WORKSHIFTER - Dispatches from the New Executive Frontier

When the Bureau of Labor statistics announced that the unemployment rate rose from 4.8 to 5.1 in March, it finally brought to light the immense number of individuals facing job loss.

A couple of weeks ago Eve Tahmincioglu, author of From the Sandbox to the Corner Office: Lessons Learned on the Journey to the Top and Your Career columnist for MSNBC.com, wrote an interesting post on her blog CareerDiva about these statistics and what this means for the employee. The reality of today’s job market is that companies cut jobs to see their profits rise; they seem to prioritize this immediate profit above the notion that employees sparks innovation and sells products.

As Eve mentioned, employees must act, but how? Deborah Brown-Volkman, career expert and president of Surpass Your Dreams, Inc. and author of Don’t Blow It: The Right Words for the Right Job, advised that one must think outside the box, do some research and figure out what skills he or she needs to move into a different industry or job.

I think this is great advice for any individual. But I also think that someone who has at least 20-25 years experience in a particular field does not necessarily need to push skills garnered over the years to the wayside in order to become employed again. Such a person has put in the time to accumulate a valuable and marketable skill and they should know that, rampant job losses notwithstanding, companies are looking for them. Companies are just looking for them in a different way—for project-based work at a variable cost. Therefore, thinking about how you can market your skill to a company as a free agent to multiple companies so you are no longer dependent on a single source of income is a good option.

Think about a project you have completed that has a beginning middle and an end. Companies out there are in need of someone like you to complete just those projects for a certain period of time. If you are an executive who has opened a call center successfully for example, among your many other responsibilities, realize that there is a company out there that needs someone like you to open a call center. Your entire experience is valuable in and of itself, but today, that company just needs you to build a call center, so market that skill.

Today, hiring a full time person for things like this doesn’t make good business sense for companies. If they can engage someone who has done a specific project successfully before in a similar organization, they get the knowledge they need to expedite it, all for a variable cost. To top it off, it is with someone who has no political agenda other than to get the project successfully completed which is a very compelling business proposition.