Older workers can be creative links to the future

Monday night, I drove way over – I mean waaaay ooooover – to Elyria, a town west of Cleveland in Lorain County, Ohio, to attend a community class about the online business-social network, LinkedIn.

It was already dark when I set out and, this being December in Northeast Ohio, it almost immediately began to sleet/rain and blow. Thanks to the weather, the rush-hour traffic (amazingly, there are still a few people employed around here) and the unfamiliar roads, it took me more than an hour to reach the campus of Lorain County Community College. I met up with a friend, as planned, and the two of us eventually found the right building, tramped through mounds of plowed snow and made it to the classroom just as things were getting started. 

The place was packed. On a cold, wet, messy Monday night, more than 50 people were jamming this big room to hear the director of human resources from the regional Time Warner Cable office talk about a social network.

That surprised me. But what surprised me even more was finding out that the class was aimed at people over 50 who were changing careers and/or between jobs. One of them, I discovered, was a former colleague of mine who had recently been laid off.

That put their numbers in a new and dismaying light that had nothing to do with the typically greenish flourescent illumination. How many of these experienced people, still of working age and with decades of knowledge and skill, had been lost from the local workforce? At an age when American workers of earlier eras were secure in their company positions and looking forward to enjoying hard-earned pensions when they hit 65, how many of these folks were professionally and economically adrift?

In between the tips on LinkedIn etiquette and which icons to click to make a PDF of your resume, I found myself wondering if most of my classmates were just trying to find any decently paid work that would see them through the next few years or if some wanted to turn their personal employment crisis into an opportunity to innovate their lives.

A current catchphrase says that 50 is the new 30, which makes me laugh when I look in the mirror. But I also believe that 50 and older is an excellent time of life for becoming an entrepreneur. True, entrepreneurship is something like parenthood: It’s never truly convenient to subsume your whole existence to the care, feeding and raising of an infant entity. But I’ve always thought that experience and resources were more critical to the process than youth. Though your energy is more limited, you know how to use what you have more efficiently and you have the discipline to push yourself harder. 

Change is scary, particularly change you didn’t ask for, but I wanted to stand up and tell this roomful of late-middle-agers to be brave – not to settle for another dubious paycheck from another heartless and poorly-run corporation, but to use their lifetimes of knowledge to think new ideas, invent new ways to improve the world and, in the process, make something new of themselves.  

That’s how each of us can take an event that was beyond our control and shape it to our mutual advantage. And maybe that’s the best use of networks like LinkedIn – not simply to find jobs, but to form virtual brain trusts that will create new ones. If we don’t do that, we’ll just be using a futuristic tool to perpetuate the past.  

Good social networking = your past + your future

I’m beginning to think that the best part of outreach tools such as Facebook and LinkedIn is not their potential for helping you develop relationships with new people, but the nearly miraculous ability they give you to find the old ones.

Over the last few months, I’ve been friended by all kinds of people I haven’t seen, talked to or heard anything about in nearly 30 years. I’ve found out what they do now and who they married; we’ve apologized for old hurts and/or reaffirmed our affection, traded ideas and hard-earned wisdom.

College friends, long-ago office pals – whatever our original connections were, these people feel like the best possible contacts I could have, because we share history and caring that came about through spending time face to face and experiencing life together.

That kind of bond really can’t be created virtually with strangers, no matter how many people we know in common. Yes, it will probably be handy for me to collect a large number of online nominal acquaintances  who could serve as information resources and be part of a broader market for what I sell. But frankly, I’d rather seek advice from people I actually know and trust.

What matters most to me about rediscovering old friends has to do with business only indirectly, anyway. I’ve found that it’s satisfying and somehow reassuring to reconnect with them now that I know a lot more about the world and people than I did at 20, 25 or 30 – time has somehow allowed us to understand each other better, to see why we were as we were then, to forgive or appreciate or sympathize more deeply than we could have earlier.

When we message each other from hundreds of miles away, we don’t just add another business card to the Rolodex. We join hands. 

I feel safer and more confident, richer, with them back in my life. If that helps my business, it will be because it helps me.

Guerrilla girl

Hot and sweet! I guerrilla-marketed today and already have some response to show for it. Does anything  satisfy like instant gratification?

What I did was post free notices on a local Northeast Ohio subscriber list announcing Geniocity.com’s search for artists and ad salespeople and got replies from promising people almost immediately. This was a relief, as I’ve been pricing paid advertising in area publications and finding it well beyond my means.

The next thing I need to learn how to do (among dozens, alas) is to use Facebook and LinkedIn effectively to reach resource people and markets. For the last 18 months, I’ve been going through what amounts to a self-directed crash course in Internet use, trying to educate myself at odd moments about a system and culture that other people have been immersed in for 20 years. I’d say I’m still at the “Have you seen the pen of my uncle?” stage in mastering the language, but fluency may be mine one day.

In the meantime, I’m also trying to attract press interest by making direct appeals to individual media people I know and trust. That effort seems to be off to a good start, too.

And so, happily, is the weekend. Let’s celebrate with a tune! Bombs away ….