6 Figure Career Management

Following on from Goldman Sachs laying off 10% of it’s workforce in recent days, media reports this week suggest that the newly formed Bank of America / Merrill Lynch group is gearing up for a 15% cut across its global workforce. Like Goldmans, the lion’s share of redundancies are rumoured to be in New York and London.  With further reports of Morgan Stanley and UBS planning further cuts and the dire economic predictions from the IMF this week, there’s plenty of bad news around.

If I wanted to, I’m sure I could fill the pages of this blog daily with news stories of job cuts, dire predictions and gloomy announcements. But if you keep following all these stories, they just consume you, paralyse you into not doing anything out of fear or an attitude of “well what’s the point?”

It is much wiser (and so much more effective), to instead focus on solutions instead of all the problems. That means strengthening your network internally and externally, doing some self analysis to get really clear about all the skills and talents you offer, understanding what value you offer employers then reinventing and re-packaging yourself to meet the changing needs of your current and future employers.

That’s what every forward thinking business is to doing right now to survive - revaluating itself and then repositioning the business to meet changing needs of the market. As the CEO of You Inc / You Plc, that’s exactly what you should be doing to succeed in the current market. 

Individuals who are proactive enough to take meaningful action and make changes can potentially thrive and be the winners in this market. For these individuals, the economic downturn could in fact be the best thing that ever happened to their careers. On the other hand, those that sit around watching and worrying about the bad news stories will unfortunately find themselves become the victims of the downturn.

So it’s a choice - focus on the problems or on solutions.

What are you choosing….?