Larry Boyer's Blog: The Future and You by Larry Boyer, page 2

Five Ways to Remedy Your Job Disruption

Losing your job is a jolt. Whether you are being laid off or you can no longer perform you duties, after the shock wears off you’re left wondering what do you do now? When you are early in your career, making a move back into a similar role at another company is frequently possible after a job loss. However, as you get older or move up the corporate ladder it is not as easy to move into a similar role. Similarly, if the nature of your work as fundamentally changed as technology has changed, you may not be able to bounce back as easy. This is job disruption.

 

Job Disruption occurs when there is no longer a need for the type of work you do or you are no longer capable of doing the work you did.

To make matter more difficult, job disruption usually happens with little or no warning. An it’s more likely to happen to you than you probably think.

Can It Really Happen to Me?

I’ve seen it happen many times. I had one employee fail to show up for work. It turns out he had a stroke, while he was in in 40s, and was in the hospital. Ultimately, he reached the end of his short term disability period, was put on long term disability and lost his job. During the financial crisis, many people woke up to the new the company they worked for had gone bankrupt and they no longer had a job. Even recently, people who were planning to work on the reboot of the TV show Roseanne where caught off guard when their show was suddenly canceled after the star’s late night Twitter comments.  

We often think about losing out job because of being laid off for one reason or another. In fact about 1 in 10 employees (about 20 million people) in the U.S have that experience each year according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.

 

As you can see in the chart, that figure is remarkably steady, even during the most challenging economic times, like the Great Recession.

But job disruptions, as I mentioned, are not just about layoffs. Did you know that about 1 in 3 people aged 35-65 will be out of work for at least 90 days for a health reason? Natural disasters can put you out of work for a while or even forces small business out of business. While perhaps the largest example, Hurricane Katrina resulted in over 100,000 job losses.  While jobs eventually came back they weren’t all the same. But smaller disaster happen all the time. Of course, there are many other reasons you may find yourself out of a job as well.

Are you ready if this happened to you?

When Disruption Comes To You What Do You Do?

There are basically two ways to handle a job disruption – do some preparation before it happens to you or wait until after it happens to you. Of course, you can’t anticipate all possible disruptions and what your response to each would be. However, there is still work you can do to prepare yourself, so you are in a better position if and when it happens to you. Those who are prepared can get through the transition much faster.  I had one client who, when it happened to him, put in action his plan to move across the country and start his own business, a dream he long had but feared taking action on as long as he had a steady paycheck.

If you find yourself losing your job, are five things you need to do to get through the transition as quickly and successfully as you can.  

Five Ways to Remedy Your Job Disruption




Mental Shift: At a time like this it is easy to fall into feeling like a victim, feeling anger or both. To successfully move on you will need to find a way change how you look at your situation and move positively in a new direction to build your future. Energy Leadership . . .


Get Moving, Stay Social: When your life is disrupted we tend to want some stability, so often we withdraw – physically, mentally and emotionally. This can put you on a spiral in the opposite direction from what you want. So it is more important than ever to get out of the house, move around and interact with people.


Stay Relevant: The number one reason the longer you are out of work the harder it is to get another job is you change and your skills and knowledge atrophy.


Imagine the Possibilities: You’re free. Free to be anything you want.  Don’t even censor yourself based on any limitation you have, you can come back to that later. Now it the time for expansive thinking and then to ask, “How can I do that?” 


Follow the Business of You Blue Print: Successful business follow a disciplined blueprint from founding and throughout their life. Companies stay true to their core, adapting to the outside environment. You can do the same. Learn more about the Business of You

If you’d like to learn more about building your own future proofing strategy contact us or read our free ebook.

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Five Ways Blockchain Will Impact Your Life In The Next 5 Years

There is a lot of hype about blockchain technologies and their potential to transform business. From cryptocurrencies to supply chain management to cyber security talk of blockchain seems to be everywhere. But how will block chain impact you personally, either at work or home?  Should you be concerned or excited about it?

The answer is both.  Blockchain, like many new technologies, is part of an evolution from what is today to what will be tomorrow. If you invest in learning about blockchain you’ll have a chance to see when blockchain technologies will disrupt and replace existing technologies. You can use this information to make career changes and changes to your investment portfolio.

What is blockchain?

At it’s simplest, blockchain is a way of recording data that both preserves the history of interactions with that data and keeps copies of those records on many computers. In order for a new transaction to take place, the data are verified across the entire system, ensuring trust that the data are real.  Cryptocurrencies offer an example. When you purchase a good using cryptocurrency, the system verifies that you actually own the cryptocurrency. There are no bad checks to bounce, fraudulent charges or counterfeit money. The same technology can ensure that the data being used by your self-driving car is coming from your sensors rather than from another car’s sensors, or worse yet, being fed to your car’s computer by a hacker. There are many possible applications for blockchain and many types of blockchain.

Presently, blockchain technologies are in their infancy and significant work is being done to address shortcomings that can get in the way of mass adoption, especially the speed of verifying the transactions. There is no reason to believe these hurdles can’t be overcome. It will just take the time and resources to learn how to address them.

How Might Blockchain Affect You?

Blockchain has wide spread applications and will affect a wide variety of jobs and nearly every, if not all, companies. Here is a sampling of how blockchain may affect you, your work and your lfie. 

Cryptocurrencies Change How We Use Money:  Cryptocurrencies will reshape the way we make financial transactions. Today any type of financial transaction involves some significant fees and often take days, if not longer, for the transaction to clear. With cryptocurrencies, the transactions can cost hundreds of times less and clear almost instantly. Consumers and business alike will benefit from the lower fees. Those who work in the affected areas of financial institutions will find their work transformed. As new crypto-related processes are developed and other processes retired, jobs will both be created and destroyed. New systems will need to be designed and built. The lower fees will also bring new consumers, the “unbanked”, into the system. For those who learn about blockchain and different cryptocurrencies there will be great opportunities.  

Trusted Third Parties and Legal Work: We use trusted third parties to facilitate transactions and verify ownership. Smart contracts enable the transfer of ownership automatically when conditions are met. If you work in any related field, in the coming years the way you do your work will likely change significantly. Not is the time start learning the technologies and terminologies so when the new products are ready to be rolled out you are able to understand what they do and how they work.   

Ensuring Ownership and Security: From deeds to mortgages, car titles and stock ownership, from music rights to copyrights proof of ownership and authenticity are needed for well-functioning businesses and the economy. With records stored on a distributed ledger, gone are the needs to prove the authenticity of documents.

Auditing and Accounting: By it’s very nature, blockchain is ledger, recording transactions. Because each transaction is verified and recorded multiple times and stored on multiple computers(distributed), it is secure, replicable, and virtually impossible to tamper with. In a report by Deloitte,  Blockchain: A game changer for audit processes, they speculate that auditing a high value processes could be reduced from month or more to about an hour. This would eliminate the need for substantive sampling in auditing and allow for nearly real time assurance.  From the perspective of an accountant or auditor, work would be sped up while the need to learn new technologies would be needed. Naturally, entirely new accounting systems would need to be built.

Internet of Things: The internet of things, simply put, is about machines talk to machines to make decisions and adjustments to whatever process they are monitoring. From driverless cars adjusting monitoring the road, driving conditions and the car’s functioning to your refrigerator sensing it is time to order milk, the internet of things is growing rapidly. Today there are over 20 million connected devices on the internet. Within 5 years that number is expected to more than double. In order for the internet of things to function, it’s necessary to have trusted and verified information, information that can’t be altered by attack or a system failure. The distributed nature of block chain provides a both a fail safe and a level of security to ensure that the instructions and data being used are accurate and genuine. Blockchain could very well lead to great confidence and faster growth in the internet of things.

Take some time to research and consider how blockchain can be used in your industry and what it’s touchpoints with your role may be. Research more about what blockchain is so you can understand it conceptually and develop a more intuitive understanding. Blockchain is coming and it’s here to stay. It’ll likely impact your work and almost certainly devices you uses on a day-to-day basis.

 

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