We are all well-aware of the dismal outlook for certain types of jobs in certain industries these days. In fact, there are now lists of the “worst jobs” based on the employment outlook as well as income, environment, physical demands and stress.

Healthcare, however, has held steady and in some sectors of the healthcare field growth actually outpaces job creation in many other industries at the moment.

According to the latest data compiled by the Bureau of Labor statistics, 10 of the 20 fastest growing occupations are healthcare-related. In addition:

• Healthcare is forecasted to generate 3.2 million new jobs between 2008 and 2018, more than any other industry, largely in response to rapid growth in the elderly population
• Most workers in healthcare have jobs that require less than 4 years of college education
• Although hospitals constitute only 1 percent of all healthcare establishments, they employ 35 percent of all workers which translates to pretty intense competition for talent

The anticipated response to governmental healthcare reform also means that the industry’s appetite for talent is going to continue to grow while some roles will evolve and require new skill sets.

Learn more about BPI group’s healthcare sector here.

With a reported membership of 400 million ACTIVE users, defined by Facebook as “users who returned to the site in the last 30 days,” Facebook is the undisputed king of social networking sites. But for many job seekers, Facebook remains their “social” site and LinkedIn is their “professional” site. While this is understandable, job seekers may be making a mistake by NOT taking advantage of the amazing scope and reach of Facebook as a job search resource.

So – how can Facebook be used in a job search?

Let’s answer that question by starting with another question – what is the single most effective way to find a new job? The answer – networking. Lots of numbers tossed around – 80% or 70% of jobs are found through networking. Regardless of the exact number, it’s a lot. A lot more than answer job postings, that much is certain.

So what is the most heavily used networking site on the Internet? Answer: Facebook.

From our perspective, 2 + 2 = 4. And, in the context of a job search, that means if networking is the most likely path to a new job, and Facebook in the #1 social networking resource ever, Facebook should figure into your job search planning.

1. Get your Facebook account “ready for prime time.”

There are two elements to every Facebook account – what and who. What information and activity will I display on Facebook? Who will I let see the what? One objection I hear when I talk about using Facebook as a job search tool is, “I use this for my family and friends.” Another – “I don’t want people seeing all that “stuff” about me on Facebook.” Well – who do you think controls the what or the stuff that gets on Facebook? You do.

The What – content and postings.

Let’s start by saying that we are not advocating that you avoid posting fun vacation pictures or family event photos on Facebook. It is SOCIAL networking, so please be social. That’s the idea, right? So, if you choose to post that nutty picture of yourself shooting tequila at a bar in Panama City with those nice Norwegian sailors – by all means post the photo. But if you choose to post that content, make sure you tighten your privacy settings so only the people you really want seeing that photo can see that photo.

For those in job search mode, however, some different thinking is usually advisable – that way you don’t have to worry as much about embarrassing or even damaging content derailing your search. In general, post only things you are comfortable with 400 million people seeing and reading. That usually means the funny vacation pics don’t get posted for “everyone” to see.

Your profile and personal information are also potential sources for embarrassment. Letting people see your marital status or that you are interested in relationships is not smart for job seekers. So – either delete that information, or make sure your privacy settings protect it. The education and work history ought to track your resume, AND we recommend using very similar language from or for your LinkedIn profile. You are promoting a professional brand, so use this chance at Facebook to do so.

The Who – privacy settings.

Facebook has come under a lot of criticism lately for its new privacy setting controls. Facebook has a built-in bias for disclosure. That’s not good or bad, but it is very important to understand. The privacy settings are complicated. It’s possible there will be MORE changes soon – so stay tuned. That said, you need to work your way through the settings. A great resource to check these is ReclaimPrivacy.org. It allows you to scan your Facebook privacy settings, and make changes based upon your personal preferences for privacy.

2. Friends – lists.

This author has a small but growing network of contacts at Facebook, and they are carefully organized into four lists – business network, social friends, high school friends and interests. You can organize your friends into as many lists as you wish, but I think it’s very important to do so. In general, I recommend two broad types of lists – a list for business contacts (and friends CAN be on more than one list), and your social network, and I even have that group organized into three groups based upon the contact and communications I want with them.

Once you’ve organized your friends, you’re ready to get going.

3. Activity – posts, updates and links.

As you post things or share links, think about WHO you want to see the information. If you find a link (maybe to this post!) you think your social network might find interesting, target the post accordingly. When you type in the update box, a menu will open below the space, and you’ll see a little padlock on the right side. This is the security setting for this specific update. You can see that in the screen capture to the right.

By using this setting, you can target specific posts, updates, links or even questions to your network based upon your objective and target for the information.

4. Search and Pages.

Facebook has a very good search feature that can be used to find people – both in and out your network – who work at target companies. You van use the advanced search to narrow your results.

When you do a search for a company, you may get a company page. This is a great thing to find. A HUGE number of companies – especially those in retail and consumer products verticals, maintain fan pages at Facebook. Explore these pages! If it’s a company you are really targeting, read the “INFO,” see if there are discussions, etc. And then participate. When you DO connect with a person at the company, it’s nice to tell them something you learned about the company from Facebook.

Conclusion

There are 400 million active Facebook users. Do you think one or two of them might be able to help you? We do. This is NOT a comprehensive guide to using Facebook in your job search, but we hope it will help get you started.

In my last post, I proposed a new definition of the term “resume.”
Resume – a description of an individual’s career that defines that person’s personal and professional brand, qualifications, skills and accomplishments. It should be accessible on demand and in real time by an interested party, such as networking contacts, prospective employers or prospective clients.

 
If we accept that the current job and career management market requires a new way of thinking about how a set of qualifications are presented, it makes sense to talk about how to started with marketing qualifications in the current and emerging market. So – how do we get started with a new “resume”?
Getting started means developing a profile, and for the purposes of this conversation, I’d like to focus on developing an effective Linked In profile. According to Linked In, there are more than 55 million accounts in that social media community. So building a profile that’s visible and effective can be a very important tool, and it doesn’t matter if you’re looking for that next great career opportunity or you’re simply looking to build an effective professional network. Building a Linked In profile is – at least in my opinion – as close to a requirement for most of us as you can get in today’s marketplace of ideas and opportunities.
Here are three tips on getting an effective profile started:

1. Build your brand. What is it you are selling to the market? Visitors to your profile should not be forced to guess what you do, what you do best and what you want to do next.

2. Tell your story. Your profile should not be a simple restatement of your resume. Why bother if that’s all you’re going to do? Let visitors “see” what motivates you, what you’re passionate about, and a bit of your personality. You can do this by writing a profile that reads conversationally.
3. Focus on key words. Think carefully about what search you would enter at Linked In or Google to find yourself. What are those crucial key words that get to the very heart of who you are and what you do best? Then, build your profile around those terms. Use three or four in your headline. So instead of, “Operations Professional,” you are, “Director of Operations | Motivational Leader | Efficiency Expert.” Make your headline sing out the core key words tied to your brand.

Obviously, there’s a lot more to writing a great profile, but if you try these tips, you ought to see an increase in the traffic across your own profile as more and more people find you.
Good Luck!

Word Cloud made at www.wordle.net

Let’s start with numbers. According to Linked In and Facebook respectively, there are 55 million & 350 million members at those two social networking sites. We are seeing more and more recruiters and hiring managers go to social media sites to view profiles before even ASKING for a “resume.” In this new job market reality, maybe it’s time for us to rethink how we define the term “resume.”

Resume is traditionally and widely defined as a “written document” that serves as a “brief account” including “career qualifications” usually transmitted as part of a job application. This definition is clearly rooted in a view of the business world that might not be as accurate today as it was even a few short years ago. Traditional resumes are – indeed – written documents we’ve handed out to people either in face-to-face meetings or by e-mail. Just a few years ago, job boards, like Monster and Career Builder permitted us to post a resume for prospective employers to find and download. That move to on-line accessibility represented a huge step away from paper only resumes. But we haven’t moved our definition of resume much beyond a definition bound by the limitations of distributing one resume at a time to one person at a time.

Social media changes everything. Really – everything in the current job search world. So – let’s try this as a definition of a resume for 2010:

Resume – a description of an individual’s career that defines that person’s personal and professional brand, qualifications, skills and accomplishments. It should be accessible on demand and in real time by an interested party, such as networking contacts, prospective employers or prospective clients.

What we need to do is recognize an important marketing principle related to career transition. It’s about going where your target audience is. The key audience for job seekers is on-line at places like Linked In and Facebook. Remember those numbers – 55 million (Linked In) and 350 million (Facebook)? Not every one of those people will be helpful recruiters, hiring managers or contacts at targeted organizations. But, you can bet your bottom dollar that more helpful recruiters, potential employers and great networking leads are there and reachable than you can reach with a traditional, one-at-a-time approach to resume circulation.

Are resumes – the traditional ones – dead? No. We will need to develop and maintain a well-written old-fashioned resume for the foreseeable future. But you also need a well-written new version of resumes – social media profiles – in the emerging and future market place. I am not advocating a technology is the only answer approach here. What I’m saying is that it’s critical to recognize that successful searches today require an effective, well-written, web-based presence. For some of us, that might mean our own web-pages, a blog and multiple social media profiles such as Linked In, Facebook and Twitter. For others, Linked In alone might be effective.

But none of us can afford to be absent from social media any longer.

Chris Osborn, BPI group

We’ve seen a lot of writing over the last 50 years about business leadership. Only a small percentage of any of the traditional writing and research is likely to have true staying power for one simple fact – the pace of change is far greater than our collective ability to research and write about what works best. So what I’ve been looking for as I’ve put together this 3-part series about The Characteristics of Innovative Organizations are those traits that – at least in our current world – really seem to be common in this organizations. So far, I’ve talked a little about optimism and risk taking, structure and collaboration, and now for the last characteristic common to innovative organizations (I’m borrowing a great term from Sarah Caldicott Miller here) – charismatic leadership.

We have learned enough about leadership to know with a high degree of confidence how important leadership is to an organization’s vitality and success. We have learned what traits people value in their leaders, and we have some good leadership models for leading through change, leading by example, etc. But what we don’t have a lot of is an explanation of how leaders can drive true innovation and why leadership is so critical to successful innovation. There are some writers now contributing to a growing body of work in this area, but this research and work is all relatively new. So I’ll offer my take on the current state of research in the area, what I believe makes sense and a brief description of three excellent books I recommend on the subject.

I want to start by focusing on the word choice I am using here – “charismatic leadership.” I am not arguing or positing that “charismatic leadership” about a management team or structure. It’s not. It’s also not always about the CEO, COO or any other specific member of the top management team. While there are great examples of leaders in those roles who fit this emerging model for innovation leaders, leadership does not always rest in the management structure an organization provides.

We take our leaders where we find them, and frequently, innovative leaders are NOT the people our organizations tell us have “authority.” In fact, innovative leaders are frequently a little scary for traditional management types. Innovation is about driving new ideas and concepts forward, frequently with an evangelistic fervor and little hard evidence to support the notion the “it” will work. Traditional management methods require metrics, data and proof. So innovation frequently flies in the face of business school management teaching, and as such, results in innovative leaders being left out of the “ladder to success” in a traditional career advancement model. Traditional management, therefore, frequently doesn’t “get it,” and move innovation leaders to roles outside the formal management structure of their teams and organizations.
But – there are those organizations that do “get it.” And it’s in these organizations where passionate people find positive reinforcement, encouragement and a place to apply their passion to their ideas. So, here are the traits we most often find in truly charismatic leaders:

1. Generation of lots of ideas. One idea – even a great one – is not an indicator of creativity or innovation. It’s one idea. No more – no less. Innovative people have lots of ideas. Ideas are the currency of innovation, and we need to look for people who have numerous ideas.
2. Curiosity – where do you think ideas come from? Ideas generally are the product of stimulation from a wide range of sources, and to be exposed to lots of different things, innovative leaders are relentlessly curious. They read, the see film, they explore, they think, they exchange ideas, they seek out new things for the pure pleasure of the new experiences that result from these events, things or ideas. Too many traditional management types are unfailingly NOT curious. They do the same things over and over. They get their news from the same two sources, etc. Look for a different sort of leader. (A good interview question for this – “How many books are you currently reading?” Not that I am a model here, but I am usually digging through 5-6 books at a time – fiction, politics, economics, leadership, etc. During a corporate interview I had several years ago, I was asked about THE book I was reading. When I answered truthfully, I got a raised eyebrow or two. After hired, I was told my answer scared them a little. I should have walked out the door on the spot, but – hey – I was optimistic I could help shift the culture a little. WRONG!)
3. Collaborative – this trait is so critical, it is an absolute requirement in my opinion. Truly innovative people are constantly working with others. They share ideas. Refine ideas. Look for improvements. Look for obstacles, etc. And you cannot do this in isolation.
4. Able to see patterns and connections – this is one of those key traits or competencies that many current management methodologies seek to stamp out. There are patterns and connections all around us. Innovative people put things together in ways others of us don’t quickly see. Don’t discount any suggestion that some unusual things are – in fact – connected. Discounting these sorts of observations can lead to missing some terrific new markets, new products or new processes that can really help drive bottom line results. Too many organizations have structures in place to actually discourage people from sharing information across business units or divisions. Those organizations – and those at the very top of such organizations – lack the ability to see broad interconnections and patterns. So they build structures designed to keep people in silos. These companies are frequently successful for a time, because they push on the things they do best to the exclusion of new ideas. And they are rarely innovative over the long haul.
There are other crucial leadership traits, but these (and they are NOT exclusive in my view) seem to be common to the innovative leaders I’ve met and studied. I’d LOVE to hear your thoughts on the subject.

Now – here are three books you should read ASAP about these ideas:
A Whole New Mind – Daniel Pink. This is – hands down – my favorite business book ever. I’ve read it 4 times, and am now working on some ideas inspired by this amazing work. We ALL owe Mr. Pink a debt of gratitude for getting his ideas on paper and to all of us to enjoy and read.
Innovative Like Edison – Michael J. Gelb and Sarah Miller Caldicott. It’s really impossible to top Thomas Edison for innovation leadership. This is a must have read for those of us interested in this subject.
The Seeds of Innovation – Elaine Dundon. This another terrific read, and Dundon gives us some great information about how innovative organizations work. LOVE this work!

First – sorry for the long hiatus between posts here. I’ve had a great last few weeks including a wonderful trip to Paris and a week in Chicago doing some certification training. In the meantime, I’ve also been doing some more thinking about innovation, creativity and how organizations can align talent to improve the chances that innovation can occur. So now it’s time to talk about the next two characteristics I see in most innovative organizations.

Collaboration and a “flat” structure that facilitates information exchanges seem to be present in innovative organizations. I am not talking about a free form, wide open floor where everyone is chattering with everyone else. While such a structure might be fun and entertaining, it’s not a structure that really encourages true collaboration, and it’s not what I mean by “flat.” Most of this extremely important work will occur in team situations, and that will lead us to our last (3 of 3) post on this topic which will be ready next week.

Collaboration

We all have ideas. Right? How many good ideas do we develop in isolation? I’d wager that number is low; at least it is for me. But collaboration with no guiding principles or direction will be a disaster.

This is a bit like releasing thousand monkeys into a room of word processors and hoping they’ll produce Shakespeare. If you are lucky enough to have it happen once, you surely wouldn’t expect it to be repeatable.
The Innovator’s Guide to Growth, p. 121 Scott D. Anthony, Mark W. Johnson, Joseph V. Sinfield & Elizabeth J. Altman

Collaboration can occur in many forms. Organizations can build teams. Formalized “collaborative” opportunities can be made to work, but it’s much more difficult to direct innovation in these circumstances. On the other hand, teams can be vitally important as innovative ideas are brought forward towards production or execution.
The sort of collaboration that really helps drive innovation has its roots in the organization’s culture. Its’ collaboration by, among and between people empowered to think expansively and communicate with people across traditional organizational boundaries, that drives innovation.

My most recent experience with a corporate job illustrates just how true collaboration can help drive innovation. When the project was in its start-up phase, there was a lot of excitement around it. Multiple people all over the organization and outside the organization made themselves available for discussions, brainstorming and ideation. This open ended collaboration lasted about 18 months, and it resulted in the introduction into the market of a completely new way to reach the location level management at client organizations about ways to improve margins aligned with the vendor’s third-party administrative services.

Over the next 18 months, relationships became more formal and the open ended culture of free communications and information sharing ended over turf disputes and certain internal players demanding control over the project. The free exchange of ideas ground to a halt. Outside resources were dismissed as irrelevant or inconsequential, and a sort of internal arrogance began to seep into the project. The end result was a stagnant sales effort and an end to the project. The culture surrounding the initial effort changed into a culture dominated by a total lack of collaboration and failure.

Flat Structure

On some levels, a “flat structure” and collaboration are so closely intertwined; it’s hard to separate the two elements. But I believe the two concepts are separate and should be addressed as such. Collaboration has to do with the way in which the people within an organization see themselves and their relative ability to reach out for ideas and assistance as needed. The “flat structure” concept refers to organizational choices related to command/control and the flow of information.
At the terrific blog, The Heart of Innovation, http://www.ideachampions.com/heartofinnovation/ there was a post on June 5, 2009 about how CEO’s sabotage innovation efforts. It’s a provocative read and highlights the dangers of a rigid, hierarchal structure with a short-term view of “shareholder value.”In other words, when organizations are set up with a strong “top-down” management (NOT leadership!) structure, innovation will usually be little more than an afterthought. These sorts of organizations also tend to work in silos with little knowledge and information flowing across structural “boundaries.” All of these factors combine into a management, structure and cultural mix that are toxic and hostile to innovative initiatives.

In Winning Through Innovation, Tushman and O’Reilly advocate for a management problem solving method they call a “congruence approach.” One of the elements the authors argue that needs to be identified and fostered to accomplish the innovative problem solving is for organizations to identify and leverage the informal networks that move information around the organization. These networks, in innovative organizations, are generally informal, defy operational identities (not in silos) and evolve naturally around the abilities of key individuals who serve as connectors between colleagues and for ideas.

Starting Point

It’s people. Innovation always has been and always will be about your people. How do teams within your organization function? Do teams evolve on their own? Are they formally created? Do leaders emerge or are leaders designated? How are your leaders handling the needs and requirements of an innovative culture?
If you have answers to these questions, I’d love to read about them. In the meantime, we will post the third and final installment of the characteristics of innovative organizations next week. Stay tuned!