Career Opportunities

Helping to build the career you deserve!

Now is the time

November 16, 2001

** Listen to this column on your computer, iPod or other audio player **

Listen to the Podcast

Keep it growing

Once you have tried this with one friend, find another and do it again…and again…and again. You could even put together an event or a party. Lots of food, lots of drink and lots of ideas. After the presentations, those people interested in any given project could break out into a mini-session to brainstorm further. Make this a part of your everyday life. Keep your ears open. Start listening to great ideas and you can't help but have some of your own.

The goal is to develop ideas into proposals, proposals into businesses and businesses into profits. The more ideas you generate the more chances you have to create the business you always wanted. The more people you talk with, the more ideas you generate and the more talent you find. You may not need an expert in ColdFusion or PHP today, but who knows when you will come across a project that does. Keep in touch with those around you and you might be surprised what can develop.

Small is beautiful

Even though you have big dreams, keep your business small at the start. Don't expand until you have to. Don't hire staff until you can be reasonably sure of paying them. In fact, it is far better to contract out various operations first. This is yet another way of spreading the wealth, bringing more people out of unemployment and back into the work force.

This isn't charity. It is simply mining the amazing amount of talent that is available today. Too much of this talent is squandered. You can be the person responsible for creating the next great high-tech business.

Do it now!

There are many reasons why now is the best time to build on your ideas and those of others.

• Many people are out of work and looking for some way to make money before their severance pay runs out, if they received any at all.
• Once people find a job back in mainstream business, it will be nearly impossible to lure them back out into the world of the self-employed.
• You and you friends have the time and energy necessary to focus on your own ideas.
• The economy needs a new collection of great ideas, hopefully more in tune with the realities of business than those of the Dot-Com boom.
• All of us could use a bit of validation for our ideas and our lives right now. Perhaps if we aren't finding that validation in our current jobs we could find it in work of our own making.Meeting place

In an effort to get this project conversation started I offer up the Career-Op Mailing List. If you have a project that you want to get rolling, post your pitch to the list. Once a group starts to form, we can move the project to its own mailing list for further discussion. This will allow high-tech workers around the world to, perhaps, find a project that they feel passionate about instead of slaving away in yet another dead-end position.

You can join the Career-Op Mailing List by visiting http://groups.yahoo.com/group/career-op. If this project takes off, I can establish another mailing list specifically for it.

It is an extreme understatement to say that the world is an odd place at the moment. People and ideas we hold near and dear are under threat and, as often happens at the turning points of history, no one is quite sure exactly what is going to happen. That said, we cannot and should not stop building for the future. There are ideas out there waiting to be born and your goals should be to bring them safely into this world. We can do this together.

Let's start today!

Join the career discussion in the Career-Op forums at http://forums.friendsintech.com/

<%=INSERTTEXT%>