I want continue my discussion of OTR drivers transitioning to a local job, one not necessarily in trucking. The last time you might have applied, you probably searched the help wanted ads in the newspaper. You can still do that. But if you want to be successful in this terrible economy, you’ll have to launch an all out “war” on the marketplace.
The more effective method to land a job away from trucking is to hear about an opening through an friend, relative or acquaintance. You’re in a bar, restaurant, coffee shop or book store, you make small talk with someone waiting on line and you mention you’re searching, and that person gives you an idea, suggestion or contact. You learn about a job that might never be advertised.
Be advised thought, especially if it’s been some time since you’ve searched, the landscape has changed. For example, you think you might qualify as a warehouse supervisor, based on what you’ve done in trucking. You go into the cloud – the web – and look in monster.com and craigslist.com. You might see a few openings for warehousing. You dig deeper. Wait a minute. Those aren’t warehouse jobs, they’re warehouse DATA jobs. Search engines do not know the difference. Warehouse does not necessarily mean dock doors, shelves, forklifts and safety glasses any more. You don’t need shipping and receiving experience to run a warehouse these days. What an employer is looking for is knowledge about moving a (data) warehouse onto (citing one example) a “half-rack Oracle Exadata Database Machine X2-2 system”. Good luck with that.
Many jobs also want you to be bi-lingual. The work forced has changed. It is no longer a requirement that someone speak the English language to get a job. Rather than turn anyone away, employers now want their managers to be able to communicate with their Spanish speaking employees, not necessarily the other way around. I used to study Spanish and French in school. Forget the French, I should have perfected my Spanish language skills. Instead of French, a concentration on Chinese would probably have made more sense.
If you have any doubt that we are truly in a global economy, fill out a job application on line. Type in your address and when it comes to selecting which country you live in, your choices will drop down and the U.S. will not be in the top or preferred spot. You will actually have to go down to the “U’s” to find the USA and click on it.
Before you do that, you will, of course, have to create a user name and password, that, if you don’t remember it or write it down, you will never be able to apply for a job with that company again in your lifetime. It’s that crazy. You’ll need upper and lower case letters, a few numbers and some symbols to continue – something like MOses567%$. That would work. Good luck with finding a user name that has not already been taken. The whole process might take you a couple hours.
In my 6/29 post, I mentioned terms like Six Sigma, SMART, Cornerstone and BCP. Six Sigma is a business management strategy originally developed by Motorola. You may have picked up or delivered to companies that use this “method”. (Wikipedia) Sigma seeks to improve the quality of process outputs by identifying and removing the causes of defects (errors) and minimizing variability in manufacturing and business processes. Stay awake! It uses a set of quality management methods, including statistical methods, and creates a special infrastructure of people within the organization.
Did you get all that? Does that sound like a place you would want to work? It gets worse. There are LM, TPM, QRM, VDM, TOC, RLM, ISA88 and more bla, bla, bla corporate ca-ca-ca consultant mumbo-jumbo that goes along with Sigma. And all this a REQUIREMENT for a warehouse manager’s job – not a data warehouse manager’s job – a real warehouse warehouse job. SMART is yet another management system and Cornerstone refers to supply chain efficiency. Are you ready to move out of your truck into a warehouse or DC that utilizes these systems?
What’s that? You just want a forklift operators job? Are you certified? Have you ever “contributed” to a BCP? What’s that? You need to know this. A BCP is (again, Wikipedia) is planning which identifies the organization’s exposure to internal and external threats and synthesizes hard and soft assets to provide effective prevention and recovery for the organization, whilst maintaining competitive advantage and value system integrity. Huh? Whilst? One on-line ad for a forklift driver wanted the applicant to have experience working with a BCP. Do you? They also wanted the applicant to be bi-lingual and a “people-person”. Are a people person?
As I said yesterday in my “Toto, We’re Not in Kansas”, piece, you need to be ready for the transition if you want to get off the road and out of your truck. You might have 150 or more people applying for the same job. You might never get a response to your online job application. Whether you want to drive a lift or manage the place, you need to be familiar with the many systems – hardware and software – that are out there right now. They change frequently. Think about how to get some hands-on experience with these tools – remember competition out there for good jobs is fierce.
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