One Two Punch To Getting A New Purpose (That Hopefully Pays Too)

Brazen Careerist by Penelope Trunk again provides useful advice in how to live in the new Web 2.0 Millennial World. This time it is on How to job hunt from your current job.

A lot of people worry that they can’t get another job because they don’t have time to find one. This is why hunting for a job from your cube is totally standard.

Today, people switch jobs every two years between the age of 18 and 32. Which means that most job hunts do not have a start and finish—they are continuous. And this is smart, because so much of job hunting is being aware of the market (i.e. surfing at work) and networking (long lunch, anyone?).

In today’s environment, job hunting from the job you have is totally mainstream. Here are tips on how to do it right:

1. Don’t feel guilty.
2. Schedule interviews for at the beginning or the end of the day.
3. Don’t dress up for interviews if you can help it.
4. Don’t do phone interviews from your cube.

Okay, I am past the 18 -32 demographic and my job hunts will not be continuous from this point on, but her advice is still valid because it is naive to think that the world is going to maintain a special spot for you when change is everywhere else.

Furthermore, at some point in time, I will be moving on from my current role in life into "active retirement". Brazen Careerist by Penelope Trunk has advice I can use in this situation as well,

Use the entrepreneurship boom to improve your corporate job.

The new wave of entrepreneurship is changing the startup landscape for sure. It’s nearly free to start a company online, even teens are having wild success, and young people are flipping web sites like boomers flip houses.

1. Think of entrepreneurship as a safety net that allows you to demand more from your job. If you don’t like the job offers you have, you can leave. Start your own company. The history of the organization man is someone who is defined by whatever track the company puts him on. You don’t want to be that.

2. Think of intrapreneurship as a launching pad for who are waiting for the right idea. Seventy percent of young people say they eventually want to work for themselves. The problem is that only a fraction of those people have an idea for a company—or a friend with an idea for a company.

3. Get in a rotational program to learn a broad range of skills that many entrepreneurs learn as they go. Some of the most popular post-college routes today are management training programs at companies such as General Electric or Procter & Gamble, where superstar candidates get to test out the work in lots of departments in a company.

4. Recognize that with no clear ladder to climb, you’re an entrepreneur even if you never leave corporate life. Even if you don’t want to launch a start-up, you still end up functioning like an entrepreneur in today’s new workplace. There is no long-term stability, so the way you create stability is with your skill set and your connections.

5. Think of corporate jobs as a way to fund entrepreneurship. It used to be that you were either corporate or an entrepreneur. Today, people move in and out of big companies and start-ups, using the steady paycheck to fund the risky venture.