Coping with Change By First Letting Go
Write Yourself Into A New Career
Corrections or additions?
These articles by Karen Hodges Miller, Jack Florek, Kathleen McGinn
Spring, and Barbara Fox were prepared for the February 15, 2006 issue
of U.S. 1 Newspaper. All rights reserved.
Survival Guide: Reach Your Market With Just $1,000
‘If you build it and no one knows about it, they won’t come,” says
Ellen Silverman. But how do you let someone know about your
revolutionary new idea, your fabulous new product, your excellent
service, when you only have a tiny budget for marketing?
Silverman teaches small business owners “How to Maximize a $1,000
Marketing Budget” on Thursday, February 16, at 9:30 a.m. at 120 New
England Avenue in Piscataway at a seminar sponsored by the Middlesex
Small Business Development Center. Cost: $35. Call 609-989-5232.
Silverman has been in marketing for over 25 years. Her company, Ellen
Silverman Associates, is located in Pluckemin. She uses her knowledge
of marketing as a coach and consultant to help businesspeople learn
“high impact, low cost techniques, creative concepts, and marketing
communications.”
What you do with your $1,00 depends on where your business is, says
Silverman. A start-up company has different needs than a business that
is a few years old.
Logos. “Get a Logo – and get it done right,” says Silverman. This is
the first place a brand new business should spend its money, and it is
the area of marketing where the most money should be spent.
A lot of people who are new in business will go to an online service
for a low cost business card. They pick a standard graphic and order a
few thousand cards. The problem, says Silverman, is that when they try
to use that graphic as their logo on a letterhead, or a brochure, or a
website, no one can reproduce the graphic. “They just lit a match to
the advertising dollars they already spent,” says Silverman, because
they now must start from scratch and get a new logo made.
Instead of taking the lowest cost route, says Silverman, a new
business should hire a graphic artist to design a logo that can be
used on a business card, letterhead, brochure, and website. It costs
“several hundred dollars,” she says, but there are ways to minimize
that cost, such as looking for a college student who might be willing
to create something for less money.
Whoever you hire to develop your logo, Silverman recommends getting it
in several formats so that it can be used in a variety of ways. She
thinks it’s a good idea to have a logo created in eight different
formats, so that it can be used in every situation. The logo should
have a color version, perhaps for use in a brochure, and a black and
white version, which might be how it will appear in a newspaper ad.
There should be a high resolution version for reproduction in print
and a low resolution version for websites. It should be available as a
jpeg file, so that it can be used “in all sorts of ways online and it
can’t be messed up.”
She also reminds clients to find out what PMS colors are used in the
logo. These are the number codes printers use to exactly match colors.
Relationships. Once a company has a logo, the next step is not to run
out and advertise, says Silverman. It is to build relationships. This
may seem to be unusual advice from a person whose business is to
develop marketing materials, but, says Silverman, relationship
marketing is the cornerstone of business success.
“If you have a small marketing budget the best place to put that money
is into organizations where you will build small business
relationships,” she says. She recommends trying the local chamber of
commerce, service clubs such as Rotary, business referral groups such
as LeTip and BNI, and, for women, NJAWBO (New Jersey Association of
Women Business Owners) or NAWBO (National Association of Women
Business Owners). Trade organizations are another good place to build
relationships. “I always set aside money every year for joining
organizations, going to conferences, and taking seminars,” says
Silverman. This type of marketing gives her both the opportunity to
meet potential clients and the information she needs to “keep on top
of the latest trends.”
Client hang-outs. Go where your clients are, says Silverman. The
trick, she says, is to decide who your clients are and then go where
you will find them. “If you are marketing to real estate agents, go
where the real estate agents are.” You might notice, perhaps from
newspaper items, that real estate agents are active in a particular
charity, or that they are sponsoring a golf tournament. You know that
you can find them at open houses, where they could be on the look-out
for someone to talk to. Be creative. Try for “accidental” meetings.
Think about related services. If you want to target real estate
agents, you might get introductions from title agents or even from
contractors who work on houses that are being prepared for sale.
Public relations. Getting publicity for your business is one of the
least expensive ways to market yourself, says Silverman. Send out
press releases about new products or services, special events, or
seminars. “If you don’t know how to write a press release or if you
aren’t a good writer, hire one,” says Silverman. “You can hire a
writer to do a one time press release without the cost of hiring a
full service marketing firm,” she says.
Letters to the editor are another way to get your information to the
public. “I have one client who has written several letters to the
editor that have been published,” says Silverman. “It gets her
information out to the public.” Be on the look-out for issues on which
you can comment as an expert. The owner of a computer repair service,
for example, might offer hints on avoiding computer viruses when an
especially destructive one is in the news. A gardener could opine
about plant care during a prolonged drought.
That $1,000 marketing budget isn’t a one-time item, says Silverman. A
business needs to spend money on marketing every single year. If a
company has been in business a few years and has the basics, such as a
logo, business card and letterhead, what’s the next step?
Signage is a good idea, says Silverman, and can include anything from
new signs for a retail shop or signs on cars or trucks for service
businesses. A website is another “second step” that Silverman
recommends. Some people may not buy online – yet, but they do
comparison shop, checking several companies out before they make a
decision about which one to go with.
A third suggestion is “advertising specialties,” such as pencils and
pens, magnets, and calendars. Silverman’s logo is a light bulb, to
symbolize bright ideas. One year she used a light bulb-shaped stress
ball to promote her company.
Silverman also has definite ideas on what not to do with that $1,000.
Don’t print a brochure right away. Many businesses want to print a
brochure before they open their doors. This is a mistake, says
Silverman. “In the first few months people are tweaking their
business, getting the glitches out.” If you print a brochure
advertising a service, then decide to change that service, you can end
up with several hundred useless brochures and no money to change them.
Don’t build a website from scratch. “Everyone thinks they know how to
build a website,” says Silverman. But making sure it looks
professional, and getting it into the search engines, is a job for
professionals, and one that can cost a lot of money. A retail website
that isn’t well-marketed is a waste of money, Silverman says.
Marketing a business doesn’t have to cost a lot of money. “There are
hundreds of ways to market yourself and your business that don’t even
cost a thing,” says Silverman. From an E-mail signature that includes
a testimonial to sending thank you notes when you receive a referral,
the trick is to work smart.
“You can’t afford to waste money,” says Silverman. “Plan what you are
going to do.”
– Karen Hodges Miller
Top Of PageCoping with Change By First Letting Go
‘In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity,” said Albert Einstein.
That aphorism would be small comfort to the person who is saying
goodbye to their job and letting go of their sense of identity.
But letting go is the first step in making a change in your life, says
Cathy Quartner Bailey, whether that change is retirement, a job
switch, or losing a life partner.
In her business and life coaching practice, Quartner & Associates LLC,
Bailey invokes the three-part change and transition model offered by
William Bridges: The Ending, The Neutral Zone, and The New Beginning.
Saying goodbye to your identity (“I DON’T work for XYZ”) is one of the
biggest hurdles, and you have to get through that before you get to
the neutral zone, says Bailey. She gives a workshop “Managing the
Human Side of Change” to the Human Resource Management Association on
Friday, February 17, at 8:30 a.m. at Lee Hecht Harrison, 997 Lenox
Drive. Cost: $25. Call Grace Pohlhemus at 609-896-2122.
When someone gets through the first phase of the Williams Bridges
change model, they progress to the neutral phase. “It’s the
psychological no-man’s land between the old reality and the new one,”
says Bailey, “like Moses in the wilderness.”
Feelings of confusion and loneliness are likely to appear during this
uncomfortable, chaotic time.
Bailey quotes Marilyn Ferguson, in the American Futurist: “It’s not so
much that we’re afraid of change or so in love with the old ways, but
it’s that place in between that we fear . . . It’s like being between
trapezes. It’s Linus when his blanket is in the dryer. There’s nothing
to hold on to.”
Energy is low, because so much energy is being spent on change.
Creativity is high, because the possibilities for innovation are at
their peak.
Invoking Moses, Bailey notes that his wilderness phase seemed endless,
but that the third phase (the promised land or the new beginning) was
the goal. In order to move forward, one must let go of old ways and
behave in new ways.
Since Bailey hung up her coaching shingle in Princeton Junction last
April, she has coached more than 25 men and women, including
entrepreneurs, managers in not-for-profit organizations, and Fortune
500 executives in consumer products, financial institutions, and
pharmaceuticals. She focuses on emerging leadership development,
performance enhancement, and balancing work/life issues
Bailey knows first-hand about the politics of a big organization. She
had marketing management positions at the Federal Reserve Board in
Washington DC, Warner Lambert (now Pfizer), the Maier Group in
Manhattan (now Time Warner), and Lippincott-Margulies (now
Lippincott-Mercer, a corporate identity firm).
Her expertise is in strategic marketing. Buns of Steel, a nationally
best selling exercise video series at the Maier Group, was a landmark
project because infomercials at that time were still new. At
Warner-Lambert she managed an award-winning campaign for a pregnancy
test kit. At British Airlines, she led the launch of a new worldwide
identity for the airlines and marketed premium services such as the
Concorde brand.
Bailey grew up in a Baltimore suburb, where her father was an
entrepreneur. She has a BA in economics from Emory University, Class
of 1988, an MBA from the University of Chicago, and executive coach
certification from New York University. She and her husband, a Wall
Street trader, have two preschool children.
“I really wish I had had a coach,” says Bailey. She did have a couple
of mentors, but she points out the difference. “A mentor is someone
successful to emulate, but a coach is a partner in the process, a
sounding board, completely confidential. In a corporation it is very
rare to completely trust someone and let your hair down. You need to
be protective of your image in the workplace.”
The difference between a coach and a therapist is that a therapist
might take a slower approach. “Some clients can’t be propelled to
action because they are not ready,” says Bailey. “When they have to be
healed, that person would not be suitable for coaching.”
Bailey sees a typical client for three hours a week for three months.
Corporate rates are $300 per hour, and if a client is footing the bill
without employer support, $200 per hour. Bailey says she isn’t worried
about getting enough clients who want to be promoted from within an
organization and need a strategy to get to that goal. “When we focus
on clear results, people get them faster and more quickly than if they
are on their own.” For instance, she helped a fast-rising woman at
Kraft learn how to delegate. Bailey offers a free 30-minute session
from now through March.
Bailey quotes Helen Keller: “When one door of happiness closes,
another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do
not see the one that has been opened for us.” And a Chinese proverb:
“Be not afraid of going slowly, be afraid of standing still.”
– Barbara Fox
Top Of PageWrite Yourself Into A New Career
Are you fed up with your job and considering a career change? Would
you prefer to work from home rather than trudging to the office every
morning? Would you like to earn $30 to $40 an hour? Say, yes, the
highly burgeoning profession of technical writing could just be the
right one for you.
“Technical writing absolutely is a hot job these days and there are a
lot of positions available,” says Cheryl McNeil, owner of Graphik
Connexions, a technical writing business located in East Windsor.
“Just look at the top job sites on the web such as CareerBuilder.com
or Monster.com, and you’ll see all the jobs out there and all the
industries in which technical writers can work.”
McNeil teaches a two-session technical writing course at Mercer County
Community College on Fridays, February 17 and 24, at 9 a.m. Cost: $75.
Call 609-586-9446 for more information or visit www.mccc.edu.
“Technical writers create manuals and user guides by taking highly
technical information and boiling it down in a very precise manner so
that it can be easily understood by lay persons or specialists,” says
McNeil. Technical writers primarily focus on interpreting new software
applications, new computer programs, or even highly sophisticated
policies and procedures manuals for corporations and businesses.
While the concept of technical writing may be intimidating to some,
McNeil makes her course very student-friendly. “You don’t need to be
brilliant for a career in technical writing,” she says. “People of
normal intelligence can do very well.” The course is presented in a
step-by-step format, which teaches students how to organize
information, create graphical aids in MicroSoft Word, and add them to
documents.
McNeil says that technical writing requires a systematic approach to a
systematic subject. Before writing anything it is important to
determine just what the knowledge-level of the audience and the exact
purpose of the document.
“If you are writing for an audience that is already highly
knowledgeable then it is appropriate to use highly technical
terminology,” says McNeil. “On the other hand, if you are writing for
an audience that is lower level or with no knowledge at all of the
subject matter, you want to use layman’s terms and break down the
terminology to make it simpler for them to read and understand.”
The use of graphical aids is another important aspect of the job. She
talks about page balance, which involves having a visual sense of the
page, by balancing the use of text, graphics, and white space on the
page. This skill, she says, is vital.
“Research has shown that people do not spend the time to read whole
paragraphs of information,” says McNeil. “That means that the best way
for a technical writer to get the point across is by using a lot of
headers, a lot of bulletin lists, and graphics. There has to be a
balance on the page.” The graphical aids used include diagrams that
visually display the process, flow charts, arrows, and drawing tools.
In McNeil’s course all students are given an assignment of creating an
instructional manual at home between the first and second class. “We
separate the sessions because there is a writing assignment due the
following week,” says McNeil. “This gives the students something to
practice and think about. I give them a topic such as how to bake a
cake and the students actually put together a document with
step-by-step instructions and graphics. Some of them look really
good.”
While there is no prerequisite for the course, McNeil says that many
of her students are professionals working as business analysts or
administrative workers hoping to become technical writers. There are
also some students who already work as technical writers and are just
taking a refresher course.
But McNeil says that students with little or no experience can also
learn a great deal from taking the course. “Last time I taught the
course I had some students with no experience at all, but who really
wanted to get into the field,” she says. “They were able to follow
along very easily and did very well.”
Technical writers must use language as a precision tool and McNeil
recommends that students overcome any writing deficiencies they may
have before embarking on a career. “They really need to know how to
handle language well,” she says. “At the end of the course I suggest
texts to help those who have weaknesses in writing, grammar, or
spelling to iron out their weaknesses.”
Although technical writers are in demand, starting out can be
difficult. McNeil says that the best way for a fledgling technical
writer to break into the job market is to use whatever experience he
already has as a springboard. “A technical writer who is interested in
getting a job writing about accounting software applications should
really have some background in accounting,” she says. “I recommend
that students look at their backgrounds and decide from there what
technical writing position may be best for them.”
McNeil began her career as a technical writer after working in IT.
This offered her a way into the profession, and she still writes
technical materials for that industry. “I always write about software
applications,” she says. “I can go into any company, learn about the
software applications that they work on, and go from there.”
Born and raised in the southern part of New Jersey, McNeil earned her
bachelor’s degree from Montclair State University and her master’s
from Capella University in Minnesota. A single mother with one
daughter, McNeil started Graphik Connexions in 1998.
McNeil says that technical writing is a good profession for single
mothers because over 50 percent of employers allow their writers to
work from home. “That is something that I address in the class,” she
says. “I help students come up with just how to bring this up with
their boss. If you are looking to become a technical writer you just
might be able to telecommute.”
McNeil says that the typical career path of the technical writer
includes starting out with small projects and then gradually moving up
to more complicated and sophisticated projects. In the process
technical writers often work in a specific department within a
corporation and receive promotions within that same department. McNeil
adds that earning big money is something that may not happen right
away. But with persistence, fledgling technical writers will see their
careers advance. “You know how the job market is,” she says.
“Sometimes a company will want someone with 10 years experience. But
on the other hand there are companies who will want to work with a
beginner.”
For even those with little technical experience, McNeil says that
technical writing can still be a good career choice. “If you are a
go-getter and you find a small software development company or an IT
consultant company and you get your foot in the door, you can learn
about computers and hardware and software and then work your way up.
If you get a year’s experience under your belt, you can definitely get
a technical writer’s position.”
– Jack Florek
Top Of PageWho Keeps The Embryos
In addition to arguing over who gets the silver tea service, the
sailboat, and the right to see the children open their Christmas
presents, divorcing couples are now grappling over Brave New World
stuff. Family law attorney Lydia Fabbro Keephart is seeing many
couples whose “relationships are on the rocks” and who “have eggs in
the bank.”
Actually, they have more than eggs in the bank – the fertility center
bank, that is. They often have embryos in the bank. “What shall we do
about custody of potential children?” is a question that Keephart, a
partner with Pellettieri, Rabstein and Altman, is hearing more and
more often.
She speaks on “Embryonic Custody: Medical and Legal Responsibilities
Associated with Planned Parenthood” on Tuesday, February 21, at noon
at the Nassau Club. Also speaking is Dr. Melissa C. Yih, a physician
specializing in reproductive endrocrinology and infertility with IVF
New Jersey. The talk is sponsored by the Princeton Bar Association.
Cost: $40. For more information contact Holly Russell at
“A lot of people are very troubled,” says Keephart. “Making babies is
not so easy sometimes.” She and her husband, William Joseph Keephart,
a CPA with a practice in Lawrenceville, grappled with infertility
before having a son, who is now 22. She has tremendous sympathy for
couples struggling to have a child. “There’s lots of potential
conflict,” she says. “One person says ‘let’s adopt,’ but the other
doesn’t want to. One says ‘let’s take a vacation.’ One doesn’t want to
spend any money (on infertility treatments), and the other wants to
spend everything.”
She is not sure if the stress of infertility makes divorce more
likely, but does know that struggling with the issue is miserable.
“It’s not romantic. It’s not pretty. It’s embarrassing. It’s bizarre.”
It’s also more common as childbearing is delayed. Keephart says that
she and her husband did not even think about having a baby during
their first five years of marriage. And they were married 32 years
ago. Now it is common for women to delay serious dating – let alone
marriage or any attempt at conception – until they are well past 30.
Meanwhile, female fertility drops sharply by age 34. One result is
lots of customers for fertility centers like IVF New Jersey, which has
one of its three offices at 3100 Princeton Pike.
In vitro fertilization is the last option remaining when all other
fertility treatments fail. It is a process through which eggs are
harvested and inseminated. The result is a collection of embryos. Some
of the embryos may fail to develop, but if the rest look healthy,
fertility doctors will implant two to five of them – depending on a
variety of factors, including the clinic’s policies in regard to
limiting pregnancies with a high probability of yielding multiple
children.
After in vitro treatments, there are often left-over embryos. These
embryos are often left at the fertility center. Each, of course, has
all of the genetic material it needs to grow into, say, a six-foot
tall, blonde, gray-eyed basketball phenom, or a small-boned girl with
curly hair and a real knack for crunching numbers.
What is to become of these potential people if a couple divorces?
Couples fight over the question every day, says Keephart. Many of her
clients are men, and they worry that they will be responsible for
child support if the women they are divorcing decide to use the
embryos to have children with new mates. Keephart is not sure whether
or not they will be.
“You can never sign away a child’s right to support,” she says. But
it’s early days in the left-over embryo wars, and she just isn’t sure
whether a man can write a no-child support clause into his divorce
papers if the “child” currently exists as a frozen embryo and resides
in a fertility clinic vault.
There are also questions of visitation rights. If the father takes the
eggs, and uses them to impregnate a future mate, can the children’s
biological mother take them for two weeks in the summer?
Most of these details can be included in a divorce settlement. But
sometimes the couple cannot agree. Keephart sometimes gets to the
point where she throws her hands up. “I have sent people away to deal
with doctors and (fertility) banks,” she says. When she is next
consulted, the issue is generally not discussed. “I think they dispose
of the eggs,” she says.
This method of solving the issue makes her uncomfortable. In fact, the
whole IVF solution to infertility sits uneasily with her. “You know,”
she says, “the reality is that there is selective reduction.” In other
words, a woman in whom multiple embryos “take” may decide to have some
of them killed in utero so that she will not end up with quintuplets,
or, at the other extreme, because of the risk of a multiple pregnancy,
with no baby at all. Keephart doesn’t like it. “I’m a Catholic,” she
says. “This is a big moral issue for me. It’s a very big moral
struggle.”
Interestingly, in light of these comments, Keephart says that Dr.
Susan Treiser, the owner of IVF New Jersey, is her best friend. The
two became friendly when their sons attended the Lawrenceville School
together.
While Keephart is not happy about what science hath wrought in terms
of family law, she does enjoy the work, at least most of the time. A
graduate of the College of New Jersey (“I prefer Trenton State,” she
says.), she began her career as a teacher in the East Windsor school
system. She then completed graduate work in business administration at
Rider, and went to work for ETS.
In a strange career twist, Keephart may be the only person who has
ever gone to law school in search of a less stressful career. At the
end of a long week, fresh from court, exhausted, and yearning for an
upcoming vacation in Aspen, she laughs at the irony. But, yes, the
work at ETS was just too much. “ETS had me traveling all over the
place all the time,” she says. “I wanted more control over my life. It
was important to be a mom.”
She earned her JD from Seton Hall and planned on becoming an
environmental lawyer. But after serving a clerkship became “smitten
with family law because it involves children.” She has been with
Pellettieri since 1991, where she does “divorce and all the rest.”
She remains passionate about children, and sees a big part of her job
as advocating for them, and making sure that they are in no way
cheated in any marital re-arrangement.
Now she, with help from evolving case law, needs to decide just
exactly what a “child” is in terms of a divorce settlement. Does a
frozen embryo hanging around at a fertility clinic qualify? Maybe, and
for the moment, Keephart is writing up divorce settlements that
foresee a day when one or more of a divorcing couple’s embryos are
plucked from a freezer to begin their journey into the world.
– Kathleen McGinn Spring
Top Of PageThe Perfect Job Just For You
Basing a career choice on personality types may sound a bit mystical
to some people, but research has shown that it can be one on the most
crucial aspects of finding a job that satisfies both emotionally as
well as economically.
“When looking to make a career choice it is good to start with a kind
of aerial view and then zero in on the economic matters,” says
Lawrence Shatkin, author “The 50 Best Jobs For Your Personality.” He
holds a free book signing and discussion at Barnes and Noble at
MarketFair on Wednesday, February 22, at 7 p.m. Call 609-897-9250.
Shatkin is a staff writer for Jist Publishing, which is based in
Indianapolis. He says that he wrote the book to help fill the job
searcher’s quest for more certainty and information in the ever-more
complicated world of obtaining meaningful work. “The basic point is to
look at the kinds of work and kinds of work situations in which people
will feel comfortable,” he says. “There have been a number of books
that look at the concept of best jobs from the viewpoint of economic
rewards, but it occurred to me that many people would do well to start
looking at a career search from 40,000 feet. Once you establish what
careers work well with your personality, then you can dig into the
economic concerns.”
While many people look at a job as primarily a means to make money and
pay the bills, Shatkin says that personality issues are often the most
telling when it comes to job satisfaction. “To use an obvious example,
if someone is afraid of heights, then he certainly doesn’t want to
consider a job as a window washer,” he says. “If you are looking for
high prestige, the income aspect of a job will satisfy some of your
needs, but not necessarily all of them. There are a lot of concerns
beyond money that people have when it comes to finding that perfect
career.”
Shatkin adds that personality issues can have an exponential impact on
a company’s productivity as well as its employees’ work experience.
“If you take a person who likes a very structured work environment in
which there are rules and everything is very systematic and throw him
into a room where people are very creative and like to break the rules
in order to arrive at some sort of a breakthrough, you are setting up
an awkward situation,” says Shatkin. “Those people are going to get on
one another’s nerves.”
Based on the work of John Holland, who first investigated the
correlation between career choices and personality types in the 1950s,
Shatkin says that his book will serve both those who are in mid-career
and looking for a career change as well as those in high school and
college who are just preparing to hit the job market.
“Holland divided the world of work into six types and then created a
system that revealed what personality types would most likely be
attracted to what professions,” says Shatkin. “Since then there has
been a lot of research on this and it has been expanded to be able to
predict traffic accident rates or what sort of personality types are
likely to abuse drugs. Of course, I am interested in how personality
pertains to career choice.”
Much of the information Shatkin used in formulating “The 50 Best Jobs
For Your Personality” came from the United States Department of Labor.
“If you don’t have access to the data that will support your ideas,
you really can’t write a book about it,” he says. “I can’t base my
book on guesswork and say that this career is better than another one
because I think there are a lot of job openings or that it may fit
with a personality type. The statistics we get make it possible to
analyze the data in a meaningful way.”
The book is structured with a general introduction that explains the
various personality types, the applicability of personality in career
choice, as well as an assessment test, which allows readers to narrow
down just what their personality type may be. “It is sometimes more
than one,” says Shatkin. This allows them to look over the lists in
the book that spell out the best jobs for their sort of personality.
The book also includes comprehensive descriptions of 50 jobs for each
personality type as well as educational requirements that further
allow readers to make an informed choice on what sort of career they
may like to pursue.
Born and raised in New Jersey, Shatkin earned his bachelor’s degree
from Johns Hopkins University, his master’s degree from the University
of Chicago, and a Ph.D. from Lehigh University – all in English
Literature. “Literature was my entrance into the world of career
information, because when I graduated, at the end of the 1970s, there
were very few jobs for people to teach English,” he says. “I had a
career problem on my hands right then and there. That’s when I
discovered that teaching wasn’t really what I wanted to do.”
With an interest in research and writing, Shatkin found the perfect
job in the research department at the Educational Testing Service. But
after 19 years, he was downsized in the late 1990s. “ETS was moving
away from the work they had been doing in careers and decided to focus
on their testing,” says Shatkin. “But career work was where I had
established my expertise.”
Shatkin, like most people, has felt the impact of personality and work
collide. “I’ve learned over the years where my personality fits in,”
he says. “I`ve been in working situations where there is a great
emphasis on the social aspects of work. You needed to please people,
and while I am not a nerd or a churlish person, pleasing people is not
what I want to spend most of my time doing. On the other hand there
are people who really enjoy that part of work.”
As a part of the staff with Jist Publications, Shatkin is able to work
from his home in Hopewell Township, where he lives with his wife and
daughter. This is a work situation that fits his personality type
well. “My morning commute takes me 10 seconds,” he says. An author of
a number of career books published by Jist Publishing, Shatkin’s next
book is entitled “Best Jobs for Baby Boomers,” due out later this
year.
For those searching for the right career for their personality,
Shatkin offers the following tips:
Do some self-analysis. Those who do a little self-study can
potentially save themselves years of job dissatisfaction. Reflect –
honestly – on your likes and dislikes. Ask yourself what sort of work
environment suits your temperament and then go for it. “My personality
comes somewhere between investigative and artistic,” says Shatkin. “I
like doing research. I like solving new problems, and I also like to
write and the creative aspects of putting things together. I have been
able to find the perfect working situation.”
Act your age. In order to land in the right career at the right time,
Shatkin says that job searchers of all ages should consider their age
bracket. “It is best to look at what sort of jobs have a high
representation of people working in them who are around your general
age,” he says. “It is also necessary to see what education they may
have or are planning on obtaining. That way you have an idea of what
your success rate may be.”
Look at the work. Consider the nitty-gritty work situations of a
potential job or career before plunging in. “Take a good look at the
kind of work that is done on a daily basis, what the work situations
are, likely problems, and what sort of people you will have to work
with,” says Shatkin. “It is important to be comfortable with all these
aspects of your job.”
Then look at other factors. “There are a lot of ways that you can look
at the issue of finding the right career,” says Shatkin. “Personality
isn’t the only one, but it is a real important one. It counts for a
lot. After studying your personality needs, move on and look at what
your economic requirements are. Then, hopefully, you can meld all your
work requirements.”
And work happily ever after.
Corrections or additions?
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