Gene Nokes
"Tips from the Career Coach"
Gene Nokes is a Career Coach and Business Development executive with a 3o year record of achievement in high-tech markets. Gene has also ministered to the unemployed and underemployed a St. Raymond's Catholic Church, in Dublin, CA since 1995. His specialty is coaching individuals in the high-tech industries of Northern California. He is also very interested in assisting mature workers find meaningful and rewarding work. He offers private career coaching as a lay minister to Christian Churches throughout Northern California.
Please Login or Signup to Email Gene or Post Comments
Login to Comment
0 Comment
When you lose the job you love
January 16, 2012 by Gene Nokes
I recently had an opportunity to help a local church that had the dreadful task of laying off staff. My job was to hold a workshop orientation on how to do a professional job search in today’s market. When you work for a church or religious organization, even when you are not in the clergy, it feels like you are doing God’s work. Many people pour their heart and soul into helping the congregation.The shock of a layoff is always hard. Your senses go numb and you can barely hear the words being spoken, but you know that your job is gone. As a career coach, my goal is to get people focused on the solution which is moving forward into the future, but I need to deal with the fact that people get stunned by the experience of job loss. People go through the grief process (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance), sometimes quickly and sometimes slowly. For people who work for religious organizations, job loss can be very traumatizing. Not only do they lose a job that they feel led to do, but they lose the people and the organization.
From a practical standpoint, church workers need to get moving on a productive job search quickly because often they do not have unemployment benefits. In the United States we have this concept of the separation of church and state, which means that church and other religious organizations are exempt from paying unemployment insurance. The church organizations have the option to pay for unemployment insurance. If they have had reductions in staff previously, they often opt to pay unemployment or buy optional insurance. Sadly, most church organizations do not have unemployment benefits.
Reality sets in; no job, no unemployment benefits, and leaving the job and the people you love. Fear and depression are the big problems with moving forward. I am very blunt that taking time off is not a good idea. This is not the time to take a long vacation or trip. It is not time to remodel the bathroom or fix the deck. Take all of that energy, all of that anger, and pour it into a productive job search. Our Experience Counts has an excellent free resource for getting you started in the right direction. You can download “The Job Search Planning Kit,” and begin to organize your search. Get the basics done first. Draft a resume and get it posted on Craigslist; then get your profile on Linkedin started. Then start going to job support network meetings at local churches. These are always free and you start to make new friends and associate with the kind of people you miss so much. If you don’t know where to find them, you can go to your local One Stop Career Center (www.servicelocator.org) and they will have lists of self help job support groups in your area.
If you need to take some time off, limit it to one week. If you don’t feel good enough to work hard at the job search process, then work at it when you feel better, but work at it weekly. You can go to a meeting every day in most major cities, so get out there and meet some new friends. You never know when you are going to meet your next best friend – and find out where God is leading you.
|
Login to Comment Comments:No Comments |
You will find these interesting:Should I File An Age Discrimination Law Suit?Are Job Placement Services a Good Idea? A Career Transition - From Finance to Teaching This article was posted in:Job Search CoachingLayoff Job Search Help Click on a category name above to read more on the subject |
