Barb’s Blog

In spite of the government telling us the recession is over, I am hearing of layoffs, pay cuts, and people not able to find jobs yet.

I was very interested in the headline I recently found, 7 Ways to Survive the Jobless Recovery.

Here are some snippets:

1. Don‘t wait for lost jobs to return. Chances are they won’t. In prior recessions, many job losses were temporary, and laid-off workers were often called back. But this time there’s a lot more going on than just a recession.

2. Don‘t count on big companies. They’ve gone to a lot of trouble to cut costs and weed out workers, which is the main reason corporate profits have held up reasonably well (and the stock market has enjoyed a historic rally). For the most part, big companies that have gotten lean want to stay that way.

3. Become entrepreneurial. Some laid-off workers have no choice but to start their own businesses, since there may be no other jobs where they live. Starting a business is often harder than it seems, and the scarcity of credit these days doesn’t help. But entrepreneurs love working for themselves and reaping all the rewards of their work.

4. Juggle jobs. The old either-or paradigm—either work for somebody else or run your own company—is becoming outdated. It might make sense to do both. The Web is making it easier to write a blog, launch a hobbyist site, or start a business in your spare time while holding on to your day job and that regular paycheck.

5. Hold on to your dreams, but adjust your expectations. With real estate prices falling, many homeowners trying to sell are shocked to learn that their house is worth a lot less than they thought. To some extent, that’s happening in the job market too. A glut of unemployed workers means that pay will come down in some industries, and the next job you get may pay less than the last one. The sense of backsliding can be maddening. But the value of any good—including your labor—is what it will fetch in the marketplace, nothing more. Just because you earned $20 an hour three years ago doesn’t mean that’s your value today.

6. Downsize everything. Your car, your home, your appetite, and most importantly your debt.

7. Solve problems. The United States has an Underdog Economy right now. We’ve lost more than 7 million jobs over the last two years, a huge setback. China, India, and other countries are growing much faster. A host of other problems threatens our prosperity. Those circumstances place a higher value than usual on innovation—the ability to come up with new and better ways to solve problems. That includes everybody, at every level: checkout clerks who can make the line move faster, engineers who can squeeze more mileage from a gallon of gas, financial geniuses who can figure out how to pay down the $12 trillion national debt. Solving problems that others can’t sets you apart, raises your value, and earns the gratitude of people whose lives you help improve. These days, it doesn’t get much better than that.