You can locate potential partners several ways. If others from your company were let go when you got your pink slip, consider contacting one or more of them about partnering or forming a job search group.
Professional organizations and alumni associations also provide good opportunities for locating partners. Some folks find partners through notices in the personal advertising sections of newspapers or by posting notices in nearby stationery stores or copy centers, places job seekers are likely to frequent. Don't be afraid to work with someone who has a different vocational background and different vocational aspirations. We humans have a terrible tendency to become parochial in our thinking and speaking; having to explain yourself to someone from a different background can be helpful in preparing to talk about your background and goals to the new people you will meet in your quest for new employment. It can also help you see yourself and your experience in a new light while broadening your view of the world of work.
If you decide to work with a partner, plan to meet regularly at least twice a week and view meeting times as solid commitments. When you work with someone else, you have an obligation to both yourself and your cohort, and you should view your meetings as no less compelling than, for example, appointments for job interviews. Also, converse by phone once every day to report on the day's accomplishments and discuss the next day's plans. Remember, however, that your partnership is a working relationship; try not to become inadvertent contributors to each other's procrastination through lengthy, rambling phone calls. Beware, too, of conducting mutual gripe sessions. If you find yourself and your partner dwelling on the topic of the idiotic questions you've been asked in recent interviews, steer the conversation toward the topic of how you might best handle some of those questions and why interviewers might be asking them.
Some experts frown on partnering and group work (without "expert" leadership that is) during a job search. They feel that meeting with other people who are out of work may bring the job seeker down or fuel negative feelings. "Don't hang around with losers," said one outplacement expert recently interviewed on national TV. If you see people who are unemployed as losers, you will, indeed, have trouble benefiting from partnership or group work. That, however, won't be your major problem; your major problem will be that you see you as a loser for not having a job. If this is the case, your first and most important task is to revise your thinking about people who lose jobs. Read about Winston Churchil's career or Lee lacocca's. If you are inclined to believe that the best and brightest naturally rise to the tops of organizations, reflect for a few moments on Hitler and Stalin.
The Chronological Career Review
Memories are strange, elusive entities. Yet, to a large extent, we are what we remember of ourselves. The fuller our memories, the fuller and richer our self conceptions. Your first self exploration activity should be to remember (literally: put together again) your vocational life since infancy, which means recalling your career of learning and working. In completing this task, you will be creating a data base from which you will draw the information for subsequent, more analytical aspects of your self exploration.
It may take you quite a while to complete. If you don't find yourself pausing to consult family, friends, and files, you're probably trying to go too fast. Where you begin in reconstructing your vocational history is immaterial. If you find yourself having difficulty recalling your earliest years, switch to your college years and return later to your first five years.
I know you will be tempted to gloss over your early years. In fact, you may well be wondering what possible relevance your preschool activities could have to a vocational decision at this point in your life. Lots. One of Freud's major contributions to the 20th century was his insistence that early childhood holds keys to understanding an adult's personality and characteristic responses to life's challenges. Suppose one of the major memories from your first five years is that your father forced you to take swimming lessons at age three. This fact of your personal history might throw light on your later resistance to a superior's suggestion that you enroll for some management development seminars. Recalling the early experience may help you find a pattern in your responses to people in positions of authority. Having isolated the pattern, you can evaluate your response rationally, instead of being compelled for essentially irrational reasons to resist opportunities for training and development.
Many people find themselves getting back in touch with parents, siblings, and other family members to complete the exercise or to pursue themes it uncovers. Now, perhaps for the first time in years, you have the time and motivation to truly talk with family members. You may learn much of value to you personally when you ask Dad why he thought it so important for you to begin swimming lessons at three. You may find yourself actually talking with him warmly and honestly for the first time in your life, especially if you can ask him about your childhood relationship without anger, resentment, or blaming. As long as you're talking with him, why not ask him if he ever lost a job and how he felt about it? Ask your mother and siblings, too. Their answers may help you change your life.
One client, a woman in her late 30s, began after losing her job to ask friends and members of her family whether they had ever been terminated. Much to her surprise, she found that all of them the very successful as well as the not so successful had at one time or another lost a job or left one under duress. After recounting these findings, she went on to say, "You know, I feel really good about myself for the first time in weeks because I had the courage to ask my family about things we had never discussed before. Now I know there are people close to me who understand what I'm going through and who'll be there for me if I need a boost."
