Employment-Related Blog by Martin Elliot Jaffe, JFSA Career Counselor

2-01-10

I was recently pondering my work life in a former career counseling setting (that shall go unnamed) and found myself sleepless as I tried to answer the following existential questions:

·                 How can the phrase “deadline for turning in your counseling reports by Friday morning” be interpreted 12 ways by six people?

·                 Why does everyone see their need for space, recognition and rewards as the center of the universe and show such limited flexibility?

·                  How can someone work all day with people, talk all day, and then go out to a fund raising event or salsa dance workshop?

·                 Do they ever stop talking, or think before speaking or read/reflect?

·                 Why do they have to talk to ME?

I have found during my extensive years of career counseling that work satisfaction/dissatisfaction has a strong element of mismatched skill personality, value and reward systems among differing types of people resulting in strife, anxiety and long tortured days.

On February 8^th at Mind/Body/Soul we will take a journey to Holland, a land of flowers windmills and satisfied workers.  This will be a figurative journey using work/life assessments designed by John Holland, the leading vocational psychologist of the last century.   Holland's theory will help you to clarify your skills, work values, the meaning and purpose of  your work,  and the environment that works best for you with people of different types as you are forced to interact productively in a shared workspace.

When you come to this week’s MBS with your completed SDS (self-directed search)booklet, our tour of Holland will sail. This session will delve deeper than focus on resume, job search, networking etc.  Instead, this session will provide you with the opportunity to look inward in order to identify the unique value that you bring to the world.

This session promises to deliver a new appreciation for the wisdom of the noted philosopher, Sylvester Stone, who proclaimed in his work “Everyday People”, that the key to understanding work satisfaction is  “different strokes for different folks.”

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Written by Marty Jaffe, Career Counselor at JFSA...

On this chilly winter afternoon I share my reflections on 2009 and my hopes and vision for your job seeking/ career development goals in 2010. Our Employment-Related Support Program will be here for you.  As I begin my 27^th year of career counseling  I offer these thoughts to bring you calm, focus and the honor of letting us continue to serve you during 2010...

JOB SEARCH IS DIFFICULT :

While everyone and his second cousin will tell you their magical networking technique that will assure you the job of your dreams, or tell you that all you have to do is read "Do What You Love, The Money Will Follow", "What Color is Your Parachute?" or go to every job club/networking event in Ohio and Pennsylvania and why are you not doing what I told you?..... we won’t! 

We know that job searching/career transition is daunting and difficult.  The American economy resembles the London of the 1840’s that Charles Dickens’ wrote of in HARD TIMES and some days job seeking feels like being Sisyphus rolling the boulder up the hill only to see it roll over you at the end of the day.

We promise to bring you fresh methods and  rigorous analysis of what works, makes sense, seems doomed/hopeless, needs to be rethought, etc.  After all, we are not killjoys or bland cheerleaders.  Rather, we try to be objective, realistic – as well as supportive and caring. As I have said so many times at our Monday Mind/Body/Soul sessions, we are Jews, and therefore we agree to debate, struggle, disagree and seek truth and effectiveness.  Job search is neither rocket science nor wisdom of Torah sages—it’s a process with multiple interpretations and twists, and our programs and counseling will reflect varied perspectives. 

A GROUP REVELATION FROM 2009:  PASSION IS OVERRATED!

A Mind/Body/Soul speaker in the past, spoke about passion for what you do and seeking your true passion as the path to success…… as a career counselor working with adults for 27 years let me temper  “passion” with what I term the “reality inventory.”  Imagine you are a 47 year old downsized accountant, with three children, a loving spouse with no work history, a huge mortgage… and in one of the MBS sessions where we completed one of the vocational/personality assessments I am so fond of, your results say to you, “ AHA—my passion is for ornithology, I must go back to graduate school, then to Tahiti to study  rare birds.”  

When you meet with me and tell me of this passionate dream my role will be to work on refocusing to the gritty realities of adulthood, marriage, mortgages and deferring dreams or finding a vocational way of expressing dreams (perhaps the zoo needs volunteers in bird feeding in the rainforest)

AND ON THE OTHER HAND

Our market-driven competitive capitalist economy does not foster introspection and self analysis among the American workforce.  As a career counselor I am not serving you well if  I overemphasize  all the process pieces of job search/career transition, the networking, targeting employers, resume and interview preparation and ignore the rich intrinsic search for meaning and purpose in work--- an occupation integrating skills, values, interests, as well as providing a means of generating income --- I call this LIFEWORK,  and it is a vital cog in our program.

Have you ever heard a career speaker or read a job search book/article that says you are “selling yourself” in the job search to an employer?  My perspective is distinctly opposed to that view—too many superficial programs for the downsized overemphasize the superficial “self-marketing,” “networking,” "hidden job market” approach that treats you as an object, a Willy Loman, to be packaged and marketed like detergent. If I don’t treat you like a mensch, a human being of value, integrity and with much to contribute to this world, I have failed you as a counselor and a job search strategist.

My 2010 pledge to you is to be here to struggle, care, plan and be present as we confirm the effectiveness of a strategy, implement a new dream, …. One  final lesson from that great American play, Death of A Salesman that I cited earlier that I hope informs everything we  will do in our program in 2010.. to quote Linda Loman, “Attention must be paid.”

Martin Elliot Jaffe, JFSA Career Counselor