I believe there are many professionals who, like myself, have been seeking their niche, a place to fit into this new age where they can thrive and earn a real living, honestly, providing value to the marketplace without risking their reputation, entire savings or life to do it.
This is my contribution to the conversation as both one of the boomers out on that limb willing to risk breaking away from the old beliefs that employers will take care of you and value your loyalty when times are tough, and as a woman who has been online since 95 and has seen the rapid advancement of commerce, marketing tactics and outright scams using emotional buttons and trickery to part us from our money.
I've been on the bad end of the stick when it came to holding my own as a mother with the desire to stay around my kids as they grew up but also to make an income, trying many uncharted options before they were uncovered as scams and finding also great opportunity having kissed a few frogs to get to the good stuff. There's good and bad stuff out there but now we have some real oversight and experience to determine which is which in the opportunity world. While an opportunity may be solid there's always one question mark in the picture and that's people.
I don't think I need to expound on the current state of reality in employment and jobs as the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports the decline by county on this page;
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cewqtr.nr0.htm
Then in another reports increasing despair among the unemployed who believe there are no jobs in their field available after months of seeking work.
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm Read on...
What we once believed was a standard in America for success and pursuit of happiness formula, i.e. get an education, choose the field to work in, find entry level position in a formidable corporation, climb the ladder & make your way to the highest position possible to ultimately retire on the pension promised after 30 years trade of life blood is no longer an option or reality. We may have grown up in that dream or on the higher or lower end but middle America believed that the brass ring was that a modest suburban house would be paid off, white picket fence and all, your children grown up, in college paid for by your tuition funds, and golden years traveling to see the grandkids as they took their part of the cycle again.
It began to unravel before our eyes though we may not have understood the big picture at first. We saw in 80's how the telecoms and other industries started offering early retirement packages to offload their senior salaries, then the aerospace industry layoffs and the unprecedented reneging on their pensions plans. Even as a then frivolous twenty- something, uninvolved onlooker I was shocked as I heard these corporations were being allowed to get away with breaking their deal with people who'd dedicated the majority of their lives to the good of the company only to have them pull the rug out from under them when they were counting on the money to live and had kept their part of the bargain. How could it be that companies were allowed to break their commitments to thousands of workers by withdrawing the pensions of those who had already served them well for a lifetime, without penalty? Isn't it a breech of contract? Could you or I get away with that?
The government was expected by these corporations to jump in and save the day with a bail out.. that's you and me by the way, Joe Taxpayer, we shoulder their corporate responsibility.
What about their insurance? Shouldn't these corporations be expected to carry a policy for such cases? Like malpractice when your CEO screws the pooch so badly it can't keep it's bargains. It was the first sign of the oxidation of the American dream, and those souls who'd given everything to the company to find an I.O.U at the end of their lives, no teeth in enforcing that contract, those men and women had to find employment as seniors for humbling pay. My childhood friend's father was an aerospace engineer at North American Rockwell who got laid off and was relegated to spending the remainder of his life as a school janitor to feed his family and support their modest lifestyle, never owning a home himself.
The corporations merged and continue to enjoy their profits but downsized and wiped out their debt to their workers to do so. It's become the standard now instead of having 2 or at most 3 positions on your lifetime resume to having numerous positions and some with no rhyme or reason. I've seen resumes with new positions every 1-2 years in many industries.
Do you still believe that you can depend on pensions, retirement funds and always being valued when profit margins shrink and its time to cut back?
It's time to start thinking of your own life and the bigger picture. We all need a plan B and C, not the MadMen facade of their campaigns in the 60s, 70's telling us what to believe and fall in line or else.
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