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Talk about these questions.
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1. Which personality type are you most similar to? What kinds of jobs do you think would fit your personality?
2. Can you think of someone who has the wrong jobs for his or her personality? Explain why?
Strategies for keeping your job.
After six years with the company, Bob Congers lost his job. Bob hadn’t done anything wrong. On the contrary, he was a good worker, but his company was cutting its workforce. Workforce cutbacks were a common occurrence in the early 1990s. In response, career experts developed strategies for holding on to a job:
Make sure everyone knows you. Being a good worker is sometimes less important than making sure that people know you’re a good worker. Volunteer for new responsibilities, push your ideas, and generally make yourself visible.
Learn everything that could help you do your job better. If the company buys new computers, learn how to use them. If learning more about marketing could help you, take a short course in marketing.
Make sure you know everything about the company. And use this knowledge. If you find out that sales is becoming the most important department, try making a move to sales.
Be positive. People who find things to complain about are a lot less popular than people who find things to praise.
Improve your speaking and writing skills. Having good ideas isn’t enough. You need to be able to communicate your ideas.
Impress your boss. You can often impress your boss by arriving early and working late and by dressing in a businesslike way even if others dress casually.
In the end, it all comes down to one basic strategy: make yourself so valuable that the company won’t want to lose you.
According to the article, which employee fits each description? Check the correct name. What information helped you determine this?
1. The employee whose job is least likely to be cut:
a) Alice, who is always bringing problems in her department to her boss’s attention.
b) Betty, who is always finding something good to say about her department.
c) Carol, who always keeps her opinions about the department to herself.
2. The employee whose job is most likely to be cut:
b) Albert, who puts his extra time into doing his job well.
c) Bill, who puts his extra time into training in new areas.
d) Carl, who puts his extra time into taking on different responsibilities.
Talk about these questions.
1. Are the strategies given in the article useful for places where you’ve worked or places you’ve heard about? Would you follow these strategies?
2. Which of the strategies seem most important? Which seem least important?
3. What other strategies can you think of for keeping a job?
UNIT 5
EMPLOYMENT
Read the text and translate it
Have a nice day
(Employee loyalty in service firms)
Hotel, shop and restaurant chains, which employ thousands of people in low-paid, dead-end jobs, are discovering that high labour turnover rates resulting from the indiscriminate hiring of “cheap” workers can be extremely costly. Cole National declared a “war for people” in an effort to recruit and keep better staff.
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Employees were asked: What do you enjoy about working here? In the past year, have you thought about leaving? If so, why? How can we improve our company and create an even better place to work? Employees replied they wanted better training, better communications with their supervisors and, about all, wanted their bosses to “make me feel like I make a difference”. Labour turnover declined by more than half; for full time sales assistants, it declined by about a third.
Marriott Corporation, a hotels and restaurants group, has also decided to spend more money on retaining employees in the hope of spending less on finding and training new ones. In one year, it had to hire no fewer than 27,000 workers to fill 8, 800 hourly-paid job slots.
To slow its labour turnover, Marriott had to get a simple message accepted throughout its operating divisions: loyal, well motivated employees make customers happy and that, in turn, creates fatter profits and happier shareholders. Improved training of middle managers helped. So did a change in bonus arrangements.
At the same time, Marriott became more fussy about the people it recruited. It screened out job applicants motivated mainly by money: applicants which the company pejoratively described as “pay first people”. Such people form a surprisingly small, though apparently disruptive, part of the service-industry workforce. Marriott found in its employee-attitude surveys that only about 20% of its workers at Roy Rogers restaurants and about 30% of its workers at Marriott hotels regarded pay as their primary reason for working there.
Many middle managers in service industries are more comfortable coping with demands for more money than with demands for increased recognition and better communications. They will have to change their ways. Surveys say that when 13, 000 employees in retail shops across America were asked to list in order the 18 reasons for working where they did, they ranked “good pay” third. In first place was “appreciation of work done”, with “respect for me as a person” second.
Highlight any useful vocabulary you’d like to remember in the passage.
Too old at 30
I’m contemplating applying for my fifty-first job. It’s been a long time since I wasted stamp money this way. In fact, when I reached the fiftieth without success I decided to abandon job-hunting and got out my pen to scratch a living instead.
But there’s another wildly exciting job in the paper today, “salary 12,500-16,000 pounds according to age and experience”. The good news is the pay, the bad news is that damning little phrase “according to age and experience” which means I won’t get the job.
It’s not that I have more age than experience – I’ve led an incident-packed existence. Unfortunately it’s not all related to a single-strand career structure. Journalist, temp, company director, wife and mother, market researcher, and now, at thirty-something, I’m trying to use my Cambridge degree in criminology.
I’m a victim of the sliding pay-scale. Employers can obtain a fresh 22-year-old graduate to train a lot cheaper than me. Yet I’m the ideal employee: stable, good-humoured, child-bearing behind me, looking for 25-plus years of steady pensionable employment.
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Ageism is everywhere. It’s much more prevalent than sexism in the job market, or that’s how it seems from where I’m standing. Even the BBC is a culprit. Their appointments brochure says: “The BBC’s personnel policies are based on equal opportunities for all … This applies to … opportunity for training and promotion, irrespective of sex, marital status, creed, colour, race or ethnic origin, and the BBC is committed to the development and promotion of such equality of opportunity. Traineeships … are available to suitably qualified candidates under the age of 25.”
Ageism is lagging behind sexism, racism, and handicappism because even the oppressed seem to accept the discrimination. The public and private sectors are obsessed with attracting young high-flyers. Yet there are many professions that would benefit from the maturity and stability the older entrant can bring. This is recognized by the Probation Service, for example, who welcome experienced adults looking for a second career.
The armed services and police, perhaps, could think about strenuous aptitude and fitness tests rather than imposing a blanket upper limit on entrants which is arbitrarily and variously fixed between 28 and 33. The administrative grade of the Civil Service assumes the rot sets in at 32.
My own pressing concern is to alleviate my guilt. I loved every minute of my university education, and I’m desperately grateful to the Government for financing me through this at a cost of over 10,000 pounds. But unless someone gives me a job, how can I pay them back in income tax?
Work in pairs. Decide whether statements 1 to 10 are true or false, according to the article.
1. The writer is over forty years old.
2. She gave up applying for jobs some time ago.
3. She has not had much experience of working for a living.
4. Employers think that someone of her age is too expensive to employ.
5. She needs a job so that she can support her family.
6. People don’t get as angry about ageism as about other forms of discrimination.
7. Employers are looking for bright, ambitious people of any age.
8. More mature employees would be valuable assets to many professions.
9. People in their thirties can’t get jobs in government departments.
10. She wants to “repay” the State for her university education.
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