The Marketing Pitch

OK, so now we understand that we need to sell ourselves, so to speak, before we can convince the other guy across the table to hire us. But how can this be done? While this is certainly not a panacea to all the issues you might face in your journey to a career change, it’s certainly something to start with. It’s a simple, yet powerful self-realisation process that can yield amazing results in your career transition.

FOCUS

Start by focusing and identifying suitable job markets. The questions here are:

a)      STAY in the same industry and do the SAME thing? (STAY-SAME)

b)      STAY in the same industry and do a NEW thing? (STAY-NEW)

c)       CHANGE the industry and do the SAME thing? (CHANGE-SAME)

d)      CHANGE the industry and do a NEW thing? (CHANGE-NEW)

In addition to those, you need to know the skills, abilities, interest and experience that you offer; find a match with an employer’s needs  and get hired! It sounds easy, but in real life, this could be a frustrating and ultimately rewarding experience.

The Phases of Transition

When a job is taken away without another one in line, this leads to a transitional phase. This concept of change vs transition is taken from Managing Transitions by William Bridges.

1)    Change is situational and happens without people transitioning

2)    Transition is psychological and is a 3 phase process where people gradually accept the details of the new situation and the changes that come with it

People react differently when they approach the neutral zone.

Can you remember the time when you hung up the call from your director informing you are let go, or when you walk out of the door after your contract was not renewed? At that moment, change has occurred, but you were still in the throes of transition. Everything in the company, in your personal life has changed, but your emotions are still playing catch up.

In the Neutral zone, one can start to feel the apprehension and emptiness from the insecurity of having lost something. On the other hand, another person undergoing the same change might transition differently, and remain calm and even excited about the future possibilities of a career move.

Whatever the reaction is, it is normal to feel that way. The uncertainty will always be there, yet that should not stop us from having confidence in our abilities and seeing hope in a new future ahead.

The first thing to do is to have a career review. All of us should be doing that regardless but sometimes we are so caught up with the hectic schedule, we neglect it…until we find ourselves with ample time in our hands.

We should know what are strengths are, what satisfies us and what our accomplishments have been. With this knowledge we can specifically target companies or businesses to go into, effectively form our resume, network appropriately and focus on the key points of your career that can be highlighted and accented.

A job search can become a journey of self discovery if done systematically and could potentially be a rewarding period of your life when you find out more of yourself through the course of the exercises to come.

Taking Control after the R-Word

The three phases that we need to go through when we have lost our job are:

a)      Adapting

b)      Strategizing

c)       Implementing

Adapting

Adaptation is more than adjustment. While adjustment is a passive reaction to the circumstances around us, adaptation is using the circumstances around us to become better. It might be creation of a new income stream, or flowing into a new channel of employment, or learning something new that you never had the time for.

Losing a job can have different effects on different people.

Some might be expecting it and might even be relieved about it. The individual might have already had plans to move on and to use the retrenchment package as a springboard into something new.

For most, however, a job loss is akin to losing a loved one. In fact, one of my associates correctly surmised that the experience was like breaking up. Like a break up, we need to accept it and move on. We might not be too happy about it, but holding on to the past will just hinder us moving forward.

That being said, there are also times when the retrenchment is severely unfair, or there is an abuse of ethics in the way the retrenchment was done. In these cases, bringing a charge to the company can also be an option. You can be either seeking reinstatement or additional compensation but you’ll need to prepare for the long haul on this.

Either way you decide, to file a complaint or to just walk away, you need to sweep it off your table and start anew. Many of us physically leave the company but mentally and emotionally are still attached to it. Leave it completely, it’s a closed chapter.

Strategizing

Several steps can be done in this phase:

1)      We need to know ourselves. What is our skills? What is our experiences?

2)      We need to know the market. What’s the current bracket in the particular industry? Which industry are we targeting? Are we staying on in what we do best or explore horizontally across different markets?

3)      Update our resume (or CV). Time to dig up the old resume we had and dust it off. Most likely, there’s going to be a lot of work to do on the resume.

4)      Network, network, network. Along the way, we would have made a lot of friends, partners, associates, acquaintances. We can start a list of those, as well as potential employers. We can be as optimistic as possible; I usually start with Google, Inc.

5)      Train for the interview. Yes, an interview is not chit-chat although some might look that way. It’s entering the battlefield, so we need to be prepared for questions like, “Tell me about your weaknesses.”, and what the interviewer actually means.

Implementing

We can only strategize so much. Once we’re fairly ready, we need to kickstart our job search. Two things are needed: Stay Positive and have a sense of humor. Staying positive translates in our walk, talk, confidence, the way we project ourselves. Having a sense of humor is helpful, it releases endorphins, and it puts others around you at ease.

Severance Pay 101: Show Me the Money!! (Part 2)

From Part 1, we can derive what your severance pay is basically made of. Of course, depending on roles and industry, there might be additional factors. For instance, if sales, you should have commissioned factored into your pay if there were any deals closed before your termination.

One of the key factors is determining your daily wage. Here’s what I found:

1) For salary of Incomplete Month

I.e you are fired on the 8th of July, you’ve worked 8 days. The calculation is based on number of days in that month, so salary would be:

(Monthly Wage/Days in Month) x Days Worked

2) Annual Leave payment

Calculation is based on 26 days and not calendar month, this is from the Employment Act.

(Monthly Wage/26) x Annual Leaves Remaining

3) Termination Wages

12 months basic / 365.  This is the daily rate used for your severance payment based on the tenure with the company. For instance, if you worked 13 months, you get 10 days for first year worked. The additional 1 month is prorated according to the first year rate. So your termination wages is

(Annual Basic / 365)  x 10 x (13/12 months)

4) What can be EPF or Taxed?

Taxable

Basic Salary for days worked in a month, Leave Pay, Allowances,  Retrenchment package

EPF

Severance and any refund on your share options scheme is not subject to EPF. This is really subject also to your own government laws. Singapore for instance is pretty laxed in employee protection and there’s no need for mandatory payout of employers for severance. I suppose this gets foreign investors in. So BE CAREFUL!

A note for Malaysia: There is a tax exemption of RM10,000 for each completed year for severance pay. If your severance pay is under that, then it’s exempted from tax.

All sounds pretty complex, but you just need to know what is rightfully yours and ensure the company is not shortchanging you. At times, they might count your annual leave wrongly or your additional severance days wrongly, which leaves you a few thousand short! So make sure you make some noise, since these guys are the ones who caused your income to vanish overnight. This is not a time to be shy or ‘pai-seh’, because it’s YOUR MONEY.

A helpful link on EPF is found here!

Severance Pay 101: Show me the money!! (Part 1)

OK, here’s where the fun starts.

Imagine this: You just finished a meeting with a group of very dissatisfied ex senior managers of your company. They’ve been laid off with you and not only has the company NOT PAID the severance package within 7 days, they finally pay out end of the month and you get a lot lesser than what you think. What the hey!

Well, let’s go through this step by step.

Step 1

Let’s bring out the rule books. The employer has the right to defend themselves so here’s the playing field. The Employment contract. Yep, the one you signed those long years ago. Under the contract, there should be a section for Termination. What’s important in there is:

a) Your notice period or severance payment (usually one month to 3 months)

b) The conditions of termination

Step 2

Additional Rules, namely your country rules. You need to know what your rights are as an employee, so you need to do a little searching. It’s easy with the internet, for instance for Malaysia it’s

• ten days’ wages for each completed year of service of less than two years;
• 15 days’ wages for each year of two to five years’ service; and
• 20 days’ wages for each year of service exceeding five years

So, for instance you finish 13 months, you’ll get a prorated number. It would be 10 days + (10/12)= 10.83. I.e it would be 0.83 days for any months before you hit the second year. Once the second year arrives, calculation would be (15/12=1.25) for each month and so on. So if you have 34 months, it would be 2 years and 10 months. So

(2 x 15) + (10 x 1.25) = 42.5

Those are your days. Remember it.

As I said, the internet is your friend. You can check your country here at this link.

If it ain’t there, search some more. I bet if we spend more time, we can find the severance payment for guys in Timbuktu.

Step 3

Next, you get paid daily for whatever days you’ve worked for in a month. For instance if they sack you on the 8th, you get 7 days wages. We’ll get to daily wages calculation later.

Step 4

Annual Leave Pay. This is nice. If you are a workaholic, you are rewarded because the company is obligated to pay for the annual leave accrued and not taken. So if you have like 200 days of annual leave (which many company will limit these days), you go back a millionaire. Or at least a whole lot richer. Companies hedge themselves by limiting the number of leaves you can take forward or maximum number of leaves per year an employee can have.

Step 5

Any other reimbursements will be stock option participation etc.

OK. Now you have it all listed out, you have at least an idea what you should be expecting. The playing field is set.

LAR4.0: The Attitude of Retrenchment

So let’s recap:

1) You’ve been fired

2) You’ve exited the company physically

3) You’ve thrown in some f-bombs to your supervisor (optional)

Now you’re left with a few more options:

a) Take action against the company against unfair termination

b) Take whatever compensation, and kickstart your job search

c) Take a break

While a) and b) will be looked, over, option c) is an extremely viable choice. Take a break?? What??!

Now I’m aware that there might be dependents. If you’re the single income owner, if you have kids, if you have a huge mortgage, hey, then getting some cash inflow is priority. All said and done, it’s hopeful that you at least get 1 and half months of severance pay, which hopefully will bide you through that period.

You are not idle either, you need to start updating your CV, your coverletter and get some contacts. If you have a placement agency, then get them to mentor you as well. The week after your retrenchment might me the busiest week as you scramble around, just getting things done and adjusting.

But take a break once those initial adrenaline of being fired wears off.

Think about it, how often do you get a break where there’s absolutely no obligations to the company. For us, the curse of the Blackberry (or now iPhone) often haunts us even when we’re in our honeymoon, or to some, even when taking a crap. It’s crazy, we’ve been tied down so long to SMS and emails, we don’t know what was it like to simply wake up and not have anything to do.

Take this time to go on a vacation, go for a break. I packed up to head to South Philippines with a medical group and we went to tribal villages for a week dispensing medicine. Ever sat in a four wheeler with 20 people on it, and set up a makeshift pharmacy in a village at the bottom of a live volcano? Well, do it! It’s cool! Or you could just chill out at the beach and take time to recuperate. You’ll need the rest.

Secondly, the Attitude of Retrenchment is an important part of LAR (Life After Retrenchment). I am convinced there are two essential attitudes to have: Humour and Positivism.

It’s hard to be humourous, I know. The first call I made was to my wife. We’ve been talking about her quitting and us being a single income household. I told her our wishes came true, only it was the other way around! I thought it was funny. She didn’t.

But humour is vital to survive the first few weeks of retrenchment, because it’s easy to slide into the doom and gloom window, especially when we start getting rejection slips. Staying positive throughout the whole process is also key. We need to continue with our self belief in our abilities and skills, and people will see that in us. Think not about losing a job, but gaining a whole bunch of time to do your stuff. Those poor ex-colleagues of yours are stuck in their cubies rotting away while you’re backpacking China and gaining a whole bunch of experience from it. Which is cooler?

Besides, you have that compensation package, so that buffer time is for you to chill, look for job and enjoy a little, and maybe fix up that blasted leak in the toilet your wife has been bugging you about for 6 months.

You’ll have time to sit and go through your career reassessment soon enough. But for a week, or if possible two weeks, it should be chill time. At least, that’s my humble opinion.

LAR3.0: Walk Away

I know the feeling.

Every part of you wants to justify why you were let go. It’s natural. You bust your butt for something, building a castle only to find that it was on sand and the waves of changes has come to wash it away. That sounds pretty poetic!

Anyway, the next step after getting all your personal stuff in tact is to just simply…walk away. It might sound like you’re accepting, but we need to know whether fighting with the guy on the other line is the right forum to protest. Likely it’s not. And don’t give your admin staff too much trouble too, no matter how sadistic they are. They are simply doing what they are told. Most likely, it has already been brewing for a couple of days, or a few weeks and the axe was about the fall, whether you are aware of it or not.

The company has certain rights:

1) They can bar access to your cubi, and rightfully request the return of all company properties. They have the right to reject your request to backup your personal things (the idea is not to use company stuff for personal stuff, but who does that, really?), or they can have someone to stay beside you to ensure you are not committing any sabotage.

2) They will terminate your email, login, company access card etc. You are basically lockdown. Some companies are kind enough to give you a brief 1-2 hours window, but they have the right to lockdown immediately.

3) They will remove any remote access accounts, system accounts, old accounts, backdoor accounts etc. Especially if you are from Info Security, there are a whole bunch of changes the company will and must make.

4) They have the right to put you under constant escort until you are out of the premise.

All these are actually good for you, since if someone happens to really screw up the company, you have witnesses to see that it wasn’t you. And I suppose we still need to be as professional as possible and not actually do the things we want to do, such as going to the big boss office and letting go a few f-bombs.

But they don’t have the right to force you to sign the termination notification.

In most cases, you probably don’t want to sign it right away. Let them sit on it.

Clean out your personal stuff on your desk, and if you’re not escorted out, take time to say goodbye to everyone in the office, including those who had made your life a living hell. Take a few pictures. How you leave a company is as important as how you enter it. It’s important to show that you’re still in control, that everything is going to be fine, that you might even consider going to the Gold Coast to chill. Or if you’re short on cash, Sepang Gold Coast will do. The important thing is, the final memory of you leaving the office is one of dignity not kicking and screaming.

No matter what industry you’re in, you’ll be meeting with them.

Once you’re out the door for the final time, and in your car, you can do whatever you fancy, but please refrain from running down the first ex-colleague you happen to see crossing the road. It’s not worth it.

LAR2.0: Backing up your life

Before you launch an offense against the company that just destroyed your life, get on the defensive first. If you had been with the company for a long time, part of your history is in that company laptop or company phone. BACK UP!

My retrenchment was extremely devious. Management from US only made the call to us at 10 am our time, which is roughly 1 am over there. Now, we all know nobody in senior management will be staying up that late unless it’s for karaoke, drinks or some other business activity. It’s calculated to have us all in the office so that they can immediately get one of their henchmen to confiscate your laptop and phone and escort you out of premise.

Is this legal? Many people ask.

Well, legally, the laptop or phone (if its not personal) belongs to the company, so they can do whatever they want to it. Many companies fear sabotage from disgruntled employees and a quick way is to have them in the premise and grab a hold of the company assets and remove their access immediately.

Is it legal for them to be so devious about it? It depends on what the country law is, which we will go through it later.

For me, since I was working till the morning the previous night and had a teleconference, I wasn’t in the office when the axe dropped. Which was good.

1) Let your customers know. Many might not agree to this but there’s good reasons why customers must know you are retrenched, especially if you’re in sales, or senior positions. One, it’s ethical. Else, they will continue to send you email and tell you about company related information, which you should no longer be privy to. Two, for sales managers, you need to network with your customers. If it’s a sudden death, like what we faced, many customers/partners will go berserk because they are left in a lurch. That’s NOT YOUR PROBLEM. That’s the problem of the company that just fired you. Keep all customers and partners contact because any industry is small. You’re bound to bump into them sooner or later. I know of a channel sales who sent out 300 emails and smses announcing his retrenchment and stirred up a hornet’s nest from Australia to Japan. Remember: NOT YOUR PROBLEM.

2) Backup your SMS and addressbook. Each phone these days comes with some kind of software kit for your PC. Hook it up and send everything to a personal PC or external harddrive.

3) Backup your emails. Emails can be generally found in C:\Documents and Settings\your.name\Outlook stored in .pst files. Just backup the whole Docs & Settings folder and sort it out later.

4) Backup your personal stuff. Now all of us have a few things in our laptops that aren’t supposed to be there, i.e anything personal, including documents, pictures, videos, games, and god forbid any illegal applications! Either remove them or back up, just don’t leave your stuff for other fellas to clean up. Hasn’t Edison Chen taught you anything???

5) Clean out the browsers! Many people forget to do this, but your browser stores cookies, temporary files, bookmarks and worst, passwords for sites. This is the most vital thing you need to do, is to remove all saved passwords and form information and temporary files, including those in default download folder. If you have multiple browsers, you need to sterilise them all.

6) Clean out applications. Some apps might contain more passwords/information like FTP clients, VPN clients etc that people can poke around. What I like to do is simply go to add/remove programs, seek out all the programs that have been installed by myself and remove them.

7) Clean out your registry. The registry is like your yellow pages in your computer. Every app registers itself there once installed, so when you remove it, sometimes, these registry data is left behind. You can use a free registry cleaner like Eusing Registry Cleaner to remove invalid entries.

8 ) Finally, shred your drive. No, not physically, but if that’s an option, you should! Shredding means completely deleting your files. See, when you delete and remove files from your thrash box icon, Windows doesn’t really ‘delete’ it. It just removes the pointer to the data and allows that ‘space’ to be overwritten by other data. The ‘deleted’ data still exist! You can download a freetool called Restoration, a very small tool that will recover all deleted files.

To shred a drive, you need to overwrite over and over again. There are lots of tools out there that does this, just google ‘Hard Drive Delete’. Most offer military algorithms to delete your drive but you need to pay for it, but your information is probably not extremely classified, so some free tools you want to try out:

1) Secure Erase

2) Eraser

3) Sdelete

4) Ultrashredder

If anyone interested I can probably write up a more comprehensive review on the best and quickest way to shred your files.

Problem

Of course, I realise that time is probably not on your side, and the laptop is probably required then and there. It depends on you and your company. For me, I had good friendships with the procurement and admin staff in the country and negotiated for an additional day due to ‘extracting large videos of my wedding’. Most people are not sadistic enough to reject that request.

If your admin staff are sadists, then you can only hope to constantly backup weekly to external drive (You want a big one! I personally have a 1.5 Terabyte external harddrive). and maybe every month, run the file wiping tool to remove any remnants of references to deleted files.

Good luck!

LAR1.0: Keep Calm

Life after Retrenchment (LAR) step 1: Keep calm.

Our first reactions is most likely the following:

1) Silence: until the VP on the other end of the line thinks you’ve dropped dead.

2) Ask if this is a joke: to which the response is a tombstone NO.

3) Ask what are the options: We like to do this. As Malaysians especially, since everytime we get in a pickle, we always ask: “Abang, ada jalan tak?“, i.e “Brother, got any option or not??” Unfortunately, international rules of engagement doesn’t take Malaysian tactics (especially when caught speeding or beating the red light) into account. At this point, your VP will probably respond with a tombstone NO.

4) Ask if everything has been done, if there’s any chance of placement in the company: This might sound like you’re grovelling, but there’s a point to it, since a company’s ethical obligation is to ensure all things have been done to avoid this current situation. Well, most likely, it’s a NO as well.

5) Ask what the heck is the compensation package: Here’s where the crap hits the fan, because it’s negotiation time, which we can go through in another article. Unfortunately, in many cases, the guy calling you won’t talk to you about package. He’ll say it’s being worked out by the finance and will be in touch with you shortly. That’s standard excuse, because most of these guys calling you are having their B**LS wrenched from senior management who are out playing golf.

6) Shout out some flowery language to the other guy on the line. If you have a long history of feud against him, it might be a good time to tell him to shove the notification up his own ****. You won’t be getting any more satisfaction from here on out. Do be careful though, as you don’t want him to cause too much mischief.

My recommended tactic (not that I’ve gone through this many times..) is to go through steps 3-5 calmly. If it’s clear they are releasing you, that’s it. Bite the bullet, live to fight another day. We need to regather ourselves and get reinforcements from other guys who got the sack and strategise a way to fight back. No point yelling around. It’s highly likely your head is spinning around too much anyway and you need some time to think. Even if you have expected the axe, it’s always something that will affect your day one way or another.

Life After Retrenchment

Retrenchment.

It’s just a word. But it can send shivers down the spines of the toughest corporate beast. It’s not just the mere action of it, it’s the aftermath.

Only someone who has been there before recognises the different emotions of being retrenched. And only someone who has been there before understands the people undergoing the process. It’s Victor Hugo who said: “In face of a common adversity, there is fraternity amongst strangers.”

In case you’re wondering if this is another philosophical rambling: well, no. Of course not. I’m hoping to compile as much information and data as possible while I’m still contributing to the unemployment statistic, in hopes that the ones who will come after me will benefit a little from whatever experience I am going through.

Each of us has a story I suppose. Mine was brutally cold, but not uncommon: Regional Manager of an upcoming US company; did great for the past 4 quarters, leading the group to a 300% growth in bookings and revenue pipeline; getting all the commendations needed from the VPs; and having a great time and looking forward to major plans for the coming quarter.

These are the ones that hurt; the ones you don’t expect. In fact, I was up doing a system migration till 5 am with a customer and was preparing to get on a major conference with their management at 10 am the next morning when I received a nice little call from my senior director.

“Due to strategic restructuring, I’m afraid to inform you your position as Regional Manager is no longer required. I’m sorry, but we’re letting you go.”

It’s always hard to swallow, that pride that just disappears like that little piece of fruitcake you consumed yesterday. You know he’s reading from a paper. You know he has rehearsed this little conversation and you know he’s ready for your protestations.

At that moment, you’re retrenched. You’re no longer needed by the company. The rules of the game has now changed.