What If Your Job Disappears?

There is a lot of economic turmoil going on in the United States right now. Federal workers are losing their jobs and private-sector employment is being impacted from the ripple effect. What happens if your job disappears?

It's one thing to get laid off. You pursue employment with another employer and keep doing the same thing, just for another company. But what if the entire classification of your job — your career — disappears?

In the Pacific Northwest back in the 1980s, the lumber industry that had sustained most rural counties in Oregon and Washington saw great upheaval. Many of the mills that processed raw lumber were closed down because much of it was being shipped overseas rather than being milled locally. Secondarily, old growth timber stands were increasingly being marked as off limits due to environmental concerns.

Remember the spotted owl?

What did these mill workers do?

Community colleges and other trade schools began offering worker retraining programs. Those who worked in saw mills could learn new skills, often in tech fields that were completely unrelated to what they did before.

Is this feasible? How does a millwright go from maintaining giant lumber cutting operations make a 90-degree shift into robotics or software development?

What are your options if something like that happened to you today?

Identify Your Fundamentals

Let's say you are a highly creative person and your job working as a video graphics designer at a television network is eliminated. Perhaps the network executives decided that an AI is cheaper than a real person (you) at creating the chyrons and intro montages for football games.

You've been let go, a human being replaced by computers.

Take stock of your foundational elements.

First, identify the fundamentals of where you shine. It wouldn't be effective to seek a job in accounting — you're a creative and visual person and that would be a waste of your aptitudes. If one TV network shifts their graphic design to AI to save money, the others probably will, too.

Second, be honest with yourself about how much you actually enjoyed your job. It's common for people to spend their entire career in a job track that paid the bills but didn't feed their soul. They obtained an adequate amount of skill and achieved a certain amount of success, but it required a bit more effort to get out of bed every Monday morning than it should have.

70% of workers are disengaged in their current role. Are you one of them?

Perhaps your career track up to this point was misaligned with your psychometric and emotional hardwiring. Maybe you really are more analytical than creative. Be honest with yourself about this, as your next move depends on this insight.

Get the facts about your hardwiring. Take the world's most accurate and reliable psychometric assessment and personality test, the Core Values Index™.¹ Learn what your innate and unchanging nature really is, then see if that matches what you've done so far in your career.

→ Did you know: The Core Values Index includes a Personalized Career Guide with career advice specifically tailored to your individual personality profile.

This personalized information will indicate if you should find something adjacent to what you've been doing all along, or if retraining in a different field altogether makes the most sense.

The Difference Between Weather and Climate

A meteorologist once explained the difference between climate and weather by saying, "Climate is what you expect, but weather is what you get." Your job loss might be a temporary weather event, or it may be a sign of a significant change in your career's climate.

If you have become unemployed, did you just lose your job, or has your whole career gone away like it did for sawmill workers back in the 80s?

You have three options.

1. Find a new employer but keep doing the same essential job.
2. Keep doing the same thing but do it as your own boss — start a small business or become an independent contractor.
3. Consider a new career or discipline and pursue the steps needed to make that change in your occupational climate.

How are You Hardwired?

No matter which of these three options you pursue, start by learning how you are hardwired. Determine how much of these four core value energies exist within your personality's DNA, as specified in your Core Values Index psychometric assessment report:

• Builder: You take bold action, always confident in your ability to handle any circumstance, always seeking to get things accomplished.
• Merchant: You thrive on being the one to get things started and bringing others together as a team, all pulling together toward a common goal.
• Innovator: Solving problems and refining systems and processes is your life-blood, adding your wisdom and compassion to the broader effort.
• Banker: Gathering data and knowledge is your purpose and joy in life. You lend your ability to learn and know to those who justly deserve to receive your wealth of knowledge.

Everyone has a blend of these four core value energies; nobody is just one of these personality types. When you take the CVI, you get a report that details the specific ratio of how much of these core value energies exist within your personality.

Your decision about which career path you choose from the three options we listed above should be shaped by the knowledge of your particular CVI profile. This will help guide you in the path that's most aligned with your personality's DNA, and it could help you avoid a very costly and emotionally draining mistake.

NOTES

[1] Source: Seattle Research Partners, 2014. [PDF]

Core Values Index™ and CVI™ are trademarks of Taylor Protocols, Inc.