One of the things that has happened since I started working, 92 days ag0 (yes, I’m counting!), is that I’m not available to help around the house and yard like I was. One of the things I shared with the kids was checking on the chickens… do they have food and water, and how many eggs where there each day (we have a chicken coop to pay off, ladies! Give us some eggs!).
The last week or two we’ve gotten either zero eggs, or one egg, from eleven chickens (one disappeared a few weeks back). This is surprising because even over the winter, when they said the ladies shut down and we wouldn’t get hardly any eggs, we got seven to ten each day.
And now, with nice weather, we get maybe one?
Saturday I finally had time to go check on things, filled the water and the food, and found four eggs in the nesting spot. That was good. But then, I noticed another four eggs in the wheelbarrow where we keep some of the food, and poked around the rest of the shed (I built a shed and have the coop in one part of it). Guess what I found?
Two more nesting spots. One had about seven eggs in it.
Overall, it was a good egg harvesting morning (I think I found about two dozen eggs). That night I got another five eggs. We were back in production, baby! The girls haven’t let me down!
I was thinking about this and, of course, relating it to the job search. Because that’s the weird thinking I do 🙂
My kids are, really, new at egg hunting. We’ve had Tina (I call my birds, collectively, Tina, from Napoleon Dynamite) for about a year, and I’ve gone out to collect eggs as much as they have. They are learning to get better at checking the water and food, and get the eggs before Tina eats them (ewwww). It’s not rocket science, but there are certain skills to learn, and certain discipline to be had.
JUST LIKE THE JOB SEARCH.
You see, they did “stuff.” Maybe the bare minimum. They thought they were fine, but they weren’t getting the results they wanted. However, they didn’t change what they were doing.
I, the guy who built the coop, had a lot more knowledge. I had been doing this long enough to know there were some hiding places (still not sure how they are getting out, though) where they will lay eggs. I knew that one a day was not good enough, and because of chicken biology I knew that they were laying somewhere.
What I knew was different than what my rookie egg collectors “knew.”
In the job search we think we know what we are doing. So we apply the skills we assume to be correct… even if they were the skills we used ten or twenty years ago. The market was different back then, as was technology, as were we. The variables have changed… and our skills and tactics need to change.
In the job search we think we know where the jobs are, so we look there, and then pout a little when we don’t find what we think should be there. “Oh well, maybe tomorrow.” In the olden days, the nineteen hundreds, that meant looking in the classified ads (in print newspaper). Nowadays there are many places to look, and we kind of have to look around at all of those places every once in a while.
In the job search we think we can do this on our own and if we don’t get the results we want, then it is Tina’s fault (no offence to all of the Tinas out there). But the reality is there is always someone out there who you should talk to to learn the what’s and the why’s and the where’s. There are job clubs that you should participate in, there are resources at career centers, and there are trained and up-to-date professionals in the resume and career coaching spaces. Yes, there are charlatans, but there are a lot of people who really care, really know, and can really help. When you are tired of getting the low results that you are getting, it might be time to swallow your pride, open your wallet, and get real help to get yourself from jobless to working in your dream job.
I know it sucks. I know it is uncomfortable (my kids did the chicken duties in the Utah winter, rain, snow, etc.). But really, if you aren’t getting the results you want, it’s time to ask someone who has been there and done that for help. Don’t settle for just one egg a day, especially in today’s economy.