_An engineer from Slovakia has loyalty to the American company he works for in Australia because he is waiting for his Australian green card. This is the global twist on the job=citizenship situation that has run rampant in the USA for years with immigrant professionals. Now it seems with many professional seeking opportunities out of their home countries that this type of hostage employee is global. The term wage slave has has taken on a new meaning with a scarcity of good employment opportunities in some countries while more plentiful in others, greater numbers of job seekers are being held for visa ransom by some company in Brazil, Singapore, Canada. The worse offender used to be the USA but more professionals are seeking opportunities elsewhere now given the decline of the US economy. Interesting I met an Indian executive who wanted advice on a job search in India from the USA. He had spent the last 12 years in the US working for the top Fortune 500 companies. He was finally just getting his green card and decided to just leave it all behind and go home for better opportunities. He was fortunate as he loved the company he worked for. The funny thing about employee loyalty is that it is engendered by either a scarcity of jobs or a devotion to the employer and the product. However, if a professional needs a company to employ and sponsor them to obtain a visa to stay in a country then enforced loyalty is tantamount to being held hostage to the job.
Most professionals I have met in this situation felt powerless to control their destiny but I have a few simple suggestions to at least mitigate the impact of visa situation on your employment.
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_One of the largest placement companies in the world with 4000 offices worldwide was explaining their stock price. The key thing they said that interested me is that 85% of their business is not in the USA. They have growing markets in Asia especially. They explained that given a significant portion of that 85% is in Europe is the reason why their earnings are down but they touted that growing emerging markets in Latin America and Asia. If the USA's marqee employment firm is mostly offshore what does that portend for future hiring in the USA and should American job seekers who are of a mindset to reinvent themselves relocate globally to greener pastures? If you are vital at any age, willing to blaze a new trail and blend well into different cultures including languages then seeking out opportunities globally just might be a good idea. More and more frequently, companies are hiring a significant number of employees on contract at all levels. At the executive level they are referred to as interim CEOs, CFO, etc. If the professional has found the position themselves, then the title is Consultant or through a broker, then Contractor. It still all boils down to what kind of tax from is filed: a 1099 or W4.
Regardless of title or tax status, the crucial dimensions of the engagement seem to be the leveraging of "just-in-time" talent for the duration of the need. This certainly keeps an organization lean and mean and hopefully competitive. In this age of information, the downside is that the company's intellectual property walks out the door in event of a workforce retrenching. Like Wall Street quarterly numbers, there is a short-term advantage, in this case cost savings, but a long-term loss to the corporate infrastructure. Apple, for example, at $400 a share is hiring with a 60-40 rule: 60% contractors and 40% regular employees with benefits, stock options, and 401K matching. Those 60% have no loyalty and great motivation to leverage their time and accrued cache at Apple to find a higher paying position elsewhere. Say goodbye to the intellectual horsepower and gleaned expertise as it walks out the door. Google does the same thing and even houses many contract employees in different buildings where they are easy to terminate contracts and make go away without any disruption of "the force, Luke". Many people in non-essential functions are hired this way: HR/finance/accounting/marketing/sales/recruiting functions. I have singled out these companies as they are high profile, easy to use as examples and I am in their hood so I have access to information. I am sure that other companies and industries elsewhere in the USA are behaving the same way. We aren't in that flat of an economy, viable talent that can get contract work is marketable and in demand in many industries and services that have stabilized and recommenced growing. The 14M folks unemployed do not all fit that category because of obsolete skills or no work experience, age discrimination, geographical region, a consolidating industry, or too long a tenure at one company. That is the topic of another blog post in how to remedy those road-blocks. The point is that companies are being incredibly short-sighted using a just-in-time talent pool due to the loss of productivity, a reliable knowledge-base, and eventual diminishing of bottom-line results. Further, this approach, combined with a lack of a viable national safety-net of health insurance and unemployment insurance for a contract workforce will ultimately drag down an economy and a nation built on an ever-growing pile of short-term solutions to systemic unbalances and unfairness. People as Cogs: perception drives performance
by Nilofer Merchant | With peers in a few CEO roundtables, I've heard things like: "I plan on hiring 3 biz dev people to get $345K per headcount in revenues." After publishing a book about closing the execution gap by focusing on the "peopley" stuff, CEOs of major companies took me aside (in a friendly way) to suggest I had made a major faux pas, and would be seen as having gone "soft." In spite of a forest's worth of academic papers and rafts of best practices published by the likes of HBR on the importance of the "soft" stuff, most companies continue to treat people as inputs in a production line. I've had leaders ask me if this "people engagement thing" is something that can be added on, after the core business stuff is done, sort of like adding frosting to a cupcake. For the rest of this article visit ( http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/06/people_are_not_cogs.html ) Harvard Business School Online This interesting short article pointed out the obvious persistence by the use of terminology in many executive suites and board rooms. However, even more engaging were the associated comments to the article. I believe the use of Web 2.0 has been the addition of comments to every article or news story. Further, that these comments can in turn be commented on by other readers creates a "just-in-time" community around that topic that embellishes, expands and enlivens the original far beyond the intention of the author. One detraction was the author's penchant to slang as in "gotta" when responding to comments. Two reader comments caught my attention. One placed the blame of the impersonal and objectifying language used such as "headcount" at the doorstep of business schools and their cirriculum. Given that most faculty had actual real world experience in the bowels of a company, I have to concur. One solution someone suggested was to put them on merit pay and remove tenure to see how quickly they start referring to themselves as "talent". But the other comment really was interesting and I take issue with it: I love the idea of the two camps being one - but the 'existence proof' you cite is, sadly, very flawed. Google and Apple are successful because they sell Market Leading - nay - World Leading products. The fact that they have different people-engagement approaches is, sadly, coincidental. By contrast, Henry Ford, also at a time when he was producing the World Leading Model T Ford, was treating his people like dogs. There is an enormous difference in perceived value between assembly line workers of Henry Ford's day and today's information/knowledge worker. Factory workers were treated as interchangeable parts and perhaps rightly so but, of course that doesn't justify the behavior. When someone leaves Apple or Google, part of the company's intellectual property just walked out the door. There is a reason that in tech companies in particular the term for Human Resources has been replaced by Talent Management. It seems fair to extrapolate that as work becomes more and more knowledge based, even manufacturing with AI, then regard for the talent that provides the intellectual horsepower will have to improve as well. And, yes, it will have to migrate to business school as well. The new tech bubble: Irrational exuberance has returned to the internet world.
May 12th 2011 | from the print edition, Economist Some time after the dotcom boom turned into a spectacular bust in 2000, bumper stickers began appearing in Silicon Valley imploring: “Please God, just one more bubble.” That wish has now been granted. Compared with the rest of America, Silicon Valley feels like a boomtown. Corporate chefs are in demand again, office rents are soaring and the pay being offered to talented folk in fashionable fields like data science is reaching Hollywood levels. And no wonder, given the prices now being put on web companies. Read the full article in the Economist Far be it for me to take issue with the Economist as the article was mostly accurate in terms of facts delivered. I live here and went through the first so-called "bubble". Without rehashing the gory details of the first bubble, let me just point out that all the derisive, mockers of online pet store, grocery delivery, and auto sales need only look at Amazon.com, Safeway.com and Cars.com. I buy pet supplies, hair products, lawn furniture and massages online now. The Economist's focus in on shareholder and investor's ROI. They miss the far broader view. That there was an economic collapse in 2000-2001 in the tech sector is not disputed but how much of it was caused, egged on and goaded by Wall Street greed and the Fed policies that, by the way, enabled this last crash as well. Were those tech companies too soon to IPO? Yes. Were they overvalued by Goldman Sachs. Definitely. Are the dot.com companies to blame. Not even for 40% of what happened. Did Silicon Valley suffer for it, yes? But, Wall Street didn't in that giant IPO ponzi scheme unless you were one of the last ones in or didn't sell soon enough. Over 400,000 jobs were lost here and less than half have been recouped. In addition, 3000+ companies went under (source linksv.com). What was lost? Talent, jobs, productivity, new products and markets but not the will to keep on growing businesses out of nothing but an idea. What's different this time? Linkedin, Groupon, Facebook are all profitable. Linkedin's share price at $45 was in line with its profits and growth rate. Is Wall Street's cultivation of it's institutional investors and the day traders antics to run the stock price up 100%, based on pure greed? Yes. Is that Linkedin's fault? No. Will Linkedin's share price be back down to the original offering level? Yes, because that's where it logically belongs. Is there a bubble? On Wall Street, in Private Equity companies, and with the new Angel investors, yes, but not in Silicon Valley. Company leaders are taking their time to bring companies public or do an M&A. Linkedin was founded in 2003 or end of 2002. It just went public after 8+ years not 8 months. Here people are working hard to make a living and a profit building new products and services using and creating new technologies. What does this have to do with the rest of the economy and the world? Silicon Valley has replicated itself worldwide. There is job creation here based on bio-tech, nano-tech, clean-tech, software, Internet, alternative energy technologies, and consumer electronics. This is not going away but rather it is growing and expanding. Yes, it's nice to have it shovel ready but tomorrow bandwidth rules economic structures not more car lanes. The true story is that job creation, and business opportunities can be replicated world-wide and it is happening. The Economist just doesn't have the full perspective nor does it understand the ramifications beyond the point of view of the investment community. Word of advice? Don't buy the stock, rather, look for the job and business opportunities. Build a Groupon leveraged business like all those little E-Bay businesses. Uncover ways to make money for yourself not Wall Street and welcome this new boom for all it's worth. Last year my client conducted a very successful job search. He moved up from Director to Vice President and into a company that was a much better fit for him.
I have to laugh at his complaining about the efforts his search entailed. Given he took less than 4 months to land a new position while the average executive search is at least six months. Here are some of his experiences that I can pass on to you.
Because we built a great website for him, because he blogged religiously, because he was well-branded and visible online, he was well-received in advance of an interview by hiring decision-makers. http://www.kued.org/productions/utahnow/thejob
With an unemployment rate that has doubled over the past two years and a shifting economy, "The Job" begins to explore how all this has changed the expectations and realities of work. Produced by the Utah NOW team of Doug Fabrizio, Dave Castleton, Erik Nielsen, and Gary Turnier, this KUED documentary features the stories of people who left stable jobs to follow a dream. But there are also stories of those who couldn't make the dream work. "The Job" traces the history of work and the changing role of work in our lives and it chronicles the humiliating experience of losing a job and the daunting challenge of trying to find one. In discussions at the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland, the economic recovery was described by the acronym LUV as the various shapes of the look of the recovery.
In certain developed countries such as Ireland, Greece and Spain it is an L, while the USA and other EU countries is a U, and the developing nations such as China and India have a V recovery. The same analogy can be made for the recovery of the job market worldwide and specifically in the USA. It is situational depending on the local and regional industries as well as the impact of the housing market on the local economy. Without going into lengthy examples to prove the point as that can be found on government websites. Suffice to say the difference between 11% unemployment in the San Francisco Bay Area vs 7% in Salt Lake City. I can predict which labor market has the greater stability and potential for growth. Regardless of the technology growth engine in the SF Bay, that alone simply cannot create enough jobs to cover the numbers needed for full employment. The world job market echoes the same statistics. Opportunities abound in China, India, Brazil compared to the struggling EU and Eastern Europe. What is the answer? This may sound simplistic and contrived but I suggest anymore with the where with all to move. Yes, just pick up stakes and move on to new opportunities, to a cheaper standard of living, or both. Certainly that is more difficult for older workers. However, since our next generation of professionals is at the greatest risk of lack of choices and growth, they can take advantage of their ability to be mobile. I have found newer immigrants and minorities have fewer embedded ties and roots to places compared to the decendents of earlier settling populations in the USA. Regardless, opportunities will go to those who are mobile, adaptable and |
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