Family Weekly
January 25, 1959
i
1.7
WHAT TO DO IF YOU
Lose Your Job
Here is practical advice from an
expert on turning a setback into a
new opportunity for advancement.
by Richard D. Gleason
Sometimes losing your job is the best thing that can happen.
I certainly don't recommend it as entertainment, but if a pink
slip forces you to analyze the road map of your career where you
came from, where you want to go, and how to get there it may
indeed be a disguised blessing.
In my work as a career counselor, I have seen many men with
the resourcefulness to turn a setback into progress, who started
their upward climb as a result of getting fired. While each man's
story is different, their combined experience includes four steps:
1. Don't panic plan.
2. Reappraise yourself.
3. Re-establish your goals.
4. Sell yourself as you would a product.
Sure, these sound simple, perhaps too simple to take seriously.
But let's examine them one by one, then ask yourself how many
job-seeking men try to relocate themselves in this methodical way.
I can assure you that most men don't find jobs. Jobs find them!
They bounce from payroll to payroll, hoping to find themselves
accidentally, without taking the time and trouble to look them
selves over, survey the job market, pick out the job in which they
really can prosper then go out and land it.
So if you should ever be so unluckyor perhaps lucky as to
lose your job, try the following four steps.
W
1 9l Kl I
A former vice-president of
employee relations for one of
America's major industrial firms,
Richard D. Gleason nou heads a
Chicago career-counseling
organization. He is a member of
various sales executives clubs and
of the Chicago Association of
Commerce and Industry. As a
leader in the New York Man
Marketing Clinic, he helped that
group provide job advice for more
than 600,000 men and women.
DON'T PANIC-PLAN!
Don't panic. The average man works for five or
six companies in his career. From at least one
of his jobs, he is likely to be fired, or forced to
resign; or the signs are so clear that he quits.
Recently a man came to me who had been a
factory engineer with a railroad for 15 years. His
intelligence and knowledge of the workings of his
whole department brought him into a major
difference with his supervisor and led to his being
eased out. This man and I took inventory of his
experience and we found he had been working
beloio his real level of ability. This turned his
initial fear into optimism, and he landed a job as
an engineering executive with a railroad-equipment
manufacturer at a 35-percent inciease in
salary and, incidentally, with more responsibility
than that of the man who had fired him!
In trying to relocate, many men try to deny that
they lost their jobs. To be caught in a lie, even a
well-meaning cover-up, might undermine your
reputation far more than a discharge which might
not damage you at all. Always keep in mind that
the man interviewing you may have been fired at
least once himself. The higher the job, the more
likely is a firing to be called a resignation, but
make no mistake about it: it has happened to
almost everybody.
On the other hand, don't make a big production
out of the fact you've been bounced. In an inter
view, you want to mention it quickly and neatly,
so you can sell your positive virtues. One of my
clients once complained to me that he had come
out of an enormously complicated office hassle,
and it would take a half-hour to explain why he
had been shown the exit. I told him he'd be lucky
to get a half-hour for his whole interview.
I asked him to prepare a 20-word explanation,
not a word more. He came back with 35. Together,
we cut it down to 18 and I told him to memorize it:
"My boss and I differed on a matter that I con
sidered vital to the business, so I resigned."
The statement was entirely true and under
standable (even commendable), and no further
questions were asked. Beginning with his 19th
word, he was telling what he had accomplished.
I can think of another amusing circumstance,
this one concerning a top wheel in a major auto
company who reported directly to the company
president. He did not resign; he was just plain
sacked and said so in his subsequent interviews.
"Call up that president," the applicant would
urge. "Let him tell you what a so-and-so I am.
Then while you're investigating me, investigate
him, too. I'd like to hire the men he has fired.'
The company president's reputation for supply
ing his competitors with fine men was already
widely known, and the applicant was readily
snapped up by another blue-chip firm.
Family Weekly, January 25, 19S9