Tis the Season… for Career Maintenance

Correct, Career Maintenance. It is like get an oil change for a car or cleaning out the gutters on a house. People can avoid it now, but odds are that they will regret it later, so why not do it now?

Career Maintenance 101

The primary thing I want to encourage is for each person to take an hour in the next few weeks to go off by themselves to write down what they have done this year. Getting in a habit of doing this each year can make future job searches incredibly simple, can make people more grateful for their jobs (paid or volunteer), and can reveal goals for the next year that a person may want to pursue.

Preparation

The first thing to do, which does not count toward the hour I want, is to consider how to record this information. In this digital day and age, my default suggestion is for a person to send an email to themselves and store this in a file folder which either gets archived or remains indefinitely on the email server. If taking this advice, make sure the email gets sent to a personal email address.

If a person chooses to use written word, I recommend buying a notebook just for this exercise. Each year, put the information into the same notebook so it is all in the same place. This will be important later.

Explaining the Maintenance

The purpose of this exercise is to create a working list of career & personal accomplishments as well as a list of skills and experiences which can be drawn on in the future. Preparing these lists every year gives a person the ability to look back over these when preparing a resume, considering job openings, and deciding on where they wish their career to go. At the end of the exercise, people will also go back and mark the tasks and accomplishments they enjoyed the most, creating a list of tasks which can be used to direct them toward work they can enjoy EVERY DAY!

Step 1: What has been done.

First, list out every task performed over the last 12 months. I mean every task: personal things like mowing the lawn and fixing the plumbing, professional things from the major tasks to the minor office or resupply tasks, volunteer tasks whether earth shaking or quaint. Think through the last year’s activities and remember every place something was done and write down what it was and perhaps a note about where that was.

Here’s a brief example:

Stocking Snack Vending Machine

Stocking Soda Vending Machine

Managed soda and snack inventory

Stocking bathroom supplies

Stocking paper products

Managing bathroom and paper product inventory

This becomes helpful in future job searches when a company mentions some abstract skill or detail about experience that they want their perfect candidate to have. This list becomes an index of skillsets and gives you the ability to accurately refer back to when these skills were used and how much.

Step 2: What has been accomplished.

Second, go back through this list and, whenever possible, write out accomplishments related to these events. Accomplishments is a general term as used here. These are specific details, some of which will have little to nothing that might seem particularly notable. The key here is that this creates specifics for future resume use as well as helping identify growth.

Here are some examples continuing above:

Stocked 64 slot vending machine twice a week, ordering & picking up inventory, and

Snack Machine

managing cash collected according to company accounting standards.

Identified a new vendor for snacks which reduced cost of snacks by 15%, enabled reduction in snack cost to employees and increased profitability from snack machine!

Realize that not every task will have something worth sharing. Don’t worry about topics which don’t warrant more sharing. I put down sweeping and mopping for work each year because there is almost always a time when I help out with this task, but it has been quite a while since I performed this with enough regularity to warrant more.

Also realize that some topics may have numerous accomplishments. Any salesperson worth the name should have numerous notes each year of key customers won, retained, & grown. Every job has things like this. If a person can’t find a task like this OR the task they find most mentioned is different from one of their main functions, then these might point to a job or career change.

Step 3: Highlight Key Accomplishments

Now go back through your list and put a star, box, or other mark next to each one that seems impressive to the person. If none seem impressive to them, then perhaps more thought is due OR they may need to add more effort to their work next year to reach the level that they feel is appropriate for them. From my experience, most people will have five to twenty things they felt were impressive.

Now, go back through these items and choose three to six which are big accomplishments AND were fulfilling; highlight these accomplishments. This will give the person some guidance in the future if they have to look for new work or consider promotion opportunities.

Step 4: Save your work

Make sure this work will be saved. This exercise loses much of its effectiveness if the lists get lost each year. The email method makes this simple, although people need to be sure they keep their account or transfer their files if they change email providers. Other lists may need additional precautions to keep up with them.

- The HR Godfather

thehrgodfather@gmail.com

Snowday!!

SNOWDAY!!

When is it okay to ditch work for the powdery stuff?

Okay, I live in Georgia, so “SNOWDAY” doesn’t get said much locally, but I have responsibilities for locations up the eastern seaboard to Maryland and Virginia and in the midwest up to Omaha, Nebraska. Every year there comes a point where the cold weather combines with precipitation and the calls start coming in. “Sorry, can’t come in because…” and the excuses begin. Sometimes these excuses are fine and legitimate, but other times they are, at best, poorly thought out (and often are outright lies.) Let me offer some suggestions for those new to the workforce.

Snowday!!

Communication is key!

When the weather gets nasty, keeping managers and the company informed and asking their feedback about going to work becomes critical. Instead of wondering: make a call, send an email, shoot off a text, SOMETHING! Talk to someone to verify what needs to happen. Employees may be surprised. I once drove for over an hour to get to work in icy conditions, only to discover that the building was locked up because the management team had told everyone they could stay home; guess who didn’t check their messages that morning.

Employees should be sure they have someone in their management structure’s personal phone number (cell or home). This is to be sure that the person can talk to someone from work in the event that there is a problem that prevents people from going to the work site. In my current position, when weather does threaten to be too much, there is usually a chain of phone calls which begin in the wee hours of the morning to communicate management’s expectations.

If an employee can drive to the mall, church, the bar, or anywhere they “want to be”, then they can drive to work.

Cold weather and water CAN equal icy roads. Icy roads can lead to accidents and other problems that injure or kill people. Companies get that. But it is amazing how often that same road which is “too iced over to go to work” is just fine when a pal calls twenty minutes later and asks the person to meet them somewhere. While it can be nice to have a break from the job for the day, choosing to skip out on work when others can make it leaves the manager and coworkers understaffed. In some cases this has minimal effect because customers are not coming in either, but in this world economy there is an ever-increasing chance that customers in other places are carrying on business as usual.

I worked with some people from Wisconsin early in my career. One of them told a story about a bad weather day at a job he had in Wisconsin. Some of the employees at the job made it to work, but many others called out saying the roads were too bad. After work, this person went to a local drinking establishment, having had a fairly rough day because of people being out. He then describes in detail what his thoughts and feelings were when he enters the bar and finds one of the employees who called out sitting there enjoying a few drinks. Let’s just say that the comments would warrant at least a PG-13 if we filmed it.

There are no laws that require your company to pay if you miss work for a “Snowday”.

Some people are chuckling, while others are shocked. I have been asked this question more than once in the past, so let me state it plainly here. Perhaps there is a municipal or state law that I haven’t heard of, but I have not seen a law yet that requires a company to pay their people for missing work on a “Snowday”.

While there are no laws, some companies do have policies for how they handle pay on “Snowdays”. If a company has created a policy for “Snowdays”, employee can reasonably expect these to be followed. If a company doesn’t spell out their policy, then their employees should inquire with the understanding that there is no requirement on the company. Further, the employees at these latter companies should prepare themselves to use a vacation day or some other paid time-off if they MUST get paid for the day.

-The HR Godfather

thehrgodfather@gmail.com