6 Brutal Truths About Your Career - Career Advice To Act Like A Free Agent

are you somebody that feels like the cards are always stacked against you well stick around because in this video I'm going to share with you six brutal truths that you need to learn about your career hey everybody it's Brian from Ola Factor layoff and today I want to talk to you about a hard-hitting video and this one is probably the video that you don't want to hear but you need to and it's six brutal truths about your career but before we get too far into it if you're interested in more content just like this directly from a corporate recruiter make sure you hit that subscribe button so I do a lot of career coaching and I talk to people all over the world and I hear all these consistent themes so I started thinking what is the root cause of a lot of these people's career dissatisfaction and I really started to notice a common Trend so I decided to make a video to highlight some of the more unfortunate and difficult truths that you need to learn and it might be the hard way in your career because like it or not it's the reality but if you know how the workforce really works behind the scenes you can use that to your advantage to position yourself and remember my Mantra we always want to act like a free agent so let's break down the six brutal truths that you need to learn in your career at some point the first one and this is probably the biggest brutal truth that you're going to learn at some point in your career is whoever signs your paycheck is the one who holds the power there's a career power pendulum that I speak about a lot on this channel where it swings back and forth and for the longest time it was buried with the employer and then it swung over to the employee pretty drastically for a period of it seemed like only five minutes and now the pendulum is swinging back to at least equilibrium if not heading in the other direction again we're seeing a major uptick unfortunately in layoffs we're seeing companies that are putting hiring plans on hold we're seeing a lot of companies that are reorganing and readjusting how they're approaching their businesses and some of the layoffs are fairly sneaky some of them are very public and some of them have been handled very poorly as you might know if you follow this channel you follow the news and when I go into LinkedIn I see more and more posts of people in despair saying that they've lost everything that they're their house is going to be foreclosed on if they don't get a job in the next two weeks they're going to be out of unemployment and all of these bad things are going to happen and that boils down to acting like a free agent and I understand that being in that position can be very difficult and I'm not trying to minimize the stress that a person who is in that situation is going through however if you're watching this channel that's one of the things that I'm preaching and preaching till I'm blue in the face is that you have to take the proactive steps and act like a free agent today and that's taking the necessary steps to get yourself as prepared as possible in the event that there might be an income disruption building up nest eggs or emergency funds making sure that your budgeting is in order buttoning Down the Hatch so to speak because we're in a relatively difficult economic climate and I honestly don't think that this is going to get any better over the next 18 months to two years I hope I'm wrong but I'm just not seeing a whole lot of signs and at the end of the day no matter where the pendulum swings even when it was fully buried in the employee side where everybody was getting offers it was the gravy train you couldn't walk out your front door without tripping over a couple of job opportunities making 40 50 more than your previous role but intuitively we had to know that the good times were coming to an end same thing goes with remote work suddenly it seems like companies are really trying to push back there's a variety of reasons why that might be the case but nonetheless they're forcing it and remote work is unfortunately becoming more and more rare again and of course there's the people who've exercised the great resignation the quiet quitting all this other stuff at the end of the day whoever is signing your paycheck ultimately controls the employment Arrangement no matter how much power or perceived power you think you might have then that's exactly why I took proactive steps myself to try to set up this channel to try to set up this business that I have because I want to be the one signing my own paychecks because I truly am acting like a free agent and taking complete ownership of my destiny and when I want to make a raise I just call it my accountant and tell them what I want to make and that's the true definition of free agency no obviously not everybody wants to be an entrepreneur so I'm not trying to suggest that but there are a lot of things that you can do to try to protect yourself in the advantage of an income disruption and being in a precarious situation where you're not in the position to invest in yourself to invest in your education to invest in furthering your career learning how to write resumes Etc then you are going to be at the mercy of an employer and you're probably going to be in this Perpetual cycle of always being reactive and chasing the carrot so it's a brutal truth that I learned the hard way going through layoffs myself and I finally decided to act like a free agent and change it the second part of truth that I learned probably the hard way as well at some point is that if you don't fight for your income or your career path nobody else is going to do it for you there is nobody looking out for you in your career except for that's right you because we have to act like free agents and probably more accurately we need to act like the CEO of our career and make the Strategic decisions that we need to get where we're going a vast majority of people lack any kind of strategy in their career they literally just wing it if you stay in a role too long because you're waiting for the company to finally recognize you then you're not acting like a free agent and you're going to be in the danger of turning into Joe and if you don't know what I'm referring to I'm going to leave a link up here that you should checkout there's a video that's really important that talks all about this speaking of what's the next brutal truth is is if you stay in a company or in a role for too long the market is inevitably going to pass you by say you're somebody that has joined the company as an individual contributor at an entry level role you spend the next three to five years doing that job and you progressively work your way through a series of Merit increases then at some point you want to be promoted into the next role because if you're not promoted into the next role and you just continue to do what you're doing the market for that same talent for the same level role in the external Market is going to be outpacing what the company's two to three percent raises will be so you could be five seven ten years into your career and suddenly looking at the cube next to you and that new hire that's fresh out of school is making the same amount or even in some cases more than you are it's because of the law of supply and demand if you stay in a rule for too long the market is going to pass you by and this is almost certainly guaranteed really the only way to unlock more earning potential is to either get promoted into an entirely different band of job or you need to leave and go to a different organization then you could experience that 10 or 15 percent jump however you need to time that correctly so if you decide to make a move make sure you're taking a close look at what the labor market is doing because you don't want to make a dangerous move when things are pretty shaky the next brutal truth that I want to cover is that your boss and more importantly your co-workers are not your friends now I made a recent video about this whole concept so I'd encourage you to check that one out if you haven't seen it yet but at the end of the day everybody's in the workplace and they're all relatively selfish and that's not necessarily a bad thing because you should be selfish too and to a degree that's how we act like free agents being selfish in your career should not be shameful you should be actively looking to better yourself because again nobody else is going to do it for you and if you're not doing it I guarantee you your co-workers and your boss are and at the end of the day those close relationships can come back to bite you and be pretty painful imagine waking up one day and your buddy who you shared all this dirt with is now suddenly your boss how is that Dynamic going to change or more importantly watch what happens when you're both vying for the same promotional opportunity and they get it over you or vice versa let's just watch how that Dynamic changes and if you don't believe me wait till you get laid off from a company and see how many of the people that you used to be close with at work reach out to you after three five six months probably pretty slim the next brutal truth is that you're replaceable no matter how much you think you aren't because no matter how Specialized or how Niche you are a company will figure out a way to survive without you they survived before you got there and they will survive after you and if you don't believe me on this one take a look at the companies that you've quit or left in the past and you were for sure that they were not going to survive that the company was going to fold the department was going to collapse that the product that you were working on was going to disintegrate because you held the key knowledge and nobody else could do it chances are they still have a website they're still producing Revenue they're still hiring people and doing all those things and there is a bit of denial in it because our ego is so attached to our work that we know the work intimately we do it every day we know it better than our boss we know it better than our co-workers because that's what we live and breathe every single day so when there's a threat of that our first reaction is survival but I guarantee you no matter how much you don't want to believe it if if you leave the organization that company will not fold up because you're not there anymore so that's why it is worthwhile to try to make yourself as unreplaceable as possible but more importantly having skill sets that are in demand across industry because it's great that you have this Irreplaceable skill at least that you think you do that only one employer demands it would be better to have a really difficult to acquire skill that lots of employers demand and there aren't that many people doing it and that's how you can shift to becoming more in control of your career and more importantly like a CEO or the free agent and as far as hiring is concerned this is another brutal truth that I've learned both on the recruiting Side and being a candidate is that you can be the best person on paper but it doesn't mean that you're going to get hired and that can be a really tough pill to swallow when you interview for a job that you think you are a shoe in and then you don't get hired at the last minute and you are completely baffled and then a few weeks later you happen to go check the LinkedIn profile who they actually they did hire and you go they hired that person that could be a real gun punch because you're going to analyze their background their knowledge their skills versus yours and the whole time you're gonna be going I got more of this I know more of that I can't believe they would hire this person and the reality is that happens all the time because what it boils down to is not only who's the best person on paper but who sells themselves the most effectively because at the end of the day interviewing is like marketing you are marketing yourself and marketing your skills and you have to convince the other party that you're the best at what you do through salesmanship and it can be frustrating when you say I just want to be hired because I'm just the best at it and I shouldn't have to tell anybody that I'm the best they should just be able to see it the brutal truth is that interviewing is how you present yourself and it's a marketing game and if you're not good at marketing it doesn't matter that you're the strongest person on paper how you sell yourself and that's honestly why this channel exists to give you the tools necessary to present yourself in the most effective way so that you're the one that's getting the offer and not that other guy and the final hard shirt that I want to cover in today's video is that at the end of the day no matter how valuable we think we are and no matter how part of the family we think we are you're just a line item on a spreadsheet and that's a particularly brutal truth especially when you have dedicated all of your energy all of your time all of your passion to pursue a career with a certain company that you think you have a future with the brutal and cold reality that unfortunately a lot of people have discovered recently through all of these layoffs is if your role no longer adds value you will end up as a name on a spreadsheet and it's very cold and calculating and it's literally a business decision your name is listed out there is no personality associated with it there's no human behind the name it is literally some Human Resources people sitting in a room with spreadsheets circling and targeting people and in some cases the bosses aren't even involved in those decisions they look at how much productivity you have how busy you are and what your salary is and those are the decisions that get made when they're determining who's going to be let go or not and as you get let go and you're dealing with all the trauma from the layoff that's one thing that really sinks in is that gosh was I nothing more than just a number on a spreadsheet for you and the reality is yes you were just a number on a spreadsheet to them so that's the importance of always acting like a free agent and I hope that message is perfectly clear after this video but if you're somebody that is sitting there saying gosh I just don't know what to do next I'm in an active job search and I'm not having any luck that's actually something that I specialize in and I've got a website called a life afterlayoff.com it's loaded with tips and tricks all from an Insider's perspective I share my deepest and most intimate knowledge in the form of some training courses the first one is called resume Rocket Fuel teaches you how to write a resume that's going to give you the best chance of a recruiter noticing you to set up that first round interview but it's more than just how to write a resume it's how to use your resume as a strategic document to propel your career forward but once you get that interview it's up to you to sell yourself throughout the rest of the interviewing process and that's where the ultimate job Seeker bootcamp comes in it's one of my most robust courses it takes you from A to Z through a major corporation's hiring process it's going to give you the deepest Insider look into a major corporation's hiring process that you're going to find anywhere it's going to teach you how hiring managers and recruiters think it's going to teach you how to go through each round of the interview with the highest chance of success and it's ultimately going to get you to that final interview hopefully that offer and I'm going to teach you how to negotiate the best terms for yourself but if you'd like to get those recruiters to start finding you instead check out my course unlocking LinkedIn because trust me it is a lot easier to get hired when a recruiter seeks you out instead of you trying to apply to a job not to mention there's a thing called The Hidden job market and I teach you how to network yourself properly so that you can start unlocking some of those opportunities through a course called unlocking LinkedIn so if your LinkedIn game is suffering check that course out I think you'll find a lot of value there as well hopefully these brutal truths weren't too brutal for you and that you've stuck around till the end but I'm here to help let's act like free agents or the CEOs of our career and we got this and like always appreciate you watching we'll see you on the next one

Channel: A Life After Layoff

Views: 138,620

Keywords: 6 brutal truths about your career, career advice for young people, career advice ted talk, career advice for 30 year olds, career advice you probably didnt get, career advice for 25 year olds, career advice for 50 year olds, coworkers are not your friends, coworkers are not your friends or family, how to get promoted, job hopping, how to switch jobs, how to make more money, passed up for promotion, getting promoted at work, laid off, corporate layoffs, tech layoffs

Id: VjiFWg7Lf88

Length: 14min 22sec (862 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 24 2023