Keeping Your Job In A Recession.
For the past two weeks,
we've been fielding these questions:
???? What skills will help me keep
my job if cuts are coming?
???? My role has already been made redundant.
What skills will I need to get a new one?
Well, as everyone knows, London and Manchester are a bit of a jobs bloodbath at the moment,
so they're really good questions to pose.
Now, nobody likes to have to lose people through redundancy. It's much
more emotional than firing someone for incompetence or whatever, because
in this case, the employee is often blameless and is simply a victim of
economic circumstances.
But looking at how bosses decide to let go gives us the first step in
choosing how to upskill.
When bosses have to make these tough decisions, they have to calculate
the cost to the business of losing each individual.
For example, the most difficult people to let go are usually (but not
always) those with the longest service. That's because the cost of letting
them go is often greater than the cost of keeping them, even if they're
not the best producing members of staff.
None the less, in the current recession, this group seems to be quite
vulnerable.
The second group they want to keep (in truth, in preference to the long-termers)
are those who deliver the most value to the business. These are the skilled
ones.
The ones who are most likely to be culled are either the least skilled
or the most recently hired.
So the key to keeping your job seems to be the ability to demonstrate
the skills that prove you deliver the most value to the business.
And as a minimum, I'd say you need great typing, Word and Excel skills.
The problem is that most people are self-taught and don't realise how
much more value they can add by developing their skills in these areas.
For example, about half the people I meet are 2-fingered typists. This
results in low productivity due to slow data entry and making lots of
mistakes.
Imagine how much more productive a computer user would be if he or she
could move up from a net speed of 12 wpm to 70 wpm!
And it's fairly easy to develop this skill!
Where Word and Excel are concerned, most people use just a fraction of
their functionality. This is a bit like just doing the minimum and hoping
to keep your job.
But if you want to be one of the highly skilled, super-productive group
who are likely to be retained, you need to think again.
If you can't record macros, perform mailmerge or create formulae such
as avg, max and min, you're leaving yourself open to being in the unwanted,
unskilled group.
So the message is, skill up to keep your job. It won't take you long and
will prove a valuable investment in the tough times that are on the way.
