Legal Research

"How to Recognize Bad Advice about Work"

Posted by Penelope Trunk: "Be careful who you take career advice from. Knowing who to take advice from is a really good skill for any aspect of your life, but especially in the field of work, because work is changing very fast right now. A lot of advice that was good ten years ago is not good now. And people who are using old language to talk about contemporary careers are thinking in terms that will pull you off track.

Here are three examples of topics your parents talk about all the time in their careers, but these topics will not be a part of new millennium careers. Watch out for these three terms -- they probably come with outdated advice.

1. Career change

When Baby Boomers change careers, they stand on mountaintops. They announce that career change is a new trend, and they are doing it, of course, to save the world. The Baby Boomer specialty is saving the world by screaming from mountaintops, and then borrowing some more money to support that habit...

2. Networking

Do you know who is using social media? Gen X. The average Twitter user is in their 30s. The median age of LinkedIn is 40. The majority of people who are joining Facebook right now are over 35. This is because Gen X wants to meet new people online and reconnect with all the friends they lost along the way. Gen X is using social media to network...

3. Midlife crisis

It's not that you won't have crises. But they'll be earlier. The midlife crisis is a result of people getting on a path that someone else paved before them. If you see that you have a limited range of choices and you have to make one, then you don't need to know very much about yourself in order to move forward. That's what Baby Boomers did - they chose a path. Even the women chose a path that men laid out before them. The women fought to be able to take those paths, too...

Full text and active links are available at the source site listed below.

Source: Penelope Trunk's Brazen Careerist, 12 May 2009

Full post as published by Stark County Law Library Blawg on May 13, 2009 (boomark / email).