A Bit of (Hopefully Useful) Background

Now that we've started our discussion about successful career self-management in the 21st Century, I thought I'd pause and tell you a little bit about my book and this blog.

First, the book. Work Strong: Your Personal Career Fitness System is a different kind of "career book" in at least two respects.

• It asks you to use both hemispheres of your brain. It encourages you to use your left or analytical hemisphere by providing a detailed description of the principles and practices of career self-management in the modern workplace. And, it challenges you to use your right or creative hemisphere by offering an integrated, parallel story-it's not Hemingway, but it is fiction-that illustrates how a person might actually use career fitness at work.
• Work Strong is also distinctive for its central metaphor. The book uses physical fitness to help you grasp the essential truths and dynamics of managing your own career. What does that mean? Well, we've all learned two things about our health: we are personally responsible for our own physical wellbeing, and we have to work at it every single day. The same is true with your career, especially in today's unforgiving world of work. To put it another way, managing your career is now every bit as critical to your success as developing your expertise in your field of study.
  

Second, the blog. I'll be posting comments regularly according to a syllabus that is based on Work Strong and posted at HigherEdJobs.com/blog. I hope you'll read the designated section of the book and then contribute your thoughts at the blog. You can get a 24% discount on the book at Amazon.com.

Also, please come by frequently to read the posts of others and encourage your friends and colleagues to contribute, as well. The more lively the discussion, the greater the learning we all will do.

Thanks for coming by,
Peter

What's Going On in the World of Work?

Consciously or unconsciously, many-maybe even most-Americans see the world of work as an orderly system. They believe if you do X, you can expect Y to happen. Or to put it another way, if you invest the time and effort to get a doctorate, you should be able to get a good job-or at least a job-in academia.

As many of us have discovered, however, that's not at all the way things happen. The modern American workplace isn't an orderly system; it's an environment, and a Darwinian one at that. What does that mean? You can do everything right, and still, you may be wronged.

You could, for example, be a loyal, dedicated and hard working employee, and even that commitment won't protect you from a layoff or a feckless and self-serving supervisor. Corporations have now been given human rights by the U.S. Supreme Court, a decision that simply codifies the rise of entities that are free to behave in inhumane ways. As I say in Chapter 1 of Work Strong, they can and do behave like bullies.

That's not a cute literary device; it's the hard truth. Consider just some of the facts:

• The decade between 1999 and 2009 is the first in American history where we created virtually no new jobs. The net gain over those ten years was just 121,000 positions or about enough to employ the crowd at a University of Michigan football game.
• Over two dozen of the companies cited on the Working Mother and Forbes lists of the best places to work have now been sued by their own employees for not walking the talk. They don't promote their workers' careers or support a healthy career-life balance.
• In 1927 Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle to expose worker abuse in the meatpacking industry. Today, Americans in every profession, craft and trade are spending over $1 billion per year on pain killers because they, too, are being physically, psychologically or emotionally mistreated.

How do you protect yourself in such a dangerous environment?

The surest way to answer that question, it seems to me, is to look at some of the strategies that have been tried over the past decade. They include:

• hoping that the bullies will see the light and change their ways.
• ignoring the bullies and trying to work around them.
• waiting for fortune or the fairy godmother to save us.

I don't mean to be disrespectful, but stripped down to the essential truth, those three words-hoping, ignoring and waiting-describe the way many people have tried to manage their careers. And, today, they are frustrated, angry and dispirited.

So, what's a better alternative? (Here's a hint, you probably learned the answer at some point in your childhood.)

Thanks for reading,
Peter

Welcome to the Author in Residence blog, brought to you by HigherEdJobs.com. My name is Peter Weddle, and I have the privilege of being this year’s author-in-residence.

I'm the author of a book published in 2009 called Work Strong: Your Personal Career Fitness System. Over the next twelve months, we'll be using this blog and my book to explore the principles and practices of a healthy career … in the world of work at large and in the higher education profession in particular.

I'll hope you'll pick up a copy of the book (sorry, couldn’t help myself) and visit the blog regularly to contribute to our discussion. A copy of the syllabus indicating our monthly topics and the related pages in my book will be published shortly.

Regards,
Peter

How to Purchase the WorkStrong Book

You will be able to purchase the book here on Amazon.com:
http://www.amazon.com/Work-Strong-Personal-Career-Fitness/dp/1928734472