Blueprinting the Future: Using Job Loss as an Opportunity for Change

by Phil Rich, Ed.D., MSW.

Sometimes things happen that can change our lives, if we let them. A life "shattering" event can also be a life "changing" event.
For some people losing a job is an inconvenience or an interruption. For others, it's a disaster that starts a downward spiral. For still others, however, it's a transforming experience that leads to the most positive changes in their lives. The best possible outcome of job loss is that it can be turned into a positive and transforming experience.

The "Future"

The future isn't a pre-determined "thing." Instead, it's a container of possibilities. Trying to understand and plan for the future is always difficult, but essential. It means making informed guesses about different industries and job sectors, and looking at changes in society as we move from the industrial age into the information age.
Although predictions about the future are often wrong, thinking about the future is crucial because a future orientation helps people move from the past and present into the future.

Strengths, Weakness, Opportunities, and Threats

As people plan for their future, it's useful to conduct a SWOT analysis -- Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. But each element of the SWOT is not to be treated independently. Instead, each is tied together in an evaluation of self and market place, and as a means for setting direction. The SWOT analysis is often thought of a "strategic" tool, because it helps people (and organizations) to see themselves and their work environment clearly in order to plan specific ways (strategies) to get where they want to be. The SWOT analysis asks:

• What are your Strengths? How do these match with the field? Where do you want to be, and how will your strengths help you to get there?
• What are your Weaknesses and limitations? Where do you fall short in the current, changing, and developing job market? What personal or professional limitations must you overcome?
• What Opportunities are there out there? What does the field have to offer, and where is the market going? What allies and advantages exist out there that can help you to meet opportunities and accomplish goals?
• What are the Threats to your career and your decisions? What sort of competition exists, and where do you fall short of being able to meet those challenges? What might disrupt or interfere with your ability to recognize, seize and build upon opportunities?

The message here is clear: people who want to take more control of their career must get to know themselves and their field, and know the environment and climate in which they and their profession meet. This simple model offers important direction and guidelines to help people blueprint their own future:

• Take personal charge of your career. Don't wait for someone else to change the course of your life, either by firing you or creating new opportunities for you.
• Recognize your weaknesses and limitations. Understand the sort of skills that your field needs, and clearly spot where your current skills, attitudes, and knowledge fall short, not only with respect to your own profession but neighboring professions as well.
• Build new skills and expand your capacity. Identify the range of specific and general skills that fit both your own profession and extend to other relevant professions as well.
• Sharpen your people skills and your communication skills. These are those interpersonal skills that help you to understand and be understood, and will always help you because virtually every endeavor involves interpersonal communication.
• Look at what's out there, and train yourself to spot opportunities. Research your field or others that interest you, and keep a close eye on other market place and social changes that might affect your field.
• Recognize change. Some people don't see change coming, until they trip over it. Recognizing change is one of the keys that allows you to make the changes in yourself that will keep you in the game.
• Be Flexible. You can't stay in a changing game without being flexible and having the ability to adapt to change. This is a simple, but often difficult, task, requiring the ability to roll with the punches.
• Understand and befriend new technologies. Although people think of technology as electronic "high tech," technology extends to virtually anything that helps you to do your job. A pencil was once a technological breakthrough. Find ways to understand the technologies that affect your work, and not be intimidated, frustrated, or fearful of them.
• Don't Limit Yourself. Don't limit yourself to what you do now. Spread in new directions, stretching yourself further, or even going entirely outside of your current profession. Expand your horizon, and become a "futurist." Think about where this is all going, and how you can fit into and take advantage of it. Enlarge yourself. 

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