Back at Work – July 13, 2009

What do the Emerging Economy and the All-Star Game have in common?

You know the answer, but you might not know the official term for it (a term that could be appearing in print for the first time ever right here and now): Cross-Team Teams.

Think about it this way. Managers on both the sports and the economic playing fields value talented individuals who are motivated and capable of working productively on organizational teams, but who are also flexible enough to do their part well in any lineup, even when it’s made up of unfamiliar players. You’ll be hearing a lot about the former example in the media these next few days, but I can assure you the latter is real, too.

Team work comes up again and again when employers talk about what they are seeking in new hires in today’s economy. A report issued by a consortium of national organizations in 2006 describes findings from a survey of 400 employers, 94.4 percent of which identified “team work / collaboration” as “very important” to the skill set of new entrants to the workforce. “Team work / collaboration” ranked second among desired applied skills, right behind “oral communication skills” and ahead of “professionalism / work ethic.” (See: Are They Really Ready to Work?, page 21)

The agility with which newbies in the workforce play on teams can pale in comparison to the way in which some seasoned workers fall right into it. I was amazed by this last Thursday and Friday, when Steve Lawler, Frank Danzo, and I spent two half-days at the new Regional Transition Center in Fenton. We were working with the State of Missouri and other partners to conduct focus groups with individuals who’ve been laid off by Chrysler. We were interested in knowing what kinds of services the transitioning auto workers would like to see offered at the Center.

There were almost 25 displaced workers in attendance each of the two days, and although they all were former Chrysler employees, for the most part they had not worked directly with one another before. Some came from the mini-van plant and some from the truck plant; some were IT folks, some robotics technicians, some assembly line workers, some managers, and more.

Frank had designed an exercise that required small groups of 6-8 people to prioritize six service options from within a total list of 25 possibilities. The way it worked was that each member of the group “voted” for their top 14 choices and the small group came to consensus to break the ties, resulting in a new list. Then, from the new list of 14, everyone voted on their top 10 services, with a group sign-off on the narrowing list. Then, one more round of voting and group consensus on the final six.

We had allotted nearly 45 minutes for this exercise, but it turned out that much time wasn’t really needed. Individuals fell right into a team decision-making mode so easily that the task was quickly and agreeably accomplished. Steve told us, in fact, that one of the small groups he observed made a team decision to by-pass the individual voting all together and went through the whole process by step-wise consensus-making. Remarkable.

Of course, the really big challenge about team work in the Emerging Economy is that we’re on a global playing field, and not everyone plays the same kind of ball. Talk to senior recruiters from any big corporation (and many small companies) in St. Louis and they’ll tell you that they need people who can work on teams whose members speak different languages, live in different time zones, operate in different cultures, and may never actually sit at the same table, face-to-face. That is a very hard reality for the folks coming out of Chrysler, who are painfully aware of the local impacts of globalization. But moving forward in your career requires accepting some tough stuff. This is the Emerging Economy. It will never be the Reversing Economy.

As they’re putting together resumes and talking points for interviews, I hope the transitioning auto workers will point out their well-honed skills in working on teams. If team-work is part of your experience, I hope you are stressing that in your job search, as well.

If you have not yet had much experience working on teams, it’s not too late to start. You can do it in a volunteer capacity with professional associations, non-profit organizations, networks you belong to. These can all be summarized on your resume and described when you have the opportunity to give employers your best pitch. Just like the Emerging Economy and the game of baseball, we are all works-in-progress, doing our best to score more wins than losses on a field where the players rotate frequently. The season is never really over.

Hope to see you at the next Bounce Back meeting on July 21!

St. Louis JobAngels – July 6, 2009

Enough with those devilish unemployment reports, already! We need some angels here.

No, I haven’t spaced out, and we’re not expecting any miracles. But when the going gets as tough as it is now, reinforcements are in order. With these being extra-ordinary times, why not aim high?

That’s why we’re creating the St. Louis JobAngels — a grass roots initiative of good people working through cyberspace to connect talented job-seekers with opportunities that might not show up on the traditional radar screen. Based on the “Job Angels” experience proven in other cities, the Bounce Back team will develop a series of self-help social electronic networks using Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook to help disseminate new job openings in the area. Our goal is to pair up job seekers with experienced working professionals who can assist them with job leads, coaching, online resume building skills, and understanding how job seekers present and market themselves online.

The project will be led by David Strom, a journalist and professional speaker who has presented at several Bounce Back sessions and an experienced social networker himself. Strom will serve as community manager for the St. Louis JobAngels, work to encourage job seekers to join these networks, and help pair-off seekers with existing workers for coaching and skill building.

St. Louis JobAngels is one of the new and expanded activities that Bounce Back will be offering in 2009-2010, thanks to support from the Missouri Division of Workforce Development. It’s going to take us a few weeks to get everything organized, and we’ll pass along more information as it is available on the newly- refreshed Bounce Back website (www.bouncebackstl.net) and at the next Network meeting on July 21. If you’d like to find out more about the JobAngels part of our program right away, explore the national site, www.jobangels.org and send your ideas and suggestions about how you think this could work best in St. Louis to David Strom c/o postmaster@greaterstlouisworks.org .

In the meantime, a few cherub-like folks sent us the following leads last week. The first two are examples of the kinds of positions that may never make it to the big job boards. Let me know if you want additional information on either of them before we can get them up on the site.

• Clearent, is looking for “a stellar C# .NET web developer to help us accelerate their market momentum.” Clearent provides secure payment processing solutions for merchants nationwide. Their services help merchants expedite cash flow, reduce risk and improve customer service. Clearent has designed and built its technology from the ground up and around the objectives of total transparency and flexibility.  Some of the qualifications required for this position are: expertise in Object Oriented development, ability to describe the effective use of polymorphism, inheritance, and encapsulation in past development efforts; experience with a unit testing framework such as NUnit (optionally JUnit); expertise in the use of Microsoft Visual Studio; demonstrable skill in building personalizable, customizable web-based user interfaces in a multi-tier system architecture using ASP.NET, HTML, and CSS; knowledge of relational database systems such as SQL Server (preferred) or Oracle.

• Kofi Nyamekye, PhD, President & CEO of IABSRI, is looking for an experienced IT professional for a part-time position with excellent potential for additional hours in the future. He specifically asked for candidates who are in transition due to economic conditions. This could be a great opportunity for someone interested in working in an academic environment with a lot of job flexibility. Applicants must have experience in Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)-Based Cloud Computing Model for Infrastructure As A Service (IaaS) for Large-Scale Systems-of-Systems Design. Prior Experience in DoD Net-Centric Enterprise is a plus but not a necessity. Experience with J2EE is a must. Must be interested in publishing white papers, writing proposals, etc.

And don’t overlook the more traditional sources.

• Mercy Health Systems recently posted a bunch of new IT openings that they’d like you to see. Check ‘em out at www.mercyjobs.com.

• Dice.com lists 468 tech openings and indeed.com lists more than 5,300 IT positions in St. Louis as of this morning. One of the best areas for immediate hires appears to be government work, which takes the form of both contract and permanent positions.

A great public sector opportunity may be hiding where you didn’t expect to find it. Bounce Back member Karl Reinhardt just landed a Big One through the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Never thought of agriculture as a 21st Century career? Think again. Adequate national and global food production depends on computer information systems that monitor, analyze, and display current and future climate conditions, crop yields, harvesting capacity, prices, regulations, transportation routes, and more. Information technology is transforming every field of endeavor; there is no place where IT isn’t important.

Next time you read a bleak jobs report in the media, keep this in mind. You’ve got one of the most important assets needed to succeed in these tumultuous times: an active network of friends, colleagues, advocates, and soon, even angels. Hold on and stay connected!