¦ Alternative ideas of what they could do with their life.
¦ Alternative ways of describing what they want to do right now.
¦ Alternative ways of going about the job-hunt (not just the Internet, not just resumes, agencies, and ads).
¦ Alternative job prospects.
¦ Alternative “target” organizations that they go after.
¦ Alternative ways of approaching employers.
¦ And, of course, alternative job offers. Make sure you are continuing to pursue more than just one employer, until after that new job starts.
Remember, job-hunting always involves luck, to some degree. But with a little bit of luck, and a lot of hard work, and determination, these instructions about how to get hired and negotiate a salary, should work for you, as they have worked for so many hundreds of thousands before you.
Take heart from those who have gone before you, such as this determined job-hunter, who wrote me this heartfelt letter, with which I close this chapter:
Before I read this book, I was depressed and lost in the futile job-hunt using Want Ads only. I did not receive even one phone call from any ad I answered, over a total of four months. I felt that I was the most useless person on earth. I am female, with a two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, a former professor in China, with no working experience at all in the U.S. We came here seven months ago because my husband had a job offer here.
Then, on June 11th of last year, I saw your book in a local bookstore. Subsequently, I spent three weeks, ten hours a day except Sunday, reading every single word of your book and doing all of the flower petals in the Flower Exercise. After getting to know myself much better, I felt I was ready to try the job-hunt again. I used Parachute throughout as my guide, from the very beginning to the very end, namely, salary negotiation.
In just two weeks I secured (you guessed it) two job offers, one of which I am taking, as it is an excellent job, with very good pay. It is (you guessed it again) a small company, with twenty or so employees. It is also a career-change: I was a professor of English; now I am to be a controller!
I am so glad I believed your advice: there are jobs out there, and there are two types of employers out there, and truly there are!
I hope you will be happy to hear my story.
THE FIVE PARTS OF JOB-HUNTING AS A SURVIVAL SKILL:
III. ADVANCED JOB-
You’ve got to be careful if you don’t know where you’re going, because you might not get there.
Chapter 10. Starting Your Own Business
If you’re unemployed, and just can’t find any job-openings, no matter how hard you try, you’re going to need to consider the possibility of creating a job. That is the third of the job-hunting skills required to survive in these times. And in this day and age that requires
Let us illuminate those two ways with a tale of two shoes. The first shoe is Cinderella’s. In Charles Perrault’s 1697 version of the classic fairy tale, you recall, the Prince went through the kingdom, house by house, trying to find who fit a shoe—a glass slipper, in fact—that he already had.
The other shoe belongs to Edward Green, a famous shoemaker, who in 1890 started handcrafting men’s shoes, in Northampton, north of London. He had no shoe, but he fashioned a shoe from the start. He made the shoe to fit a particular client. It might turn out to be a shoe that no one had ever seen before.
You get the point: one shoe already existed; the charge was to find who fitted it. The other shoe didn’t exist; the charge was to create it from scratch, after taking the measure of a particular client.
So it is with job-creation. Analogous to the Cinderella shoe, you can create a job by starting with a career that already exists, some model that research can find for you—a franchise, perhaps—and see if it fits you.
Or, analogous to the Edward Green shoe, you can create a job by taking the measure of yourself, and then trying to design a career or job that fits you. It may turn out to be a job that no one has ever seen before. At least not in your neighborhood or city.
The first method, creating a job by finding a fit, is the subject of this chapter. The second method, creating a job by inventing something new, is the subject of the next chapter, on inventiveness.
I want to do two things in this chapter. I want to tell you about the existing business opportunties there are, which you may want to look at, to see if there is a fit. But I also want to sound warning notes about each of them, so that you will go in with your eyes wide open, if you decide it might be a fit. We live in a world of spams and scams these days, and consequently the pathway to creating your own job has its perils, as well as its rewards. Anyway, here are three ideas for creating your own job:
Finding a Fit, Idea #1: Consider a business already existing that you could start a branch of. Franchises, as they are called, exist because some people want to start their own business, but don’t want to go through the agony of starting from scratch. They want to
www.franchiseopportunities.com
Now, here’s the rub. Franchises require you, generally speaking, to have a bundle of cash, if you wish to buy in. And you may not be able to take much money out, the first year. And they are highly risky businesses. Their failure rate is high, particularly in these difficult economic times. You have to guess what kind of services or products the public wants. And the public is tremendously fickle.
So, if you start out thinking that maybe, just maybe, a franchise might fit you—not only creating a job for you, but also for others—you owe it to yourself to investigate the whole idea, and that particular franchise, thoroughly. That’s: thoroughly.
Start that homework with these sites:
http://tinyurl.com/64gda2: Interesting checklist from
http://tinyurl.com/4286yju: The best franchises in 2011 according to their owners’ ratings.
http://tinyurl.com/23kuwp: The Ten Riskiest Businesses to Start, according to Fair Isaac Corporation, popularly known as FICO.
http://thefranchisehound.com/2011/01/25/the-best-and-worst-franchises-to-own: This has very current data on the best and the worst, plus news items about retirement as a vanishing dream, etc. Good
