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- Common Challenges to Selling a Business: Business Owner Insights (1/25/24)
- Considering Selling Your Business in 2024? (12/13/23)
- 12 Ideas to Attract and Keep Employees (11/13/23)
- Hope is Not a Strategy…and Private Equity Isn’t Your Escape Route (10/11/23)
- How to Successfully Sell Your Business to an Employee (9/25/23)
The Right People - Part 2
Job Security. Our parents and grandparents had it. Not because of who they were, but because of the time in which they lived and worked. Their career was their identity: He was an insurance agent, she was an architect, he was a teacher, she was a nurse. Back then, people usually started off down a career path and stayed on it until they retired – hopefully somewhere up the ladder. Times are very different now. As of 2008, the median career length was 4.1 years. In the 45 years between education and retirement, that could translate to ten different jobs. Is that a bad thing? Does it make a potential employee less desirable? The answer often depends on your viewpoint.
With three and sometimes four distinct generations working together in the modern workplace, it’s important to recognize their different points of view. If you’ll allow me the generalization, a lifelong “career man” CEO from the Veteran or early Boomer Generation might label someone who has had several different jobs as a “career hopper” at best and a “never-happy-where-he-is drifter” at worst. A Generation-X manager might look at that same resume and think, “This person can grow and change with our company – they have adapted their skills to many environments.” See the rub? It can help both these points of view to consider the skills possessed by the individual in question.
Was the teacher effective because he’s an expert at conflict resolution? Was the architect successful because she pays tremendous attention to organization and detail? Does your organization need a teacher or architect? Maybe not. Do you have need for someone to manage conflict or organization? More likely. Your staffing options open up considerably when you’re a skill collector.
When we collect skills (as opposed to merely filling positions), we add new skill sets to our team and then have the versatility to apply those skills anywhere. Reflecting on the past twenty years of my professional life I note that I was once a “banker” and now I’m a utility player who takes those skills that made me good at banking and applies them across industry. In our firm, we are all skills-based with each member contributing skills that others may or may not have. It can be tremendous fun when you discover that someone on your team has a competency in an area that a client needs and that the rest of your team never expected.
What about people either searching for their next job or simply keeping their resume updated? Given this trend, it might serve them well to focus more on their skills as opposed to their chronological job history. For instance, someone who has worked at the local Procter and Gamble plant for twenty years might not be of interest to you if you don’t make paper products. On the other hand, if the resume identifies the applicant as a visionary, a leader, a gifted analyst, or a process improvement expert first – perhaps it won’t matter so much that all those skills have been put to use in a manufacturing environment. It’s easier for you to see how those skills could be put to use in your own workforce, regardless of your product or service.
Like it or not, the days when you could start off with one company and work your way up to Vice President of Something over 40 years are gone. Still many businesses haven’t embraced the best part of the current dynamic: Don’t hire people only because they have experience in your industry. Hire them for the skills and traits that made them good at whatever they did.
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