Are Your Children a Failure if They Don’t Grow up to be Doctors or Lawyers?

Jewish mothers are stereotyped as wanting their children to become doctors or lawyers.  Given the sheer number of Jewish physicians and attorneys (notwithstanding the apparent shortage of medical professionals in Israel), it seems that mothers are doing an excellent job of influencing their children.

However, when such professions are not appropriate for a particular child, what is a Jewish mother to do?

A few years ago, I heard what I considered to be a very enlightened principal of a school say something like the following: 

I had a student come to me that got 30% on a test.  His teachers and parents were criticizing him because he had done so poorly.  I told him that I was proud of him.  He got 100% on the questions for which he knew the answers.

 

 

One of my friends, as a present to his children upon completion of army duty, spends a not small amount of money to enable his children to take career aptitude/interest tests conducted by professionals.  As an example, for one of his sons, the results showed a good match for a dietician.  Almost certainly this young man would never have considered this particular job as a profession.  Yet, because he took the test, he decided to further investigate, and now, a few years later, after completing the relevant studies, he is happily working as a dietician.

Over my years of assisting job seekers find work, there have been many occasions when a mother or father has contacted me about work for their adult child.  This is an immediate red flag for me, and I always tell the parent that their child is welcome to be in direct touch with me.  Not once has the child ever contacted me after an approach from the parent.

Choosing a job/profession is difficult enough to do based upon your own interests/aptitude, without having to take into account expectations of others.  And, living in the 21^st century, making a career/job choice at one particular point of time is not as critical as it was for previous generations.  According to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics in the US, people nowadays average more than five careers in their lifetime.  And while I would tend to believe that the longer someone must study for a profession, the less likely the person is to change, I have met with many professionals that were burned out and wanted to do something else.  In fact, I am one such person, leaving a hi-tech career after 20 years.

And, if you do experience anxiety that your child is not living up to your expectations for them professionally, and this worry is manifested by eating too much, you are welcome to be in touch with me - I can connect you with a good dietician :>)

Job Seekers – Don’t Like What You See in the Mirror?

I heard of a study done some years ago that stuck with me. Most people, when they look in the mirror, are not happy with their appearance. According to this research, a person has a much lower evaluation of their looks than someone else does. What was the explanation for this phenomenon? Well, it seems that every person has something(s) about their face that they wish was different - for instance the color of their hair, the shape of their nose, or the size of their ears. This one aspect of their face that they don’t like is the exact area that they hone in on when looking in the mirror. However, when someone else looks at that same face, they are looking at the entire package, and most everyone seems to be put together nicely (after all, we were created in God’s image).

Job seekers can get stuck focusing on a small detail that causes them to forget the overall value that they offer.

Many people intuitively and automatically identify one or more factors that they feel are causing them to not get hired. Recently I heard the following explanations:

• Don’t have a university degree
• Live in Jerusalem (too far from the center)
• Over 50
• Don’t speak Hebrew well enough
• Don’t have work experience in the sector

Any of these issues can certainly increase the difficulty in landing work. But keeping in mind that you as a job seeker are a combination of many elements, only one of which it seems is causing you problems, may help in putting things in their proper perspective.

When an employer is seeking to fill a role, they generally have a conception of the candidate that can meet the requirements. Oftentimes it is difficult for the job seeker to infer this vision from the advertised description, but that doesn’t change the fact that it exists in the mind of the employees responsible for the hiring process.

When an employer creates their job listing, some of these profile characteristics are included and other are omitted, purposely or not. They can ultimately be divided into two categories: required and nice to have. In a perfect world, all of this would be clear to the applicant from reading the job posting. However, as we all know, we are living in a world far from ideal. For instance, sometimes in the job requirements section there is an entry for a university degree, even including the additional request “from a known university”. It is impossible to understand if this is an absolute requirement or a nice to have; being listed in the requirements section is not always an accurate indication. And whether my university is considered “known” in Israel, especially when I graduated from a university in the US, is totally unknown to me. Another possibility is a requirement for fluent Hebrew – who can accurately define what the employer considers fluent? Other examples can include a listing that previous work experience in the Internet sector is nice to have; I know some of these companies and a candidate that doesn’t possess work experience in the internet sector won’t receive even the slightest consideration, independent of the job listing wording implying it is not a requirement. The unwritten absolute job requirements are silent killers – candidates that are sure they are perfect for the job may not hear back because they don’t live in the right part of the country, are deemed overqualified and/or fall outside the age range.

Let us take a more in-depth look at a situation where the company has a candidate profile requirement that the applicant must have a university degree. You meet all of the job requirements, except this one. You have two options:

1) Don’t apply for the job
2) Apply for the job

Probably readers this far into the article can guess that I believe this job should be applied for, because nobody can know if it really is an absolute requirement, and even if it is, if it may be overcome anyway.

OK, so if you apply for the job, how should you go about it? Alternatives:

• Include on your CV a fake university and degree that fulfill this requirement
  
  • Never do this! No additional explanation required…
• Send your CV without any indication of university/education
  
  • This is not the best of all worlds, but if you have absolutely no post-high school education, you may be forced to use this approach.
• Include on your CV that education which you do have, including university courses even if you didn’t graduate.
  
  • Most people that I come across without university degrees do have some post-high school education credits, whether they be professional classes, junior college, or university courses without obtaining a degree. Listing these may get you to the next round.

I am sure some people may find the reasoning above faulty. Why waste time applying for a job if you don’t meet the requirements? In fact, as a recruiter, I generally agree with this, as many of the CVs I receive are from applicants that don’t approach the published requirements – something tremendously useless! However, if you are close, then I certainly don’t hold it against anyone for trying, and there are times when I have the ability to present a candidate that does match in all ways except for one, and help them to get invited for an interview.

And let’s remember, what is the objective of a CV? The correct answer is to get yourself called for an interview. And for any of the issues that are sensitive for you, including certainly job requirements which you don’t match, it is much better for you to be able to address them in a face-to-face (or at least telephone) interview, rather than when you are a one dimensional CV piece of paper. Keep in mind that according to studies of how CVs are processed, a CV that arrives is checked for 20-30 seconds on average. Therefore, there is no chance that the entire CV is being read in that short period of time; it is simply scanned, possibly electronically. So, if including truthful information in an education section, even if it doesn’t fully meet the requirements, is enough to get you to the next stage, then this approach makes sense.

If we return to the initial concept of thinking about the big picture rather than focusing on a single (negative) item:

• The initial objective in submitting your candidacy is to get to the next stage, giving you the ability to speak with the employer directly. Creating a CV that increases your ability to reach this goal is the only objective when considering what to include. Approaching the company in the correct manner is equally critical. In conjunction with sending your CV in response to job posting that you find on Internet, if you can develop a contact within the company (using LinkedIn or some other manner) to also submit your CV can do wonders for your response rate. An advocate inside the company oftentimes can mitigate the fact that you don’t meet all of the job requirements. I have seen many cases in which applicants arrive to the HR group via an internal company contact and go to the head of the list compared to others whose CVs arrive in response to a public job announcement. Networking is the most effective way to have the employer consider you by looking at the big picture, rather than the small individual details.
• Once you get to the interview, you now have your best chance to make a big picture impression. Yes, it may be true that you don’t have the required university degree; however you have the opportunity to show all of the value that you can deliver to the employer, which sometimes can cause them to reconsider whether the university degree is really so significant for candidates. Or, it may allow them to consider you for another position where you are appropriate.

All job seekers are made up of a variety of skills, aptitudes, and personality. Different subsets of these characteristics are relevant for each individual job, and when going through the recruitment process, if you remember to focus on the attractive overall “package” that you create, you will find that you will move from appearing defensive about particular items you perceive as negative to portraying a more rounded and positive image of yourself as a future employee to the company.

Don’t be afraid to look in the mirror – most people will find you attractive if you give them a chance, so why can’t you?

Can Career Personality Tests Guide You to a New Job?

I envy those professionals that enjoy their sector – I was one myself once. Teachers, lawyers, doctors, Java programmers – everyone that is working in a defined role in which there is a demand and doesn’t have to invest a lot of effort considering which job to target when they are seeking work.

Alas, many job seekers do not fall into this category, either because their work history does not correspond into a specific category or because they are interested in a variety of work roles. Or, the problematic case of people looking for employment that have no idea what they want to do!

For someone that is stumped identifying which types of jobs to target, a visit with an employment advisor is certainly recommended. In addition, many job seekers turn to the Internet and search for sites that can help them identify careers that match their interests/skills. Here is an article on this subject: http://jobsearchinisrael.blogspot.com/2010/03/transferable-skills-professions.html.

One category of resources that people use is career (personality) tests. The idea is that after answering a battery of questions, you will be labeled with a profile as well as a list of jobs that can be suitable for people with that profile. Sounds great, right? Well, as with most things, it’s not so simple. I remember that when I was in high school in the US, I took the ASVAB (Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery) test. This was the test that our school counselors told us all to take in the 11th grade to understand where we should be focusing our future attentions. As with astrology newspaper predictions, you can always find something in these reports which can be used as validation for yourself; for instance in my results the lowest ranked job was to work as a ditch digger, which made sense to me. However, there were a bunch of other details, totally forgotten by me now, which my school counselors advised that I should interpret as solid facts. Unfortunately I don’t have the results now (lost together with my baseball card collection), as I am sure it would be interesting to look at now.

As time passed, I have become a firm believer that desire is a (the) critical influencer in estimating career success. Yet, as an example, one career test measures the candidate’s personality related to extroversion/introversion, sensing/intuition, thinking/feeling, judging/perceiving. All of these indicators are useful as input for a person to generalize about their personality, but they completely ignore desire, which many career experts feel trumps all else. Bruce Springsteen says that he was advised by his parents and everyone else (older than him presumably) to go to college and be practical, yet he followed his dream and has the gratitude of my generation for his decision. There are countless well-known tales of famous people, entertainers and business moguls, who suffered through years of failure before they succeeded, using their undying motivation to ultimately reach their goal.

Nonetheless, because I know it is difficult for people that are looking for work without a solid objective(s) to move forward, even with all of the pitfalls, I do think there is some value in taking a test or two and looking at the results, as long as they are reviewed with the proper perspective. So, without further ado, here is a link to some of the popular and free career tests:
http://www.positionignition.com/blog/2010/7/2/5-popular-career-personality-tests.html.

Career Change

Mid-life crises manifest themselves differently for everyone. Probably some people are able to avoid them altogether, while others have them regularly throughout their lives. The classical example is a middle-age person (whatever that means) that begins to re-evaluate their life and comes to the conclusion that one or more of their major decisions was mistaken. For one person this crisis may be related to career/employment, for another their spouse (hass v’shalom), or on the lighter side even the mode of transportation (50-year old buys Harley Davidson).

Here in this article, employment is the focus. And to further delve into the driver for this career re-evaluation, sometimes the cause is external, such as a person that is laid-off or feels lack of job security and is forced into an employment search.

Career evaluation can lead a person to consider a different career(s), examine the possibility of opening a business, or deciding to remain in the profession they have been doing until this point.

Except for the most adventurous (fool-hardy?), people have some level of trepidation when considering a career move or starting a business, no matter what their motivations. Some of these are listed here:

• Risk in leaving current job - For those that are employed, leaving the stability of their company is a risk by definition, including the financial considerations that may be involved in such a move. One thing that might be possible for some is to investigate whether there is the possibility to change roles within the structure of your current employer in order to have a safe and secure starting point for a different type of job.
• Doubt about finding a suitable position in new career - There is not much doubt that the role that one can make themselves most attractive for is almost always the one in which the candidate has the most recent and extensive previous work experience and/or education. Change can make the process more difficult, and this can be even truer when a person arrives to their 40s/50s/60s. Targeting a job for which you don’t have recent work experience and/or provable skills requires creativity, tenacity, and confidence. Research and networking will help you understand better your options.
• Don’t like current job, but don’t know what other job to do - There are many people that are not satisfied with the work they are doing, but have no idea what they would prefer. Here is an article that addresses the issue of identifying new professions: http://jobsearchinisrael.blogspot.com/2010/03/transferable-skills-professions.html.
• Financial risk with starting a business – Starting a business typically requires an initial investment/loan, sometimes substantial, as well as uncertain incoming cash flow.

On the other hand, you often hear about someone that was previously laid-off, and they say that this event was the best thing that ever happened to them, as it forced them to move out of their area of comfort and find a new and much better opportunity. And as you may have heard, our friend in the White House (and this week announced as the third most influential Jew in the world by the Jerusalem Post) Rahm Emanuel said: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.” Take a look at this film trailer to see more evidence of how others used an unexpected work dismissal to their advantage:




And certainly many people are regularly evaluating, or at least considering, whether the way that they are spending their 8+ waking hours a day earning money is in sync with their current values and lifestyle. Initial career choice, oftentimes done many years prior and with a less than mature set of experience and perspective, is easy to overemphasize when moving forward in the present. Already at the tender age of 18, people typically choose a university major or trade; what are the chances that decision will match their future self, 20-30 years down the road? When a mismatch does occur, tension arises and decisions have to be made (postponing such decisions can lead to visits to the doctor for physical ailments).

Many times people seeking to change careers have told me that the main way they decided upon their new target career was based upon what they preceived were the demands of the market, taking their self-defined skills into account as a secondary measure, and finally considering their interests. Mabye not surprisingly, employment advisors can operate in the same way, which I view as being similar to the military approach. What seems to happen in the army in many cases is that the 18 year old will take a battery of apptitude tests, be asked about their interests in a variety of jobs - then the recruiter disregards all of that and assigns the inductee to the military police or infantry because that is what is needed at the time. Sometimes employment advisors are not so different, with the laudable goal of being realistic, pointing job seekers towards jobs in demand and stifling/ignoring interests or considering transferrable skills. In Israel that might mean guiding new immigrants to jobs in demand, such as an English Teacher, Telephone Sales/Support, or a hairdresser. Yet according to Figler & Bolles in the book: The Career Counselor’s Handbook, “Motivation and determination are more important indicator of success than skills”.

So, don’t be afraid to dream. Allow yourself to think about careers that are different than your previous jobs. In many cases the main limitation to achieving a new employment ideal is the freedom that you give yourself to consider new options. Certainly “reality” and financial considerations are factors in how you ultimately decide to act, but if these are the first ingredients in your analysis, then you may not be giving yourself the chance to envision a new and most suitable career.

Click here to listen to Chaim Emmett of Israemploy talking about career change.

Changing Careers

In the last article, related to immigrants and employment, one of the subjects that I touched upon was related to changing careers. I received a few comments/questions on this point, so I think it is worthwhile to clarify this issue.

As a brief reminder, my previous message was:

Immigrating introduces such a large number of life changes, so a good initial objective can simply be to keep things as simple as possible. A job candidate is always more attractive to a potential employer if they can show relevant work experience/education. So, you might decide to postpone making that career change until you have put some of the more major aliyah issues behind you, and gained some Israeli work experience.

My point above was that a candidate has the best opportunity to be attractive to an employer if they are applying for a job in which they have experience/knowledge. Therefore, if all things are equal, focusing on jobs that can use your previous work experience to your benefit is a positive.

Of course, in the real world (especially concerning immigration), complications can arise. If a person has job experience in a particular sector/role before aliyah, there can be the case that in Israel they still don’t meet the local requirements for a similar position. There can be a variety of reasons for this:

• Language – For many jobs in Israel, a minimum of conversational Hebrew is required. Many new immigrants do not meet this requirement, not immediately upon arrival and oftentimes not even after ulpan. Clearly the best course of action is to do everything possible to improve your level of Hebrew, continuing with ulpan, taking private lessons, or simply thrusting yourself into situations in which you are forced to speak. In any case, for the person that finds themselves in the situation of seeking employment and not having sufficient languages skills, being creative helps. The objective is to use the skills that you do have to find the correct position in Israel. As an example, I heard once of an operations/manufacturing manager that arrived in Israel and couldn’t find work because his level of Hebrew was not high enough to manage staff. Ultimately he considered the various aspects of his job, and discovered that buyers/purchasers (one part of operations) in Israel that were experienced could get a job without a high level of Hebrew, since the work is mainly interfacing with foreign suppliers and dealing with managers in Israel that spoke English. Thus, he was able to find a place for himself.
• Certification – A number of professions in Israel require licensing: http://www.israemploy.net/Licensed_Professions/. Sometimes the process is a short, and in other cases it can take weeks/months. During this interim period, if you want to find a job, your creativity can again be an asset. You can start by considering what types of jobs are available in a similar profession that doesn’t require licensing. For instance, an accountant might consider working in a corporate setting where their financial/accounting skills are valued but a CPA certification is not necessary; a nurse might work as a medical care giver. The other alternative is to temporarily seek a position that utilizes your skills and interests that is not directly related to your profession, although this can be more difficult and time consuming to fulfull.
• Job doesn’t exist in Israel – As an example, neither a physician’s assistant nor a nurse practitioner licensing exists in Israel – the positions simply don’t exist current in Israel.

To summarize, if you meet the requirements in Israel to continue in your pre-aliyah profession, in my opinion it is a good idea to initially focus on getting your first job in Israel by not straying from your expertise. However, for those of you that arrive in Israel not qualified/capable of doing the same job, either temporarily or for the long term, clearly you must do whatever is necessary to find suitable employment opportunities, including completely changing careers.