There may be a vague optimistic glow on the horizon, but it’s hardly like sunny boom times have returned to America. So after so many years of economic hardship, and so many unsettling changes to how we work and what sort of jobs are available, how are Americans coping? Has the recession, along with the shift toward more unstable career trajectories and more independent work beaten down morale and raised stress levels?

According to two new surveys, not quite. Americans may be far less optimistic than they were in other, cheerier historical periods, but this recent evidence suggests they are starting to cope with the challenges.

Adecco recently polled 1,014 Americans for its annual Workplace Insights survey, asking them for their outlook on everything from their jobs to the coming presidential election. The results show a shift in U.S. workers’ views on career instability in general and temporary and contract work in particular. Adecco reports:

• Temporary jobs are more favorably viewed today than in the past. Nearly two-thirds (63 percent) of Americans say they view temporary jobs more positively than they did last year. That might be a result of a huge majority (86 percent) of Americans believing a temporary job is a good career option for people looking to gain valuable work experience.
• Americans are also more likely to work in different fields than they were in 2011. Sixty-eight percent of Americans would be more willing to take a job in a field outside of their degree or study today than they would have been last year.
• Women may be more flexible when it comes to finding a job than men. Seventy-two percent of women would be more willing today to take a job outside of their field of study compared to 64 percent of men.

Of course, these results are hardly proof of some definitive move towards contentment with gig-based careers. As Consumerist points out, it’s not that respondents are happy with a future of piecemeal work; it’s that they’re hoping (perhaps out of desperation) these sorts of jobs will  lead to an old-style full-time position:

Americans are growing more amenable to taking temporary employment, changing their viewpoint from the glass-half-empty opinion of ‘it’s a job without permanence’ to ‘it’s a job that may lead to something permanent one day.’

But even if workers aren’t thrilled with bouncing between jobs, there’s other evidence they’re starting to come to terms with a less stable future of work. The American Psychological Association regularly asks Americans if they’re feeling stressed, and perhaps surprisingly given the lack of cheerful news, they’re increasingly answering no. The Financial Times reports:

Although 22 per cent of Americans described themselves as “very stressed”, this figure was slightly down on the previous year, when it was 24 per cent – and well below 2007, when it was 32 per cent. Indeed, the measured levels of stress have been dropping steadily over the past five years since the APA started its survey. In 2007, for example, the mean stress level was 6.2 per cent, whereas this year it was “only” 5.2 per cent.

“After five long years of financial turmoil, Americans might – just possibly – be getting used to shocks,” speculates the paper, continuing, “five years of watching ‘black swan’ type events, bad government policies and bizarre economic twists might have made shocks less unsettling. People are slowly adapting to a more unstable world.”

While these are only crumbs of data that certainly do not prove Americans have completely and happily adjusted to new career and economic realities, they do suggest we can’t and won’t look backward forever. Among the understandable fear of change and pining for more stable times, it’s easy to imagine we’ll never get our heads around new realities. These studies at least suggest it’s possible.

Do you think Americans are starting to give up the dream of returning to older realities and starting to figure out how to deal with the future of work?

Image courtesy of Flickr user Juan M. Gatica.

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I was watching a random cop program and one of the protagonists needed information on where the person she was hunting was. She called the office, pretended to be the firm detailing his car and got the information she needed.

When I was a recruiter, one of my jobs on a Thursday was to get the local paper and call all the other agencies trying to find out which clients of theirs were hiring. You’d be amazed what people will tell you, without you having to tell any lies, just by using a pleasant voice. I called a business locally recently and asked for someone, only to be told he was in rehab. I didn’t even give my name.

There’s two lessons to this. One, if you need to know something, just ask. You’ll probably get the answer. And two, if you get random calls from people with pleasant voices, find out who they are and what they need to know before you give away confidential information.

Training at a distance is more hassle than it’s worth, several CEOs have warned. But when we recently reported their cautions against onboarding new employees virtually, a senior analyst at training consultancy Bersin & Associates named Janet Clarey took exception with their point of view in the comments. Not that training at a distance isn’t without its pitfalls, she wrote, but:

I talk to organizations (Fortune 100s, 500s, SMBs) every day that ‘train at a distance’ and many are seeing excellent, real results both in terms of effectiveness and cost. Those that don’t do it (orientation or other) well tend to not do it well face-to-face either.

So what sets those organizations that struggle with remote training apart from those who do it well? We called up Clarey to find out, and she boiled down the distinction between the two groups to one main difference: appropriate instructional design. Those that struggle with onboarding and developing talent at a distance, she explained,

Oftentimes try to take something that has already existed that they’ve taught in a face-to-face classroom and simply put it online, not understanding that it’s an entirely different way of teaching. You don’t have body language. You can’t tell what people are actually doing. Are you reaching people? So a lot of times organizations fall down and that really points to not approaching it with any sort of sound instructional design process.

And while a bevy of new e-learning tools make it easier than ever before for non-training pros to share their skills and knowledge at a distance, this very simplicity of use sometimes contributes to the lack of carefully designed materials, says Clarey.

The tools have become easier to use, and that’s a good thing in that you can have someone who’s not in a training role that’s still able to create content. But with that trade-off of simplicity comes perhaps some problems in how content is delivered. People who don’t have any sort of instructional design experience don’t understand how adults learn, and you can run into some very bad e-learning that way.

There is a middle way, Clarey goes on to explain, where area specialists create content and learning specialists support them and vet the materials they produce. “Typically, the companies that are doing better with supplying e-learning authoring tools to people right in the field are able to give them direction, to serve in a supervisory role, giving them the tools they need to properly deliver the training,” she says.

What else are companies that have success with training at a distance doing differently? Employing “blended learning solutions,” according to Clarey:

So let’s say it’s for orientation. Today it would include something like a community or expertise matching, some way a remote employee can stay connected. It might also involve some instructor-led training. It might involve some self-paced e-learning that you complete on your own, so usually where it’s very successful is when it’s part of an integrated program.

There have been a couple of organizations who have taken some of the more mature technologies that have a lot of advanced features that might mimic the classroom a bit more, like break-out rooms, and have done some incredible things with those. But still there’s always some other form of connection with others involved.

Do you agree that the trouble with training at a distance isn’t the distance itself but the lack of thought that is sometimes put into how content is delivered?

Image courtesy of Flickr user Hermes

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Our recent London conference participants were the best we’ve ever had in terms of the amount of questions they asked. We always promise, whether you ask 5 or 500 questions, we’ll get them all answered and we’ll finish on time. I think in London, they did ask 500 and we barely finished on time!

Some people, we’ve noticed, need to ask a lot of questions about a concept. Once they’ve asked about all their concerns, they can accept the concept as valid and are often the strongest supporters of the idea. It’s easy to assume that the reason they are asking questions is because they are distrustful of the person with the idea, rather than understanding that it’s just their way of understanding the concept.

If your’e the one presenting and you’re feeling defensive about the questions you’re being asked, try to let it go. It’s not you, or your idea. Work through it with the questioner. And, make sure you build in time for questions. If you don’t get any, and your meeting finishes on time, all to the good.

There’s (yet another) article in the Wall Street Journal today about resumes going away. The article gives examples of companies who are using social media presence or on-line questionnaires to get expressions of interest from candidates and to assess their skills before interviews.

The problem with this is that’s there’s two or three examples which the WSJ encourages you, by their headline, to think is a long-term, wide-spread change. It isn’t. There are always companies experimenting with different ways of finding and assessing candidates. They are exceptions. They make good headlines.

But resumes haven’t really changed in the last 50 years. When it comes down to it, hiring managers want to know what you’ve done and how well you’ve done it: issues the Manager Tools resume addresses head on. Don’t be fooled by ‘newsworthy’ changes. Consider what YOU’RE being asked for the in the roles YOU’RE applying for. We’ll bet 99.99% of the time, it’s still a resume.

http://professional.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405297020375040457717303199…

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