Work hard, focus on real results that benefit your employer and your employer’s customers, make your boss look good, and uphold the highest level of personal integrity.
Their are no shortcuts or “secrets” to success; just hard work, honesty and getting things done.
Michael G Smith
Download the full text of Justice Scalia writing for the majority and including the minority dissenting opinions right here:
Taking a break from work related matters today. Those who prefer less government intrusion and greater individual freedom and responsibility received a long-overdue assist from the Supreme Court. This decision is a fascinating and worthwhile read.
Question: I am older (50+) with a career spanning 30 years, the past 20 years as a self-employed owner/operator of small companies. How do I go about rejoining the workforce in a management position?
Answer: Many believe it is difficult to find a job after a long period of self-employment. Yet, I have reviewed thousands of resumes which often show that individuals find desirable work after a long period of self-employment. Therefore, I have concluded that it’s probably no more difficult for the self-employed to find career opportunities than those who have not been self-employed.
That’s not to say there are no challenges, but 20 years of self-employment confers significant and unique advantages on a job seeker.
First of all, most job seekers today have resumes characterized by job instability: too many jobs that lasted for two years or less, and too few jobs that last for more than four years. Aside from not meeting the position requirements, job instability is the chief reason candidates are rejected, and the more senior the position to be filled, the more heavily it weighs. So twenty years in any job–self-employed or otherwise–is a strong asset.
Next up for consideration is the match between your work experience and the particular position you may be seeking. Every employer has certain qualifications in mind when filling a position and these may be categorized as: 1. industry experience, 2. work experience, and 3. responsibility experience.
Industry experience refers to the knowledge and familiarity with normal expectations one acquires from working in a particular field or industry. I still recall much of what I learned in the first few years I spent in the printing business, but I would be quite lost in a modern graphic arts facility due to technological advance.
Work experience is “on-the-job-training” from which we learn to perform a range of tasks and projects appropriate to a specific job and industry. Up to a point, greater work experience increases efficiency and decreases “spoilage” or bad outcomes.
Responsibility experience refers primarily to experience in management, including the management of staff, budgets, facilities, resources and, in some cases, profit and loss. When filling management positions, employers typically consider both the scope and extent of experience in each of these categories.
Do you see where this is leading? You must inventory your work experience in each of these three areas; list everything, not just the big stuff. For example, experience using Quickbooks accounting software is a marketable skill and should be on your list. Order the list based on the amount and recentness of your experience, since the passage of time depreciates its value, particularly in the case of industry experience.
This list will serve as your guide for three purposes. First, you can use it to brainstorm the types of employers and positions to which your experience and skills may be applicable. Second, it is a checklist of essential assets that should be mentioned on your resume. Third, it will aid in marketing your experience to potential employers.
The first and third points require further explanation. The applicability of your experience to certain fields or types of work will be immediately obvious, but with some reflection and creative insight, you may recognize that your experience is quite applicable to other fields as well. The logic supporting the applicability of your experience to a seemingly unrelated field must be honed and internalized so you can easily demonstrate the connection in a cover letter and interview.
Now you should see that several key factors (job stability; industry, work and responsibility experience; and applicability of experience and skills to the open position) constitute the basis for hiring decisions. These factors have little or nothing to do with whether one is currently self-employed.
If you understand the depth and breadth of your experience, and can quantify and communicate an accurate description to a prospective employer, you are ready to go job hunting. If you pursue jobs that fit your experience, you will actually have a competitive advantage in the job market.
The most common mistake, surprisingly, is job seekers don’t anticipate that hiring managers will perform an internet search to find out more about them. This oversight can result in two different problems: 1. negative information that comes to light; and, 2. positive information is available, but not found.
It is always prudent to consider the potential career consequences of our actions, but with an increasing amount of real-time and historical information available on the Web, the likelihood is now much greater that missteps will be discovered by potential employers, even many years after the fact.
Some sources of information are obvious: photo posting sites, forums, blogs, and social networking sites. But less obvious sources are just as important. Google, for example, keeps Web pages cached and available to searchers. So even if a page has been taken down, it will come up in a Google search and can be accessed by clicking on the “Cached” link in Google’s results. ZoomInfo.com permanently stores Web pages that mention individuals by name and can be retrieved from their cache at any time.
In addition to your name, employers will Google your phone number, email address, former employers, and anything else on your resume that might produce a “hit” when combined with your first or last name, city or state. Before you send out a resume, perform each of these searches so you know what potential problems await you.
There are sources other than Google that employers may check; the most intimidating, perhaps, is Lexis-Nexis, which can search and retrieve nearly every newspaper, magazine, radio or TV story from the last twenty years, or more. Though not as extensive as Lexis-Nexis, public and university libraries offer full text access for written and transmitted stories.
Finally, there are many ways in which “legal” records can be retrieved at little or no cost from online databases. If you have a corporation registered in your name, marriage, divorce, bankruptcy, tax delinquency, civil or criminal court proceeding, or any type of state professional license, the records are generally available. Even traffic and parking tickets can sometimes be retrieved.
Information that enhances your reputation will aid your job quest. Attention must be paid, though, to assuring the information will be found. A Google search may miss something if it is associated with a less common variation of your name. I consistently use “Michael G Smith” as my name online, since anything associated with “Mike Smith” or “Michael Smith” will be listed so far down in Google’s results they won’t be seen. It’s important to decide what your name is and then stick with that exact form. “Kate Smith” is not the same, in Google’s eyes, as “Kathleen Smith,” “Bill Board” is not the same as “William Board,” and “James R Towne” is not the same as “James Towne.”
Finally, sites where individuals create and edit their own records are of critical importance. You have no control over much of what comes up in a Google search, but the employer knows you alone control the information at sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, Flickr and so on. Content you post can be a liability if it is inconsistent or potentially embarrassing—your resume and your LinkedIn work history, for example, had better agree. On the plus side, if you anticipate that potential employers will view your profile, then you can emphasize your accomplishments and achievements in order to make a good impression.
You must decide what your purpose is in having a presence on these sites. Your profile on LinkedIn—currently, the most important business networking site—should not feature activities that detract from your “day job,” as that will give the impression your focus is not on work. If you are a fundraising professional and have a political blog that is compatible with the outlook of the organization you work for, that’s fine. But if your profile emphasizes a personal business you operate on the side, a reasonable person will conclude you are stretched too thin and your attention is divided.
Michael G Smith
Unlike career related questions, which tend to be complex, this question is easily answered: No, we cannot save the Earth.
The Earth’s proximity to the Sun is essentially a “good news, bad news” situation; the good news is that our Sun provides light, heat and energy. The bad news is that the Sun will exhaust its hydrogen fuel within the next 5 billion years or so, causing it to grow to 250 times its current size and increase in brightness a thousand times over.
It goes without saying that the Sun’s personality change will render much of our technology obsolete, including sunscreen–regardless of spf rating. The Sun’s life change will produce hot flashes capable of melting any planet foolish enough to loiter closer than the orbit of Mars.
Unless we forestall the Sun’s transformation into a galactic bonfire, the Earth is destined to become an orbital version of a flaming marshmallow, slipping from its axis to be immolated by a morbidly obese Sun. It’s obvious, therefore, that efforts to “save the Earth” or “save the planet” are preempted by nature and our energies will be better spent figuring out how to migrate to a more youthful solar system.
