Let’s Get Things Started

I started a personal blog last year after having been laid off, and have found it to be a great creative outlet for a finance geek like me (watch me play with Excel and you’ll understand what I mean). 

Throughout the fall, as the layoffs stared rolling in fast and furious, impacting / threatening many of my family, friends & former peers.  At that time, I’d started two endeavours. 

First, I saw a post in a local Chicago business networking yahoo group asking if anyone else was interested in starting a professional networking group in Lake Count (far northern suburbs of Chicagoland) instead of having to go downtown or to the far west suburbs for most of the big networking events.  I answered that email, and the next morning (Sept 9th, 2008), I was sitting in Carribou Coffee at the train station in Libertyville, IL with 5 complete strangers, brainstorming what kind of group we should form.

The second endeavour was that in early September, after 7 months of a very frustrating job search and having only averaged one job interview (not counting phone screens) a month, I was at my wit’s end about money, and went into Kelly Financial Services to register for temp work.

Within a few days of each other in mid-October, I had a temp job doing something that was a bit out of my traditional finance role (Yeay!!), and our networking group had it’s first meeting with over 50 people in attendance.  Talk about Abundance!

But more and more people were getting laid off.  And when I was offered a full-time position, even though we all knew there were some cuts coming in our division, none of us expected the sheer size of the cuts that were announced in 1st quarter of this year.  The whole department was deselected.  And there I was — 2nd layoff in 13 months. 

This time round, though, I feel much more equipped to attack this job search head on.  Outplacement last year, and getting involved from the start in the Lake County Prosperity Forum has given me the courage to put myself out there.  One year earlier, I was absolutely PETRIFIED of “networking” or self-promotion.

While sitting in on a LinkedIn basics training session earlier this week (I am also a Registration Queen, and was assisting in that role), I got this BIG IDEA to start blogging publically, and with some of my former peers, so we could help support each other in our search for our new next best thing, and share some job search tips along the way. 

So here we are — BOLD, COURAGEOUS, and banded together as we reinvent ourselves!  Come back and visit us often, and please leave comments!