Entrepreneurial Edge: Managing Your Career as a Business
October 15, 2009 by admin
Filed under Career News and Advice
EMPLOYMENT experts have some advice for the many Americans either looking for work or fearing they soon will be: Consider yourself an entrepreneur — of your own working life.
Entrepreneurial Edge
James Flanigan writes about small businesses mainly in California and the West.
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The term entrepreneur is usually applied to people seeking to start their own small businesses. But those in the recruitment and employment industry say the uncertainty in the current economy means that workers need to think of their careers as their own small businesses.
“The lesson of today is that you’re working for yourself,” said Janice Bryant Howroyd, the founder and chief executive of Act 1 Personnel Services, a staffing and employment company. “Most people say they’re giving their lives to the company, but it’s more of a cooperative process. Companies have tasks to perform and you must put in your best effort and identify yourself with that job,” she said.
Employment experts say they see a complex picture of changing job patterns as employers respond to hard times, global competition and fresh opportunities. So as companies and organizations are forced to be more innovative, they say, so must employees.
Jim Jonassen, head of Jim Jonassen & Associates Venture Search, noted the explosion of online employment sites and social media that have transformed the marketplace in recent years. “You used to be scared your boss would see your résumé on Monster.com,” he said. “But today your boss’s résumé is on LinkedIn along with your own.”
Ms. Howroyd is an entrepreneur in the traditional sense. She said she left Tarboro, N.C., in 1976 to work for a brother-in-law’s talent agency in Los Angeles and two years later started her own small employment firm. At the beginning, she said, she played off the fact that “I was a minority-owned business in two ways, as an African-American and a woman.”
Through the years, Act 1 has grown past its original role as …
Read the original article at NYTimes