Turmoil in the financial markets has been a front-page news of newspapers for several months now. On the Web, it has been analysed to death. Would it be a downturn? A recession? Or worse, a depression?
For once, this financial crisis didn’t come unannounced. It started off with a sub-prime loans crisis that led to a credit-crunch in the US almost a year ago and it took the first half of 2009 to work its way almost throughout the world. Most analyses predict a downturn to last one to two years.
This article does not seek to estimate the timeframe or the extent of the crisis. I am not an economist to attempt that. However, as an online marketing specialist, I can identify opportunities and suggest steps you may take to minimise the risks and losses that such a downturn may bring in its wake. Of course, the focus of this column remains the tools and material available on the World Wide Web.
A downturn will affect you, whether you are in business or in employment. So, instead of assuming it does not exist or cannot affect you, you may as well deal with it in a planned way.
A raft of job cuts often accompanies a financial crisis. Starting with banks and financial sector and spreading to manufacturing and services as demand slackens, redundancy especially affects employees with less time in the company who get lesser compensation.
As an employee, a network of your peers and seniors in the industry can be the most valuable asset available when looking for a new job. You should not wait for the bad news before you build your professional network. You must work on it while the going is still good. Invest a lot of time and create a great profile on online social networks such as Linkedin – a global professional network, Facebook - one of the largest global networks that is now increasingly used by professionals, and Zaabiz which is an Australian network also used by a large number of Indians and NRIs in Australia.
One of the best things you can do to enhance your online professional reputation is to have your own professional Web site or blog on which you may publish a detailed professional profile, link it to your online networks and write and publish a regular stream of articles on topics of your professional interest. Ask your online network members to subscribe to your blog by e-mail or RSS feeds. Ensure that you have taken due cognisance of your employment conditions and company policies before you publish any professional material. It’s anyway a good practice to limit your writing to general areas of your expertise and in a neutral way, if you need to mention any specific actors at all. If you want to see an example of a good personal Web site, then see the Web site of Avinash Kaushik whose web site helped in no small way to establish him as a leading Web analytics professional.
Seek recommendations from your previous colleagues and bosses and encourage them to post their positive comments online on Linkedin. Connect with peers and senior professionals in other companies. Join groups or better still, create your own group. Select a niche area in your field and emphasise your special expertise in that area. Highlight that area in your profile, create a group around it and write articles and publish it in industry journals. There cannot be a better insurance than a good reputation in your industry and reputation is often built these days online.
Continuing education is another way to make your career recession-proof. We discussed almost all major aspects of personal development – communication, leadership, management, time management, analysis skills and many others - in this column in the first half of this year. FEE-HELP and other government schemes make it easy to study further without a major immediate financial burden. For more information, check out Going to Uni (relevant to Australian readers only).
Keep in touch with job opportunities in your industry by subscribing to new job alerts on message boards and job sites such as Seek, My Career and Career One. Most people check job ads only when they are looking for a new job. Regular browsing of job ads keeps you informed of current employment trends, salaries and employer expectations. It won’t harm to stay in touch with a few recruitment consultants.
When the worse happens and you need to look for a new job, you’ll find that your online network will look for opportunities in their own companies especially if you have identified yourself with a niche area in addition to your general expertise. Recruitment consultants will be more forthcoming because of their long running relationship with you, and your online reputation will open doors for you before you arrive for the interview. An employee or executive needs to put much more effort in managing a downturn as compared to the long running boom that has just shown its back. But surviving this downturn is certainly not impossible.
Originally published in Indian Link, a leading community newspaper published in Sydney.
{ 1 trackback }
{ 0 comments… add one now }