female work force? Then come the obligatory questions, starting with the implications of a society where the stay-at-home dad is the new norm.

Early on, the august New York Times simply attributed this disparity to the hardest hit–and coincidentally male-dominated–economic sectors of manufacturing, construction and finance. While there may be some truth to this, it just didn’t  have the full ring of truth.

More likely, it’s the fact that the people with the most seniority–and the highest pay–happen to be male. So, the fastest way for most employers to get back into the black is to give the Pink to the Blue.

I refuse to provide a link to the New York Times coverage of this. To read the comments of people cheering the demise of some of our fellow citizens should be more than a rational mind could bear.

It’s Monday–and here are some resources specific to interviewing and résumé & cover letter writing:

“Knock ’Em Dead Résumés: Smart Advice to Make Your Online and Paper Résumés More Productive” by Martin Yate, Adams Media, Avon, MA, 2009. This latest edition adds updated Internet resource information for job searching, networking and company-specific research. It adds fresh examples of types of interviews, strategies to promote your distinctive components and new examples of interview questions.

“Résumé Magic: Trade Secrets of a Professional Résumé Writer” by Susan Britton Whitcomb, Jist Works, Indianapolis, IN 2006. Combines great tips with 50 before-and-after résumé transformations to explain the “nuts and bolts” of résumé creation. This guide illustrates professional techniques with actual examples that show why they work. This book also includes marketing techniques to make the reader’s résumé content and design stand out, and expert advice on cover letters, references, networking and careers.

“15-Minute Cover Letter: Write an Effective Cover Letter Right Now” by Michael J. Farr and Louise M. Kursmark, Jist Publishing, Indianapolis, IN 2005. Dozens of professionally written cover letter samples are included in this step-by-step coverage for developing intriguing cover letters. Farr is a prolific writer in job hunt resources.

“Interview Magic: Job Interview Secrets from America’s Career and Life Coach” by Susan Britton Whitcomb, Jist Works, Indianapolis, IN 2004. The author walks the reader through the distinctive types of interviews (telephone, panel, stress, or behavioral) and aims at boosting your interviewing competency, courage and confidence.

“Nail the Job Interview! 101 Dynamite Answers to Interview Questions” by Dr. Ron and Dr. Caryl Krannich, 2006. Interview preparation can be one of the most overlooked job-hunting areas. The authors highlight how to anticipate 101 questions, provide thoughtful, compelling responses–including positive responses to negative and behavioral questions. Drs. Krannich recommend focusing on your accomplishments, communicate positive nonverbal messages and ask intelligent questions. They provide application of 45 key interview principles.

Almost 15 years ago, Mel (Melinda) Marsha faced a monumental decision. She was director of the office of technology planning for NCR in Dayton, Ohio, where she had worked for 15 years.

But in the summer of 1995, the technology giant was planning major layoffs. Mel thought if the severance was big enough, this might be her ticket to getting out of the corporate rat race and starting her own business. It was, and she did.

“It is not often that you can get someone to essentially finance the first couple months of your start-up,” she said at the time. Mel was one of the handful of personal stories I used in my original 1996 unemployment book, then called Reinventing Your Career.

Fast forward to 2009. I tracked Mel down several months ago to see how her dream had fared in the intervening years. It turns out that Acorn Consulting (no relation to the community organizing racketeers) is alive and doing quite well in Springfield, Ohio, my old hometown.

The Change Game

There turned out not to be enough room in the new “Back to Work!” book to include all these updates, so I share it here. Her business has prospered and grown. Acorn Consulting specializes in helping companies improve organizational effectiveness, specifically through strategic planning.

See Acorn Consulting’s site at http://www.acorn-consulting.com/.

When the local paper did a feature story on her, Mel thought ahead about lessons learned and distilled her advice into talking points she calls “The Change Game”:

1.    Wake up. Realize that change is happening and you have to do something about it.
2.    Take stock of yourself, your own strengths, your own interests, your wishes and dreams.
3.    State goals very specifically. This is what will be different a year from now, a month from now, six months from now.
4.    Decide what is your first step.
5.    Take that step.
6.    Take stock. Assess what you’ve done. Assess where you still need to go and then go back and take your next step.

Mel took a big risk, and it paid off. She said, “Where people fall apart in that is making the decision to do something that will cause the change. People are really good at wishing and talking about it and saying, ‘I’ve always want to,’ but they very rarely will say, ‘What will I do to move me toward that path?’”

To read the entire Q&A interview with Mel Marsh:

(more…)

“Back to Work!” is getting noticed. We’ve done a half dozen radio interviews thus far, and the phone is ringing more frequently each week. Today I did an interview with Faith Radio in Montgomery, Alabama, where host Bob Crittenden was kind enough to provide a link: http://www.meetinghouseonline.info/download/AdamsSNovember2309.mp3

Please take a listen. It was a good interview, and we actually had a little bit of fun with it. Thanks, Bob!

Farewell to the job

Did you know that work in the form of jobs is just over 200 years old? (No, but if you hum a few bars, we’ll see if we can fake it…)

It’s true. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, everybody who wasn’t a slave was essentially what we’d call an independent contractor today.

The workplace was the village, the field and the home, where craftsmen, farmers and families did their work without time clocks, employment contracts and management consultants. In frontier days the pioneers may have worked themselves silly part of the year, but when the larder was full, they took the rest of the year off–without a single qualm. That’s the way it had always been.

Then came industrialization, and now the workplace became the factory and the office. Even your educational system, as Alvin Toffler has so eloquently pointed out, morphed into factory-model schools:

Raw material in. Structured processing through division of labor. Finished product out. A 12-year assembly line, as it were.

Our thinking has become so conditioned to factory-model work as the norm, that it’s hard to grasp that it all may have been no more than a momentary blip in the human experience. Here’s what I’m saying:

This is not your father’s recession. When the music stops this time, some of us will find ourselves without chairs. There’s going to be a net loss of jobs–perhaps now and going forward indefinitely.

It won’t be picking up where we left off, as before. It will be a sea change, a paradigm shift–and it will be irreversible.

Some of us won’t make that shift. Aging boomers in their 60s are bouncing off the walls, trying to figure out what they have to do to get a job, not knowing that for many of them, it ain’t gonna happen. There will be some tragedies. But for most people it’s not the end of the world, or anything close.

We just have to change our own paradigm. There will still be work; it just won’t necessarily be in the form of an employer-employee contract. Increasingly, it’s going to be in the form of work for hire for PICs–professional independent contractors.

I’ve had to learn how to make this paradigm shift, and Back to Work! is comitted to helping you do so, too.  Stay tuned. It may be a wild ride.

I’ll admit I’ve been fortunate. During these last two stints of unemployment-cum-self-employment, we’ve had my wife’s health care coverage to lean on. We haven’t missed a beat.

But it certainly is an issue for many other freelancers and professional independent contractors who are not so fortunate. So much so that it’s helped fuel the bandwagon for single-payer government-run health care–one of the worst mistakes, in my opinion, this nation could ever make. (Imagine health care delivered by your local auto license bureau, but without all the ambience.)

Our purpose is not to re-hash the political debate here, but to point out some practical alternatives less drastic than cutting the patient’s throat. Some local chambers of commerce and other private business organizations, for example, offer health plans for sole proprietors.

During my first stint of freelancing-out-of-necessity, I was fortunate enough to be living in northeast Ohio, where I was able to purchase reasonably priced health insurance from a small-business coalition called the Council of Smaller Enterprises. It’s an idea that should be replicated everywhere. Premiums were reasonable because, together, this small-business coalition had buying power. Still does.

Here’s a great resource: The Artists’ Health Insurance Resource Center at http://www.ahirc.org/. The home page provides an interactive map where you can just click on your state to find out what’s available. And here’s their mission statement:

Our mission is to make quality, affordable health insurance and health care available to every artist in the United States. AHIRC.org is an up-to-date, comprehensive and unbiased database of health care resources for artists, performers, freelancers and the self-employed.

Here’s another good one: The New York-based Freelancers Union offers health insurance coverage in 30-some states. See http://www.freelancersunion.org/. And there’s a kicker–it’s free to join the Freelancers Union.

So, there are at least three good options right there. I’m sure there are others, too. If you know of any, please feel free to share.

Yeah, I’m a bit of an Internet gadget freak, if you haven’t noticed.

Here’s another interactive map, where you can watch the deepening of unemployment state by state from December 2007 on and select up to five states to display on the line graph to the right relative to U.S. average unemployment. Go here: http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/JOBSMAP09.html.

Become a fan

Back2Work is growing. We’re getting more resources posted, the audience is growing and now it’s taking off with Facebook Fans. We’re up to 265 in the first week. To become a fan, go here http://www.facebook.com/pages/Back2Work/176292758575.

You think you’ve got stress? Try dodging bullets for a living. Concerned about an upsurge in suicides in the past year or two, the Army retained the services of an expert to help devise a response.

Dr. Thomas Joiner, a professor of psychology at Florida State University, has done some of the most cutting-edge research on the subject in recent years. Joiner, whose own father committed suicide, has created a new model of behavioral theory that the Army is weighing. It involves three prime components:

1. Loneliness–a sense of isolation.
2. Worthlessness–the feeling of being a burden.
3. Fearlessness–one’s ability to overcome the natural fear of death.

Obviously, No. 3 is integral to being trained for warfare and not optional. So, the Army is looking to ways of combating and reducing the first two. These include building close-knit teams to ensure that soldiers never feel alone and giving troops a sense of purpose that increases their self-worth.

Notice I’ve added “Hopelessness” to the list. That’s for us civilians who might not be able to relate to Fearlessness. Not that it doesn’t happen. Joiner and other experts have found that fearlessness increases with age.

As one doctor put it, “As people age, they are also more likely to develop (based on various life experiences) the fearlessness which transforms the simple desire for death into a plan for action.”

Let’s bring it home: If you’re self-employed by necessity–your fulltime job left you–you must watch out. Small businesses typically don’t make money for several years. It’s easy to get discouraged and fall into loneliness, worthlessness and hopelessness.

Guard against Relational Deprivation. Work ever harder at maintaining and building your personal network. Seek “close-knit” relationships and activities that give you a sense of purpose. Often that means serving others.

My friend Mark Carlen understood this when he, too, was laid off a year ago from Focus on the Family. He immediately formed a support group, where I met him, called Out of Focus. I’ll close with this quote from Mark that I include in the book:

“The isolation one feels when looking for a job can seem overwhelming. … The knowledge that I am making a contribution to someone else’s well-being keeps my spirits high.”

For the first time since the Great Depression, the economy seems to be having a significant effect on one of society’s most dreaded metrics–the suicide rate. It’s up.

Our intent here is not to shock, but to offer a word to the wise: If you live in the United States, people are almost certainly killing themselves in your community over joblessness. It may not be the only reason a person takes his life, but it’s often a case of the last straw for a distraught individual.

Professionals tells us that unemployed people commit suicide at rates two to four times greater than the general population. And with the big spike in unemployment during this Great Recession, the preliminary indications are for a big jump in the suicide rate. There’s been a sharp rise in calls to suicide hotlines this year, according to MSNBC, from 39,000 in January to 57,000 in June.

Counties across the country are reporting a jump in the suicide rate from 11.1 deaths per 100,000 in 2006 (the latest year for which figures are available) to levels last experienced during the Great Depression–17 to 18 per 100,000. An added complication for the unemployed is that many of them have also lost their health coverage, including mental health benefits.

We’ll explore some of the implications of all of this–along with some new findings–here tomorrow.

The ‘Adversity Index’

In the same MSNBC post (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33738656/ns/us_news-the_elkhart_project/sp-tx), we also find this useful utility:

Click on your state (or just roll over it)–on the actual site–to see employment, housing starts, housing prices and industrial production, each shown as a percentage change from a year earlier. Red areas are in recession; green, in recovery.

In a sense, there’s no such thing as unemployment. It helps to realize that work in the form of jobs has only been around for about 200 years, a product of the Industrial Revolution.

If you’re currently unemployed, your job is finding work. And in that sense, there are some occupational hazards of unemployment. Take Relational Deprivation, a relatively little known phenomenon.

Obviously, the person who’s just lost his job has also lost a major part of his social network. You might not think so, but it’s virtually inevitable. When I lost my job last November, my brothers and sisters at Focus on the Family treated me like a leper. They avoided me, apparently not wanting to catch what I had and not knowing what to say or do about it.

And these are Christians. Their own leader, Dr. James Dobson, has remarked upon how medical professionals avoid bonding with their little patients in the pediatric cancer ward out of self-preservation because it’s just too painful to invest your feelings in somebody who’s going down. It’s just human nature.

But the unemployed person has an even greater natural tendency to withdraw from human contact–out of shock, pain, embarrassment, shame or a combination thereof. And it is this tendency to withdrawal that is the jobless person’s greatest enemy, for it robs him of job-related relational and networking opportunities when he needs them the most.

This is one of those times when our natural impulse is our greatest enemy and the solution–becoming an all-star networker–is so damnably counter-intuitive.

So, if you know someone who is unemployed, reach out to him. He may be emotionally paralyzed. You don’t have to have magic words to say. Nobody does. But this is also true: Nobody cares how much you know until they know how much you care. Be one who cares.

And if you’re unemployed, get off your butt and get into relationship with other human beings. You may not see it from here, but it’s the way out. When you’re all wrapped up in yourself, you’re too small a package.

Unemployment: The movie

This will take your breath away.

The American Observer (http://cohort11.americanobserver.net/latoyaegwuekwe/multimediafinal.html) illustrates the deterioration of the U.S. economy from January 2007 before the start of the recession to the most recent period with available data.

See the black eating from both coasts toward the center right before your eyes.  Thanks to Professor Mark J. Perry’s Blog for Economics and Finance at http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2009/11/unemployment-movie.html.

I know, I know. The telephone is so Old Media.

Like you, I only use the phone when I have to. I can IM with a friend just about as fast. And you can’t beat the convenience of e-mails that can be replied to when we’re good and ready–or ignored. The phone is a jangling  intruder.

Those of us who still have land-lines don’t necessarily answer them when they ring. We’re just as likely to screen these calls by Caller ID or voice mail because–uh, because we can.

John Wren would have you think a little differently about that. “With social media, we tend to overlook the power of the telephone,” he says. John, a business and career coach of sorts in Denver, has a nifty five-minute podcast about that’s linked in the upper left of his Web site at http://johnwren.com/.

He also runs a weekly confab called the Denver IDEA Meetup Group for the exchange of start-up and new business ideas, where I’m tentatively fixing to speak in a few weeks.

Essentially, whether you’re looking for work in the f0rm of projects or a fulltime gig, don’t sell the phone short. This might be a time when you want to intrude a bit. This isn’t getting your five job contacts for the week for unemployment–dogmeat jobs you’d  hope you didn’t get. Those you do by electronic submission, right? But when you really want something, you Make the Call.

John is talking  more upstream–not so much phone calls to employers or clients, but calls to friends, to tap into their network. “People who know you well and want to help you.” Apparently, our friends are able to help us more than we–or even they–think, until prodded.

John tells about multiple positions he’s snagged just calling a friend and asking who they know who might be able to provide a valuable connection to the right person or place.  That’s how he became, for example, director of marketing and public relations for the Denver Symphony Orchestra.

But now he’s doing his own thing. I’d probably be remiss if I didn’t give his particulars:

Do you want help as you start in a new direction? Since 1979, I’ve helped hundreds of people find a good job quickly, or to find their first or next great new client. If you or someone you know wants to start a new career, a new campaign or project, or a new business, contact me about how I can help. Contact: John S. Wren, MBA+, 960 Grant St. #727, Denver, CO 80203. John@JohnWren.com, (303)861-1447.

Note the phone number. You could, like, pick up the phone and call.