Tomorrow the unemployment report for July will be released and many of you should just ignore it.

I’m talking about those of you who had jobs in shrinking industries such as mortgages, or manufacturing, just to name a few. Even though you’ve been trying hard to find a similar job in a similar field, you can’t even seem to get a call back, let alone an interview.

Maybe it’s time to think about career reinvention. I know, you don’t want to think about that yet. But hitting your head against the wall trying to get a job in a dying field will get you no where.

Come on folks, you can do it!

There are endless stories about folks over 40 who have been able to leave long-time careers behind and start something new and exciting.

Just today, there’s a great, inspiring story in the Wall Street Journal about a former New York firefighter who is now a flight attendant. Go read this piece now if you want some encouragement for your career redux.

I’m not saying starting something new is easy. It’s not. And among the biggest challenges are being able to see yourself in a new career and accepting that maybe you’re not going to find a dream job. (more…)

In today’s job market, age doesn’t seem to be a virtue.

If you have a strong work ethic, there’s a comfort in knowing you’ll take any job and do what ever it takes to support yourself and your family. But, for 50-plus workers, even if they wanted to work at a fast food restaurant, or a grunt job just to get a pay check, their options are limited.

Take Jeff T. from Palm Springs, CA, who is unemployed and is willing to do anything.

“What are 50 somethings supposed to do when they apply for work/jobs and are told they are ‘over qualified’? It seems that we have been told that employers are looking for “experience”, but when they find it, we are pretty much down the road.

“Our only lifeline, extended unemployment benefits, have run out, and with no prospects on the horizon, where do we go? We can not even get a job asking ‘you want fries with that?’”

Jeff is clearly not alone. New statistics show many older workers are remaining jobless longer than ever. But don’t despair, I’m going to offer you some solid tips later in this post from older workers who were able to find jobs they love. (more…)

Our local library asked me to speak in the fall about career reinvention. Based on the types of books readers are checking out, the program manager for adult programs at the library figured that would be a great topic to draw a crowd.

The request immediately got me thinking about what I’d do if I could do something other than journalism. (more…)

It may seem like this economic downturn will never end, but it will and job growth will begin again.

Economists have been predicting there will be more jobs than people once the Baby Boomers start to retire, and once the economy turns around we’re supposed to see employment opportunities galore. The jobs they leave behind will need to be filled, everything from education to social services positions. And the aging population has created a demand for more health care, and that means there will be many jobs related to medicine.

Many of these jobs don’t involve sitting behind a desk. And many require emotional connections with people unlike anything you may have experienced at the water cooler.

The question is, will you want to take any of the jobs that will be the most abundant? Do you have the skills, or the desire? (more…)

Valentina Janek, who’s over 40, has heard the “you’re-over-qualified” excuse before.

Janek, who started a networking group for the jobless called the Long Island Breakfast Club, has been looking for a job for a while and believes age bias is alive and well in the job market today.

“Overqualified is another word for disqualified,” she explained. “If you interview with someone not as experienced as you, you won’t get the job.”

It’s something I hear often from people in the mid-stream of their careers, and even though employment discrimination based on age is clearly illegal under the nation’s labor laws, it happens often.

What are these hiring managers and HR folks really thinking when they say “overqualified”? (more…)

What better time to rethink your career goals than during the holidays.

I’m serious. You’re seeing friends and family, sharing gifts and cheer. And for many of us it can be a time for self reflection.

I often think about the people I love so much who are no longer here. My inspiring, brilliant father; my loving and kind grandfather; and my tough-minded and warmhearted grandmother.

When I think of them, I’m inspired by the lives they led and I also realize how little time we all have. (more…)

SIT UP STRAIGHT PEOPLE!

Is work giving you a pain in the neck?

I’m not surprised given today’s workplace. It’s making us all want to slump down in our chairs.

Workers who still have jobs are doing the work of one or more employees; pay and benefits have been cut for many; and who has the time or money to go to the gym these days.

It’s a recipe for ergonomic disaster. (more…)

When I recently looked at age discrimination claims made to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), I was shocked at how high the numbers were. The number jumped nearly 30 percent last year.

Part of me wondered if there really could be such rampant ageism in the workplace today.

Last night, I wondered no more. (more…)

You might expect the suicide rate among the unemployed to be rising in this economy, but among those of us who are gainfully employed?

Turns out workplace suicides hit their highest level since the government started tracking the numbers, and the data doesn’t bode well for what may be happening among the population at large.

Workplace suicides jumped 28 percent to 251 cases in 2008, up from 196 in the previous year, according to the Department of Labor.

“A tough economic situation tends to be an equal opportunity downer,” said Thierry Guedj, the BostonJobDoctor founder and psychology of work expert and professor at Boston University.

“What you see is that many employers are trying to do a whole lot more with less. Many employees are being pushed to the limit by their supervisors, where they cannot possibly meet the productivity targets,” he explained. “So, basically they work themselves into the ground. Tremendous anxiety sets in. Insomnia creeps up. People are in a constant state of hyper-alertness, which is very bad for their health. There’s also a rise in heart attacks and other serious medical conditions.”

According to the DOL nearly 95 percent of the suicides were committed by men, and the highest levels were among those who were between 45 and 54.

When it comes to different age groups and suicide, said Eric Caine, professor and chair of the department of psychiatry at the University of Rochester Medical Center, pointed out, the rate tends to accelerate among those in their early 20s and then tends to level off among those in their early 50s and goes down a bit from there. The fact that so many of the people tracked in this research were around 50 years old may just be a reflection of the size of that group among the working population, he added.

Factors that contribute to suicide among those between 25 to 55, he explained, typically have to do with family stress, financial stress and workplace stress.

To be sure, stress on the job is rising for many workers in this economy as companies cut back benefits, furlough workers, and expect a few to do the job of many.

“Compounding the problem,” added Guedj, “is the huge debt load that Americans have accumulated. So, many people are facing foreclosure. Others can’t pay for their kids’ education. They feel like they habe failed on so many fronts. Despair starts to set in and the world looks like a huge black hole from which it seems impossible to escape.”

Among those who committed suicide guns were increasingly the weapon of choice:

For suicides in 2008, gunshot wounds (accounting for 130 suicides) and asphyxiations/strangulations or suffocations (accounting for 78 suicides) were the most common occurrences. Gunshot wounds increased 48 percent from 2007 to 2008.

And it wasn’t just rank and file workers that took their own lives. In fact, managers were more likely to kill themselves. (Here’s a link to a blog post I wrote on a recent executive suicide.)

Workers in management occupations account for the largest group of suicides, the DOL reporterd. In 2008 they accounted for 14 percent of suicides (34 fatalities) and in 2007 they accounted for 18 percent of all suicides (35 fatalities). Transportation and material moving occupations, sales and related occupations, and protective service occupations each accounted for 10 percent of total suicides. The occupations that experienced the largest increases in suicides from 2007 to 2008 were protective service occupations (14 to 25 fatalities) and transportation and material moving occupations (13 to 24 fatalities). About a third of the total protective service suicides in 2008 were police officers.

This blog post is fitting right now because this week is National Suicide Prevention Week, according to Clare Miller, director of the Partnership for Workplace Mental Health American Psychiatric Foundation.

We need to be aware of how these times impact us and the people around us. Overall suicide statistics for the nation are woefully slow, and only go back to 2006, said Caine, before the economic hit the skids.

Some mental health experts are bracing for what could be a significant increase given economic conditions. “We know with clarity that in Asia when the economy unraveled in 1997 and 1998 the rate in Hong Kong, Japan and Taiwan went up dramatically,” he said. Since Japan is quicker to track suicide data, he pointed to that nation’s numbers for 2008, which shows the rate rising.

The labor department numbers may also be an ominous sign of what’s happening right now.

Employers are concerned.

This from a Workforce Management story from last week:

Employers are expressing increasing worry about employee suicide, say employee assistance plan providers.

There have been a greater number of calls recently from employers about how to handle potential suicides, said Dr. Doug Nemecek, Eden Prairie, Minnesota-based senior medical director for Cigna Corp.’s Health Solutions organization, which includes its behavioral health and EAP business.

In some cases, employees are informing managers about co-workers who have expressed suicidal thoughts on their Facebook pages, he said.

Given the potential problem, Caine had some simple pieces of advice for people going through bad times —

*Strong people can ask for help. Some problems can’t be solved alone.
*Many people around us have ideas we haven’t thought of, and many people have gone through this before and have been able to come out of it.
*There are hotlines in many communities and thoughtful, caring people.
*There is a light at the end of the tunnel — take it on faith.

When I got out of college I was faced with a harsh reality: It wasn’t easy to get a job for a major newspaper in New York.

I was rejected by some, never replied to by others. And soon I realized my dream of becoming a big city reporter would take longer than I, well, dreamed.

Surely someone was to blame for my failure.

Maybe my parents. They both immigrated from Istanbul, Turkey, and struggled to learn the language. Aside from making us speak Greek growing up, which gave me a huge disadvantage when it came to writing and reading in English, they had no connections to New York’s publishing empire.

OK, so my mom was always encouraging of what ever I wanted to do, but my dad thought journalism was a trash profession. He did come around eventually and was proud as hell of me, but hey, his early negativism could have doomed me starting out.

What about the system? I was a first-generation Greek-Turkish kid without a fancy Ivy League degree. What did the editors think when they saw my name on my resume “TAHMINCIOGLU”. That was probably working against me.

It must have been my university. Not one professor at Hofstra University told me how hard it would be to land a job at a newspaper or any publication for that matter. They just spent all their time teaching me crap about the profession.

There are many reasons for my failures in my life. I could write a book about them. Don’t get me started on my bad acne problem.

Alas, no one gives a rat’s patootie about why you failed.

You can whine about the reasons until the cows come home but typically you get zippo sympathy.

That’s what’s happening to poor Trina Thompson. If you haven’t heard about her yet, she’s the New York city grad who’s suing her college because she can’t find a job.

From the Associated Press:

Trina Thompson filed a lawsuit last week against Monroe College in Bronx Supreme Court. The 27-year-old is seeking the $70,000 she spent on tuition.

Thompson says she’s been unable to find gainful employment since she received her information technology degree in April.

I understand her frustration. There’s a lot of marketing by educational institutions lately to all the poor souls who are out of work, or wondering how to find better jobs. Email boxes everywhere are overflowing with ads from colleges, universities and online institutions hawking their educational programs as career nirvana.

(I tell people all the time these programs may not be right for everyone so think long and hard before you sign up. Here’s a link to a story I did on online courses.)

It would be nice if we could hold their feet to the fire after we pony up the big bucks for a degree, but that’s not how it works.

We can’t blame others for our failure even if in some way they are to blame for it.

Successful people are the ones that rise above challenges and blame. I have a whole chapter in my book, “From the Sandbox to the Corner Office”, that looked at the many challenges leaders faced. One guy’s dad was a raging alcoholic, another CEO was an amputee, yet another stuttered throughout his youth and stutters until this day.

Boy, they had a lot to blame. But did they, no.

I hate to say it, but we parents should be slapped around for putting these let’s-blame-someone-for-our-challenges bologna into kid’s heads. Our kids feel entitled and that’s because we’ve entitled them.

Trina’s mom has come to her defense, according to the New York Post:

“She’s angry,” said Thompson’s mother, Carol. “She’s very angry at her situation. She put all her faith in them, and so did I. They’re not making an effort.”

Ah, effort.

It’s that pesky little thing that actually does get us what we want in life.

I’m guessing Trina didn’t get an “A” for effort in school.

(UPDATE: ONLINE DEGREE SCAM WARNING
Speaking about useless education, I just got this email for a spokeswoman at the Better Business Bureau on online degree scams:
BBB has received complaints from students across the country who paid hundreds of dollars for a diploma—one person even paid $1,400 for a Doctorate of Medicine degree—but later received the bad news from college admissions offices, potential employers and military recruiters that their credentials were worthless.
Here are the four websites the BBB is cautioning consumers to be wary about -
*Belford High School
*Belford University
*Jefferson High School Online
*Vencer High School Online)