It Can Happen Here

It's been a tough day here at the office. Three of our esteemed colleagues have been laid off. Blame it on a midyear budget crunch and the demands of being owned by a private equity fund.

To my three friends: I will miss you dreadfully.

To everyone else: If you know of any job openings for a marketing/sales executive, a Web marketing coordinator, or a graphic designer in Indianapolis, please e-mail me at loricateshand-at-yahoo-dot-com.

Back Up Your LinkedIn Contacts

Yesterday JibberJobber blogger Jason Alba posted about a situation in which a LinkedIn member (resume book writer Susan Ireland) had her account suddenly deleted for no apparent reason. She had to spend hours and hours recreating her profile and reinviting people to connect with her. Jason recommended that everyone immediately back up their contacts. It was an easy process (once I figured out that a popup blocker was thwarting me), and now I feel more secure knowing that all my LinkedIn connections are safely stored in my Yahoo e-mail address book.

Jason himself is a force of nature. He's working on his third online networking book (I'm on Twitter--Now What?). He blogs, he's ubiquitous at conferences (I was able to catch his schpiel at the Career Management Alliance conference last year in Louisville), and he's got this really cool job search organizer site, JibberJobber. You can do a lot there for free, so check it out.

What to Do If You Think You're About to Be Laid Off

In this uncertain economy and topsy-turvy industry, people are being laid off every day. Sometimes they don't see it coming. Other times they get a heads up or just have a gut feeling that the axe is about to fall. By that point it's often too late to do anything substantial to save your job.

From some all-too-close personal experience, here's my best advice:

• Update your resume--pronto. I can actually recommend a great book for that: 30-Minute Resume Makeover by Louise Kursmark.
• Reach out to your network. You've probably built a good one but maybe you haven't kept in touch with people well enough. Get on LinkedIn and start setting your network in stone. Of course, I can recommend a good book about that, too: Seven Days to Online Networking.
• Make a pact to help your coworkers. Promise to be on the lookout for leads for each other. Offer to critique one another's resumes.
• Get your affairs in order. Throw out any junk you don't want to take with you. Gather up important e-mail addresses. Delete personal e-mail messages. Thin out your personal items so that if you have to leave on short notice, it won't be a huge hassle to put it all in a copier-paper box and do the walk of shame.
• Start blogging. I started this blog the day after our company was sold last year because I wanted to be able to put it on my resume (and because I had wanted to do it for a long time, anyway). I have made so many amazing friends and contacts through it and have learned so much.
• Be sure the managers know your value. Find a subtle way to remind your boss (and his or her boss) of your impact on the bottom line. If you think you might be spared if you can adapt to a different job or department, show your willingness and ability to be flexible.
• Now, get on with your life. You can't let fear and worry cut into your productivity. If you do, you'll become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

How Kate Travers Got into Publishing

The Devourer of Books blog has an interesting guest post from publishing professional Kate Travers at HarperCollins. Kate talks about her lucky break that got her in the door, and gives a wonderful summary of how the publishing process (and an acquisitions editor's job) works. She is particularly insightful about how a book is marketed and sold. In a rather uncommon career move, she decided to jump from editorial to marketing, and found a renewed love for the industry there.

It's interesting to note how many of the commenters on the article said "I've always wanted a job like that, but I don't want to live in New York." Hello, folks! My readers and I are here to tell you that you really can have it all--bucolic living and a career in book publishing. You just have to be a bit more creative about it!

In addition to all this, check out the Devourer of Books blog itself, especially its blogroll--tons of blogs devoted to reviewing books. Looks like a bonanza for readers as well as publishing PR people!

The Elephant in the Room: Offshoring

Yesterday I hinted at my persistent worry that someday my job will be sent offshore. I've seen it happen with layout and design--thriving departments of hundreds of people working three shifts reduced to just one guy who sends things to India. A whole room full of typesetters in Singapore who work for peanuts overnight. Even JIST has begun sending some software development work overseas.

Of course, it makes short-term business sense to do it. If you can get things done faster and cheaper (and presumably with good quality), why wouldn't you?

In her post Shipping the Work to India, Beyond the Elements of Style blogger Jeannette Cezanne offers some insights and some hope. If editors can find their niche, they can swim alongside the riptide of offshoring.

But this isn't the end of the discussion as far as I'm concerned. I want to know what all of you think about the offshoring trend. Do you see it happening? Are you doing it? Is it taking work away from you or driving down your rates? How can we as American editors justify our continued existence?

Christine Larson on Ghostwriting as a Career

Thanks to author/editor Laurence Shatkin for pointing me to this fun piece in the New York Times by Christine Larson. Larson was surprised to find ghostwriting on the U.S. News and World Report list of best careers for 2008. She gives an overview of her career without overglamorizing it (in fact, she refers to her career as "a pig in a prom dress" compared to the other jobs on the list). You can find out more interesting information about ghostwriting in U.S. News and World Report's detail page for that job (be sure to check out the links at the bottom of the article).


I will now express equal surprise that "editor" is also on the list. Here's the detail page on that one. Since JIST is in the business of putting out books that recommend the "best jobs" for everyone, a list like this always makes me ask: What criteria are they using to pick these jobs? Here's what they said:

• Job satisfaction, defined as spending a high percentage of time on activities that many people would consider rewarding or pleasant.
• Training difficulty, defined by the length of training typically required, adjusted by the amount of science and/or math involved.
• Prestige, based on an informal survey of college-educated adults.
• Job market outlook, based on data from the U.S. Department of Labor and professional organizations, with the career's resistance to being offshored considered.
• Pay, with data provided by payscale.com, which has an extensive database of individual employee compensation profiles.

So this looks like good news to me. The "informal survey" says my job is prestigious, and the Department of Labor says it's resistant to being offshored. Are they sure about that second one?

One Day, One Job Profiles Penguin

I've blogged before about One Day, One Job, which profiles a different company each day with tips about how to get an entry-level position there. Yesterday the blog featured the Penguin Group, a giant among trade publishers.

In addition to the helpful information the post imparts, I can tell you that Penguin is part of Pearson. And contrary to what the post implies, not all of Penguin--not even all of its U.S. division--is in New York. Alpha Books, publishers of the Complete Idiot's Guide series, is headquartered right here in Indianapolis.

And I'm certain that our U.K. readers don't need to be reminded of Penguin's headquarters on The Strand in London--with a breathtaking view of the Thames and within an easy walk of Covent Garden. I sound like I've been there, don't I? Well, I have--if you count standing outside of it. Back in April, while my husband was conducting his group's annual foreign rights summit meeting there, I happened to walk by while I was having a leisurely tourist day. They wouldn't let me in, though, so I just went shopping.

Have a great weekend!