One of the hardest things for job-seeking individuals to get passed is the pain of termination. You and the boss did not get along. So who goes? Why, you, of course! You’re fired! It’s bad enough if you lose your job through corporate downsizing, “restructuring,” company relocation or closure, but to lose your job because someone in power favored someone over you, sabotaged you or made a bad workplace situation worse or just didn’t see eye-to-eye with you — or was just plain abusive, is the hardest thing to dust yourself off, get up and start over again after feeling “poisoned” by a toxic work environment.

As an employment counselor, I see this all the time. It happens to the best of us and somewhere along the line, I am willing to wager, most people will have experienced it at least once in their working lifetime.

“The boss was a mental case. He’d curse and scream and throw things…” Or, “She was such a bitch.”(like the boss in Damages or The Devil Wears Prada).  Or I hear about how someone challenged some unfairness at work, or meant well on some issue but was misunderstood and before you know it, unspoken, implied bad vibes filled the air and settled like a pall over every workday. You can cut that tension, as the saying goes, with a knife in those situations…

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You lost your job. You’re tired of that field anyway, so now you’ve decided to go back to school for new skills and make a career change. It’s a wonderful idea to want to better oneself and a sound one that makes sense—in an ideal world. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to learn and advance in one’s education. But before you take out that hefty loan for a certificate program and have a debt hanging over your head with no job prospects, consider some valuable tips:

Make sure the school is accredited by your state education department and is on the Eligible Training Provider List of your state’s labor department website. This means that the school had to meet certain important criteria and be validated.

Don’t go by hearsay as to employment opportunities. National labor statistics tell you that certain fields are growing. It’s important to remember that these statements are overall projections for the entire country and often do not and cannot take into consideration wild fluctuations due to the economy at any given time. The local regional reality for your desired field may be much different from those reports. Talk to people employed in your desired field. They offer the best reality-check. While labor stats may say one thing about how the medical field is proliferating in opportunities, local hospitals are laying off all professional levels like crazy and closing their doors in some cases.

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Ugh. Those dirty words: Layoff. Jobless. Unemployed—dirty words for any reason, season and situation.

How painful it must be when those who used to be the ones behind the desks doing the hiring now turn into the ones now scrambling to grab interviews. Desperate clients surprise me when they tell me, “I used to read resumes and interview people—and now I have no idea how to interview—now that I am out of work!”

Yikes. Imagine that. How could this be?

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What a preposterous statement! How can you give a good interview and be detached? After all is said about being aware of the interviewer and the dynamics, researching the company, breaking the brain to give the best answers to questions that you often don’t know what answers they seek from you, and so on, it’s a herculean thing to be asked to do by this employment counselor! Detachment is an enigma when told to prepare for the interview and you naturally feel “nervous.” But it’s really about balance.

When we hear the word, detachment, we might think of a mystic somewhere high up in the mountains of Tibet, or someone getting high from drugs. Detachment could apply to snobs or those who suffer mental illness, or just to those folks who couldn’t care less.

But the kind of detachment I believe we need for a successful interview is a detachment from self-consciousness. Practice detachment from your insecurity of being “judged.” Otherwise, you will freeze up or present yourself in a stilted manner. Insecurities turn into obsessions if nurtured too much.

Many adults come to me, some in tears, who have been laid off from their jobs and the reason for those tears is not just the frustration of job loss and subsequent rejections in cyberspace and beyond—although those reasons certainly are qualifiers—but from not knowing what to say on an interview. They hit a blank wall and dead end and all they see and feel is fear of the unknown. These same people at least once before gave a successful interview because they were hired! What happened?

On the way to their next job, they were detoured by frustration and inadequacies. Some may have told themselves they are no good because they were laid off. They don’t know if they can adapt to a new workplace, master new skills and many times they don’t want to! So they nurture fear and resistance that keeps them from greeting their next opportunity. They think, “What if I say something wrong?” or “What if they don’t hire me?” Or dozens of other “what-if’s.”

You’re either going to get the job, or you won’t. That’s all that will happen. If you don’t, know that there are factors that may not even have anything to do with your performance or background which you may never find out.

We need to get ourselves out of the picture and just concentrate on what we can do for the next employer. That’s all…Just go on the damn interview and whether good or bad, just let it go…

To me, pre-job interview and post job behavior, is one and of the same. There will be things we don’t like about an establishment where we have to fit in and sometimes lose our uniqueness to a team effort and some places are mismanaged or not managed at all. Bosses can be creepy, coworkers a drag, work a bore and so on. But somehow, some way, I believe we need to maintain a kind of detachment that makes us impervious to rejection or frustration even after we get the job. Some days we just have to take it as it comes and go with the flow to ultimately succeed. We might like to make our mark, leave our signature and be catalyst to much-needed change, leaving the workplace a better place than before we came. But sometimes a job is just a job and we learn to ride out the crappy times, balance out life and get our “jollies” elsewhere.

-By The Job Enthusiast

Face it. You wanted to get back to work yesterday. You finally land an interview. It goes well. Then, what do you hear?  A salary range that’s twenty thousand less than what you made on your last job.

Employers love to throw up obstacles in their elimination process. You don’t always know if it’s a lame excuse for a heave-ho, or a legitimate concern.  Is the interviewer with this probing question looking to deliberately “low-ball” you or honestly understand your values? Companies have expressed fear that once the market picks up, you’ll be out of there and onto another job. Handle it as if it is a sincere concern on the part of the interviewer.

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We all know how the media has created drama about employers no longer entertaining applications from long term out-of-work professionals. That’s bad enough to raise the already high bar on anxiety levels to panic mode.

And it’s been reputed by those entrenched in the Information Technology field that IT is a youth-oriented occupation.

For those workers unemployed for a prolonged period and over a “certain age” it seemed like there was no hope.  Newsweek just did a cover story on this.

Well, just when we thought that mature workers in IT with skills they hadn’t used in many months, some even with outdated tech skills, wouldn’t stand a chance of reentering their fields again, guess what? Were they finished? Ousted? History?

Not so fast!

They found comparable jobs back in their fields!

At least 6 professionals of former 6 figure salaries with whom I am acquainted got a new start. They are all over 55, and were unemployed for two or more years! Some obtained new formal skills, some did not. They just kept going.  

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