Very rarely do search professionals — or headhunters — assist candidates in need of jobs. Instead, their clients are the companies that pay them to find highly qualified people for specific openings. “When companies hire a search firm, it’s to find people they can’t find — typically people who work for other companies” who aren’t necessarily looking for new opportunities, says R. Gaines Baty, an executive recruiter in Dallas.

Why not contact them anyway? Because a lot of the ones willing to help you find a position use tactics that will end up hurting you. Some just accept your resume and never talk to you again, leaving you with no clue what they’ve done on your behalf. Others aren’t careful, and can tip off your current employer that you’re planning to leave – by sending them your resume.  Others will just send your resume to anyone and everyone, and then claim a commission if you later get a job with them, even if you end up doing all the legwork.

The one benefit to waiting for them to contact you is that they’re more likely to be actually interested in you for a specific position. The problem? Often the unscrupulous ones are just calling as many people as they can, without a real interest in you or what job fits you best. The two big rules you need to follow are:

1) Make sure you find out something about them from someone you trust before you use them, preferably someone who has used that headhunter themselves.

2) Make it very clear that they do not have your permission to send out a resume to anyone without your explicit permission – and limit the number of employers you grant permission for them to send it to.

You want someone taking the time to do a specialized search for you, not a resume dump. You can do that yourself, and the random employers you’d be contacting are more likely to be hiring if they don’t have to pay a finder’s fee.

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Now, she’s working full time at a health services company, but she’s returned to school to get an MBA from Lakeland College in Sheboygan. And in three or four years, she’d like to get a law degree, too.

Don’t get me wrong. A JD or an MBA is a great degree to have – it’s a big bump salary-wise for most people. The problem is that at best there is a marginal benefit to having both – and in her case, this idea would be a big drag on her career. Yet a lot of people go this path. How could it possibly be a bad idea to get two good degrees at once? There’s a few reasons:

1) Her timing is poorly planned. What she wants to do is get her MBA, work for three or four more years, then take another three years off to get a JD. Think about what happens in the interim: she is working for three or four years climbing the ladder on a career track that she doesn’t intend to stay in. If you get a JD, you’re not just going to go back to the same job you had before. In fact, that can be extremely difficult to do even if you want to, because many companies fear they’ll have to pay you a salary premium for the extra education – and they’d rather hire someone less educated and cheaper. So she’ll spend that three years getting experience in a field that won’t have much resemblance to the practice of law, in what she has turned into a dead-end job.

2) The MBA is not all that helpful to a career in law, or vice versa. It’s good to understand the basics of business if you want to do corporate or transactional legal work. But you can pick that up by reading the Wall Street Journal. No one is going to ask you to calculate the rate of return on an investment decision or do anything you learned in a quantitative analysis class. And it’s not that useful from a hiring perspective, because for the most part the high-paying legal jobs aren’t given out based on your experience in another field, or your other degrees, or anything else you’ve done. The biggest factor in whether you get a job out of law school is your first year grades. There are a few degrees where this statement isn’t as true (intellectual property law is a glaring exception, because having a technical degree of some kind is considered very important). But an MBA isn’t one of them – it won’t give you much benefit over all the other attorneys who don’t have one. As for jobs outside the legal sector, many of them will be reluctant to hire a lawyer – both because of the presumed pay premium and because a law degree isn’t all that useful if you’re not practicing law. A consulting job might be an exception – but on balance, if she wants to stay in the same line of health care work, she’d be better off spending three years getting experience on the job than getting the JD.

3) It sounds like she just doesn’t want to live in the real world. I’ve met a lot of “professional students” who keep racking up degrees until well into their thirties. Often they’re useless or overlapping. A communications undergraduate degree, then a communications masters degree, then a communications PhD. I can think of more than one person I know who has gone this exact route – and all it ends up being is a way to delay having to go in and be the corporate drone you don’t want to be. The problem is that like the woman in this article, you’re just adding on debt and delaying your eventual escape. You have to make money to be financially independent – and going to school for multiple, redundant degrees is sucking money away from you. You can only do it for so long, and only borrow so much.

One final point: I do know of one situation where it might be a good idea to get dual degrees: some schools will allow you to do a joint program, where you go for four years and get both diplomas. That’s not as bad a deal. You aren’t jumping in and out of the workforce, you’re there for one block of time. You don’t spend as much time to get the extra degree. And your studies are coordinated, so it’s a lot easier to focus on an aspect of business where you want to practice law. Her plan, however, is not something I’d recommend.

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The idea of selling yourself year round is a good one, too. In fact, I don’t even think you have to approach it as a sleazy, car-salesman style self promotion. You don’t have to be constantly dropping hints to your boss about how you really nailed the Smith account. I’d ask for a periodic meeting with the boss to discuss your progress and ask your boss for suggestions for improvement. The first part lets you tout all your accomplishments to the boss – and the second makes them feel like they’re doing something, actively helping your progress. If you take their suggestions into account from meeting to meeting, they’re going to naturally think better of your performance. After all, you’re doing what they want – and it was their idea. And in a one-on-one environment, you’re not dealing with other employees who might want to take credit for what you’ve done. Finally, you just seem like you’re interested in doing your job better, which is generally a good idea.

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Well, the Internet, which tends to produce web sites about every conceivable subject that could exist from banana collecting to extreme unicycle tricks, has something for you, too. There are web sites similar to Monster.com that are focusing entirely on people over 50 – so you know that the people posting jobs there are willing to hire you.

RetirementJobs is one of these that seems to have a lot of listings. It’s got some generic resources that can help you try to do this kind of job search – the success stories section will probably be interesting to you, but I didn’t find all that much that was useful in the other sections. I looked through the job listings and they’re kind of a mixed bag. Some of them are junky jobs they probably just can’t find anyone to fill. Others are nicer jobs, but they seemed to be mainly temporary – 6-12 months or so for many of them. That may be what you’re stuck with, but I think it would be worth filtering through the bad jobs to have a pool of employers specifically interested in older people.

Retired Brains is another site with the same purpose. This one seemed to be a little less useful in terms of the generic resources they provide (they’re geared toward retirement, not job finding, and some are kind of random). However, the searches pulled up a lot more jobs and they seemed to have fewer ”temp” jobs in the mix to sift through. Some of them were the kind of scam jobs that advertise on these sites (Sort envelopes from home for $20 an hour!) – but I’ve seen these on pretty much every job site.

I wouldn’t give up on other methods of job searching in favor of these entirely – frankly, your best shot is with your personal connections you’ve made over the years. But more options means a greater chance of finding what you want, and it’s good to be able to tell which companies are specifically interested in older workers.

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1) Money was pretty important, but less than you’d expect. If your company doesn’t keep on top of market compensation, it can lose people pretty quickly.

2) Boredom. Many people left either because their jobs had no new challenges, even though they were good at them, or because the company itself did not innovate.

3) Too challenging. The flip side – people expected to do insane levels of work with no support.

From a management perspective, it’s important to address these problems before it comes to a head. You want to keep your best employees, and if you can’t make sure they’re both happy and productive you’re going to. From an employee’s perspective, it’s a good look into why everyone else is leaving jobs. If your issue is being stimulated / being overworked, you might be able to work with your boss on this before quitting for another job that’s an unknown quantity.

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Have a story about your worst job ever? Post in in the Free the Drones forums.

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STRICT DRESS CODE:
Gentlemen: Jacket, shirt, and please also bring a tie (no jeans,
trainers, flip-flops, polo-shirts)
Ladies: skirt/top, cocktail dress (no denim, min-skirts, flip-flips, bad
tastes)
Advice 1: It goes without saying that the more upper-class you dress,
the less likely you shall be denied entry.
Advice 2: Photos will be taken between 10pm to 10:30pm, and these will
be distributed once processed, therefore you may want to be
well-groomed!

Now there’s even a blog devoted entirely to this person that has dug up actual pictures of the infamous party. Needless to say, becoming this kind of Internet phenomenon isn’t a good way to advance your career – especially since every investment banker in London has likely heard of her from this. Even if they haven’t, a Google search of her name will bring up dozens of sites mocking her. Something that twenty years ago would have been a nasty rumor will now haunt her for life – so keep that in mind the next time you feel tempted to misbehave over e-mail. Today, you leave a trail that lasts forever.

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1) You likely get to pick one language – and you’re probably going to guess wrong about which one to learn. My biggest objection to the idea that learning another language is a boost to your career is that most languages being promoted as economically valuable turn out to be fads that are pointless a decade or so later. Right now those “fad languages” are Chinese (on the theory that China will be a new economic powerhouse and you’ll have to negotiate with them in business), Spanish (on the theory that more and more people in the U.S. will be Spanish-speakers and potential customers), and Arabic (because of the foreign policy importance of those countries). The problem is that the languages people rushed to learn only 10 or 15 years ago for the same reasons turned out to be relatively useless. What were they?

Japanese was a big one in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s – to the point that many books and movies envisioned a future dominated by Japanese corporations. Japan, Inc. was supposedly so much better at business that America would be a second-rate power in a decade or so (i.e., now) – and we’d better get used to learning the language of our new corporate masters. It didn’t turn out that way, however – both the U.S. and Japan hit an economic rough patch in the early 1990’s, and those loyal, lifetime employees turned out to be a big burden in rough economic times because you couldn’t fire them. U.S. companies laid off people, got back on track, and we headed into an economic boom. Japan’s economy is just now starting to grow again – after fifteen years of problems. So anyone who tried to learn Japanese to boost their career ended up knowing a fancy way to order sushi.

Russian was another big one – mainly in the 1970’s when it seemed like the Soviets would be the new dominant superpower. They were going to bury us, taking over the world one country at a time. Any American who wanted to participate in this new world ought to know the language of the Soviet Empire – after all, half the world was going to be under the Soviet boot, we were losing in Vietnam, and it was only a matter of time. Of course, it didn’t turn out that way – the Soviet economy turned out to be a sham, they couldn’t keep up militarily, and by the 1980’s anyone who learned Russian now had the inside track to the shattered economies of what were now Third World countries.

So what about today’s new languages of the future?

There’s Chinese – that economy that keeps growing so fast it’s going to dwarf us all. It’s gotten to the point that in New York, it’s trendy for the wealthy to find Chinese nannies to teach their children Mandarin. My guess, however, is that they’re wasting a bunch of money. Part of this is that the economic model China is using to fuel growth CAN’T surpass the U.S. – it’s based on the plan of making cheap junk in factories that we can’t make as cheaply, and then selling it to Americans. That puts an upper limit on how much they can grow – if we can’t buy more stuff, they can’t sell it. That’s the same problem the Japanese had – their model worked for awhile, but it wasn’t time tested like the American one. A few problems hit and it couldn’t survive – and I suspect the Chinese one will prove no better. There is a big jump to be made between making plastic Happy Meal Toys and building the Internet or jet fighters or making successful movies or other things the American economy does well. But that’s not the only problem – and it’s not even the most significant one. The bigger problem is that the Chinese are communists – and communists have this tendency to lie about everything. Sorry to any communists reading, but those Soviet production numbers turned out to be largely fake. And I’ve got a feeling the double digit Chinese growth of the past decade is a similar house of cards. There are lots of inconsistencies in the Chinese economic numbers. And there is intense political pressure for leaders of local provinces to meet economic goals of ten percent growth or so – meaning that many people think the numbers are just products of political games. It’s also worth pointing out that the idea that China was about to be the world’s new superpower is nothing new – you can find quotes going back to Napoleon to that effect.

Well, what about those billion people that speak Mandarin? It’s the world’s most spoken language! We’ve got to get in on that, right? That’s great and all – but 70% of those people are poor, rural farmers. Even with predictions that they’ll all become rich and important in a few decades, I wouldn’t bank on it. Unless you’re marketing seeds, don’t expect to get a lot more customers by learning Chinese.

What about Arabic? That’s got to be a good idea to learn then? After all, we’re fighting wars in countries that speak it, the war on terror seems to have no end in sight, and it will probably be pretty important to know. That’s an interesting analysis – except for all the times it’s been wrong in the past. Trying to predict what countries will be important in the future is basically impossible – but what we do know is that there is a lot of churn. Other than English, there’s no single language over the last century that’s been consistently dominant. In the early part of the century, Germany looked like it would be the next superpower – the Kaiser was on the rise, and it even looked like they might succeed for awhile. Then France and England looked like the important powers after the Germans lost – and learning German seemed to be pointless. Of course, that was until Hitler came around, and it looked like everyone would be speaking it anyway. Japanese seemed pretty important, too – until they both lost, and English was back on top again. Until the Russians were about to be in control – that is, until they weren’t. At which point German and Japanese looked pretty good again, as those economies were growing – until they collapsed.

My guess is that if you learn Arabic, you’ll be similarly disappointed. Times will change. We’ll have new methods to stop terrorism. Oil might be replaced with renewable energy – in which case Arabic will be about as important a language as Gaelic. The reality is that while the war on terror looks endless now, what is most likely is that we’ll figure out effective ways to stop terror and the Middle East will become gradually more democratic – ironically making those countries less important foreign policy-wise. We’re talking about ten or fifteen years from now, remember – times change, and some other region will probably be more important then. If you specialize in Arabic, you’ll likely end up like those Sovietologists did – in a position that used to be important, but is now pointless.

Surely Spanish holds out some hope! After all, we’ve already got a big chunk of people in the U.S. that speak only Spanish. They’re your potential customers – and they’re growing faster than anyone else. More and more illegals come in every year, and they are having more children. Soon they’ll become the biggest population group in the United States! Again, you’re probably going to have wasted your time – a little less so than with the other two, admittedly, but Spanish is not likely to displace English as America’s dominant language. Why? Part of this is that trends do not continue on their own with no response. It’s all well and good to say that if we keep having immigration at the same rates, we’ll all speak Spanish in 40 years anyway. But it also assumes that there will be no response. And personally, my guess is that whatever you think about the merits of these proposals, it’s likely that there will be stricter immigration measures, probably more fencing, and there will be less and less illegal immigration as time goes on. When a “disaster” is looming, people try to stop it. It’s also unclear that Hispanic populations in the U.S. will keep speaking primarily or only Spanish. Every other immigrant group in U.S. history has assimilated – and with time, they’ll probably be speaking English as well. Finally, other events can always intervene and cause us to change course. Think there will be unlimited immigration from Mexico forever? Well, what if the Mexican economy gets better? Think that Spanish speaking people will outbreed the current population of the U.S. and overwhelm it? Possible – but it’s also possible that technology extends the human lifespan – and if the past is any guide, this extension will probably be restricted to the wealthy for at least awhile. Longer lives can raise population as well if people stop dying off. There are lots of ways that Spanish could become an unimportant language to know.

I will grant, however, that with Spanish there are places and industries where it can be very helpful to speak it – in South Texas, you might be alot better off knowing it. In some positions, many of your employees may speak only Spanish – and it might even be necessary already to speak Spanish. But my advice is to go based on the present, not some projection of the future. If it’s clear that you would benefit from knowing Spanish right now, then learn it. If you think you’re targeting some customer market that will exist in ten years, think again – because those kinds of guesses are probably going to lead you to waste time, whatever language you pick.

2) Most educated people in other countries speak English. This is kind of chauvinistic, but who cares? It’s true. Other people will learn English if they want to do business abroad – in many countries like Japan, everyone is required to. You may not like the idea that we shouldn’t learn Japanese because they’ll just speak our language. But as long as the U.S. is the dominant economy, English will be the world’s language of commerce. Other countries will come to us, and they already do. The competitive advantage you gain over other people will be minor, in the form of gaining rapport by showing that you are interested in the other person’s culture. This isn’t a bad thing, and it can be helpful – but my guess is it’s not worth the effort of learning another language.

3) You could be learning something else. Remember, we’re analyzing learning a language for ECONOMIC benefit, not for the benefit it gives you as a person or whether it makes you smarter or whether you just like doing it. If any of those are true, go ahead. There’s nothing wrong with learning ancient Greek because you’re interested in it – but it probably won’t make you any money. If you’re deciding to learn another language solely because you think it will help your career, you ought to think long and hard about whether there’s something else you could be better spending your time on. Either learning something else, networking and making connections, or working more on the stuff you already know how to do will probably make you more money.

4) Learning a language doesn’t mean you know the culture or have any “ins.” This may seem minor – but it’s actually a big deal. Remember, the U.S. is a country made up of immigrants from all over. So pick any language, and there are native speakers who also know about the culture and whose fluency will dwarf anything you can ever accomplish. If a company wants someone to be their point person for negotiating with the Chinese, they’ll pick someone whose parents taught them or who are immigrants to the U.S. who are native speakers.

One final thing I will say is that if you are learning another language primarily to be a linguist or translator, then this analysis doesn’t much apply to you. In that case, other languages ARE your main job skills. But I would learn multiple languages, and not just the “fad languages” that crop up every decade or so. The key point is that while languages can be a great thing to learn, people who promote them as the key to functioning in some future economy are probably wrong. It’s on par with learning to play the piano or acting in a play – they can be fun to learn and can improve you as a person. But in most cases, it won’t be of much economic benefit.

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