Showing posts with label Employment. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Employment. Show all posts

Wednesday 13 August 2014

Look for customers and markets, not jobs.

I recently saw a news post on Facebook that had a photo of youth from an East African country in a public demonstration. The young people were on the street in a protest to highlight growing unemployment among university graduates. One placard read: ‘For every ten applicants only one gets a job. Where should we go?’
Young people find themselves in difficult times with growing unemployment in all continents. And instead of joining everyone around you moaning, what else can you do?

Think for yourself. All along you have had a teacher or parent come to your rescue when there seemed to be darkness all around. It is your turn to establish why you are here, what you are living for and what you will do with your time and gifts (yes, you have some). You are likely to end up on a path to slavery if you let other people do that for you.
Finding a job after graduation lets you have a place where you are serve clients in a business that other individuals have struggled to set up over many years. You probably do not know their story. But they may have taken loans, begged help from family and perhaps failed many times before managing to stay afloat. No one is entitled to entering that safe place straight from college.  Would you like to try square one?
There are opportunities in the various circumstances we find ourselves in if we bother to stop and ask: how did I get here?  Why did I enroll for a course that makes one feel useless unless they are looking at the job advert supplement of a newspaper? If you chose the easy way through college, you may want to consider finding a course that gives you hard skills and empowers you to provide services and produce goods that society needs.
The days of secure, paid employment in government offices or the private sector are over for the majority of the population. There will be more workers offering their services for pay in short or long-term contracts. Prospective customers are no longer those within country boundaries. New opportunities can be accessed in new ways with technological advancement.
Stop moaning about jobs and go after the markets. 
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Quote of the day:

It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things.
(Leonardo da Vinci)


Saturday 27 July 2013

Do you need that Master’s degree or experience?

You have hardly been a year out of university after a three or four-year Bachelor’s program. In these times I suspect most of the year has been spent enjoying your new found freedom from academic study, course tests and exams. After a few months of rest, the race to find work begins.  If you have found a job or started your own small business (as a sole service provider), you are now trying to stabilize in that new undertaking. In the case of those looking for employment, the search continues.

Hardly a year or two after leaving university there will be cries for you to acquire new qualifications. This is made to appear even more urgent for those who have no work or are in employment that they do not find fulfilling. You have been told that there are so many people ready to present a Bachelor’s certificate with their next job application. It will be at least a second class computer science, engineering, social science or physics degree. So yours is not that special.

It is true a Master’s degree may give you an edge at the job interview following elimination of many others. But this is not always the case.

I argue here that the best approach to the decision to advance to a Master’s degree is to consider what the extra credential will contribute to your productive ability. Furthermore, that the best measure of one’s productive ability is in what they can do with what they know (not just what they know). The best way to improve your productive ability is by obtaining work experience.

One is better off spending two or three years working full-time in a busy finance department of a large corporation than a year or so on a MBA program straight after a bachelor’s degree. If a Master’s degree does not offer you the possibility of working on real products or services for real clients (say with a semester of internship), you really have to think twice about spending money or time on it. Besides, working with real clients solving real problems gives you a wide range of experiences to take to graduate lecture discussions.
Should it matter if I’m offered a Masters scholarship? Yes. Time spent shuffling more pages in text books and solving structured problems keeps you behind colleagues who learn from performance challenges at the frontlines on the job.

Another way of looking at the decision is to consider what material rewards a promotion (resulting from a new Masters qualification) will bring or the intellectual rewards of advanced study in your discipline that gives you the capacity for deeper analysis of workplace problems.

I would definitely discourage young people fresh from university from advancing to Masters study just to fill time without employment.


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A must share: Bob Parsons' 16 rules for business and life