Job Training for Yourself

September 1, 2014 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

The on-ramp into a better job isn’t what it used to be. Gone are the days when you show up and get trained to do what the boss expects from you. In other words, if you can’t demonstrate that you’re qualified to do the job on the day that you start, you probably won’t be hired in the first place. (“Companies want workers to arrive job ready.”)

In a weak economy, jobs continue to go unfilled because fewer employers are teaching the skills they require in training programs. Of course, when employers limit their hiring to people who are already doing that job, they narrow the pool of potential hires “to almost no one.” You face this kind of constraint whether you’re looking for your first job, want to advance within a company, or to find a job somewhere else. Increasingly, you’re expected to learn the skills required on your own dime in on-line courses, unpaid internships, or community colleges, in short wherever you can find or pay someone to show you the ropes.

As hard as it may sound, an even bigger training hurdle may confront you after you find a job. The challenge is to remain sufficiently engaged in what you’ve been hired to do that you never stop wanting to advance by improving the skills that you’re gaining.

Unfortunately, your co-workers probably won’t be helping you out here. In Gallup’s most recent State of the Workforce Study, 70% of all employees in North America are “disengaged” in their jobs, which it defines as “lacking in motivation” and being “less likely to invest discretionary effort in organizational goals or outcomes.” Working on auto-pilot and waiting passively for training instead of maximizing the opportunity that every job presents, will confine many of those who are in the workforce with you to jobs that barely seem worth doing.

On the other hand, when being engaged in your work (and refusing to become disengaged) is a personal priority, you have a chance to discover the parts of your job that bring you satisfaction as well as value in the marketplace. It’s a foundation (however small) that you can build on to move up to something better.

With this kind of mindset, you also seize whatever opportunities are available to become more proficient in the work areas where your satisfaction and marketability intersect. When no training opportunities are offered, you still go out and find them for yourself. That’s because they are personal investments that are tied to your feeling both productive and valued. It is partly about career advancement, but even more about self-worth. It is actively avoiding the deadening effects of opting out at work.

Among other things, this requires looking more closely at the components of your job. For example, what are you doing when you feel most proud of yourself at work? Is it when you’re presenting, selling, convincing, organizing, writing, learning new things, mobilizing people, being creative, or helping others? It is whatever makes you shine.

What gives you the greatest feelings of accomplishment? Solving a problem before anyone else, earning the praise of someone you respect, providing real value to a customer, improving a process, or doing more with less?

In your field (and related fields), what is the value of the skills and experiences that you’re gaining? What are the job descriptions where you might use the foundation you’re building for an even better fit? In a work environment like we have today, it is always time to think like an entrepreneur and do more research to understand the job market that you’re in.

When you’re continuously looking for opportunities to improve your pride, sense of accomplishment, and value in the workforce, training becomes less about what employers happen to be providing and more about the kinds of returns that you want for yourself in terms of growing capability, continuous satisfaction, and the ability to shape your own future.

Moreover, when these are your qualifications, it becomes easier to move from one job to another. Your natural allies become the men and women who made the same kinds of investments and share the same work priorities, even though they happen to be one or two rungs above you on the job ladder. Your way into conversation with them is your common interests, talents, experiences and rhythms of work. They will hear your commitments when you have them, feel your engagement when you are engaged. They will tell you whether you can find what you’re looking for in their jobs or industries, or where you should be looking if it’s somewhere else.

Conversations like this can also be your best guides through the unending thicket of job training. Those who see some of themselves in you are also more likely to give you sound advice about the training you’ll need to do their jobs, as well as the best places to find that training. The connection you make with them can sometimes be powerful enough that they offer to bring you on and train you themselves. That’s how much you’ll stand out in today’s workforce.

Knowing the most marketable and satisfying aspects of your work—along with why you need your work to be engaging in the first place—are always the keys to a better job.

The fact that employers are providing less training today will never stand in your way as long as that way of thinking is your guide.

Characters Find a Theme

June 27, 2014 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

In 1921, Luigi Pirandello wrote the play “Six Characters in Search of an Author.” A half-dozen actors show up in the theater as incomplete characters looking for someone to finish their stories. In this absurdist masterpiece, the completion they find is disavowal, suicide, an accidental drowning, a great deal of confusion, and the playwright’s wondering why he ever agreed to get involved in the first place. Who would have thought that unfinished characters showing up today could find a more meaningful sense of completion in the most mundane of life’s details, but the characters in a pair of one act plays called “Sweating” and “Sleeping” (staged as part of Philadelphia’s on-going Solofest) did just that.

Steve Gravelle has hyperhidrosis, a condition characterized by excessive perspiration. We learn that one in 20 individuals is a chronic sweater, but Gravelle didn’t find anyone else who would admit to the condition until well into adulthood, so he mostly bore the stigmata of near-constant wetness alone. That kind of humidity can do something to you.

Standing in a basement under a cluster of blazing stage lights, he told us just what it was like in a series of funny, sad, profane, and revelatory vignettes, each concluding with his changing his shirt. As our own moisture gradually merged with his, it became like a crowded sauna down there, brilliantly setting the stage for Gravelle’s description of his time in a sweat lodge with a group of Quakers who had taken the ancient Indian ritual for their own. Gasping from breathing in and being nearly consumed by the intense heat, the experience ultimately produces a calm euphoria—a visceral arc that each of us got to travel with this very physical actor.

The sweat lodge story may have been the first time that sweating was good for Gravelle, but in a further advance towards acceptance, his marriage ceremony became another. In Philadelphia, the end of July better come with air-conditioning if you’re going to host a wedding reception here. But in a laugh from the gods that was aimed directly at him, electrical transformers exploded, turning the reception hall into its own kind of sweat lodge.

Instead of resignation to the absurdity, Gravelle had wrestled with his flowing pores for so long that (in this most sacred of life-moments) he ended up accepting his fate in an abandon of joyous dancing. My only regret was that he didn’t do more to show us his abandon in a rhythmic whirl of cast-off droplets, like a congregation’s blessing during Asperges.

Sara Nye is Gravelle’s wife, and the angle she claimed to illustrate her life was the tendency to fall asleep at the most inopportune, embarrassing and occasionally appropriate times. These one act plays were staged in a South Philadelphia brownstone, and for “Sleeping” the audience repaired from cellar to upstairs bedroom with chairs arrayed in similarly claustrophobic manner, this time around an ample bed. Nye is a dancer and collaborator in the creation of spoken soundscapes that envelope a dancer’s movements. The recording of her soft-spoken narration here was underscored by lilting, almost hypnotic music, dotted (at least in the beginning) with strange exclamations and cries, presumably from somewhere in her unconscious.

Nye used the bed the way painter Francis Bacon locates his figures—as a stage for tremendous physicality. She gyrated, tented herself beneath the sheets, draped her torso over a corner, cosseted herself like a queen in the comforter, thrust her legs into the air, and caressed the sleeping pillow of her husband: all to illustrate how whatever she’s doing can be so easily overtaken by the oblivion of sleep.

While Nye’s precision was always supported by her gorgeously mesmerizing soundtrack, her reach was particularly assured when she read passages from Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, only to have his beautiful cadences repeatedly broken off in mid-sentence by the doze that everyone who has taken freshman English knows only too well. In a nearly sublime conclusion that echoed the recent wedding epiphany below, the last time that Nye falls asleep, Gravelle tiptoes in to (quietly & tenderly) escort everyone but his sleeping wife out of the darkening room.

We’d all like a theme to make better sense of our lives. What did these unexpected viewpoints tell us about living, or tell the performers about themselves?

Sweating and sleeping in these ways set the players apart from the social norm, left them no choice but to see themselves as singular and slightly askew, and the places where they are supposed to belong differently. In tribal cultures, it is a common rite of passage to go out into the wilderness alone for a time, to think about your new role (as adult or wife, a recent hire or holy man) and what it will be like for you when you return. Each of these plays was a similar act of meditation. A deeply personal way to go out, so you can come back in and have it all make a little more sense.

Finishing School

October 29, 2013 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Maxine Powell died last week after a long career. For almost 60 years, she pursued the kind of work that almost no one is doing today. Powell taught grooming, poise, and the “social graces” to Motown artists before they went out into the spotlight.

How to stand. How to speak and dress. How to keep your cool with reporters and fans. How to make the best impression you could in every part of your life. It was guidance designed to make her students hold their heads up high and feel proud of themselves, so that pride always “came through.”

Smoky Robinson, Marvin Gaye, the Jackson Five, the Supremes: Powell called them her “diamonds in the rough and her training — along with tough love — aimed to polish their posture, diction, stage presence and sense of self-worth.” That’s how we met most of them. Shiny and unforgettable.

Back then Motown was playing on the same New Haven station (WAVZ) that brought the Beatles and Stones, Dylan and Hendrix to my transistor radio—and what a soundscape it was. You’d hear them, and then try to catch their acts on Ed Sullivan, the Smothers Brothers or American Bandstand. That’s how I saw Motown for the first time: clean cut, all matching suits and steps, smiling harmonies and rhythms that conjure an era big enough for several soundtracks.

For Motown, it was no longer step & fetch it, but stepping out.

Today, we live in an era with lots of marketing but little finishing. We’re often satisfied with surface impressions, what the Temptations were doing their best to get beyond in Beauty’s Only Skin Deep. Powell, of course, was right there with them, reaching through the perfect hair and clothes for the bedrock below.

My friends ask, what do I see in you 

But it goes deeper than the eye can view.

A half-century later, you’d never dare to tell anyone how to walk or talk, or how to behave—not even those you supposedly love. It’s freedom and preoccupation with personal autonomy that we’re left with.

Only I get to make decisions in my space.

There’s not much of a role for a Maxine Powell anymore, or for a love like that. Most of us are on our own when it comes to our finishing today.

The Jobs Project Revisited

August 10, 2013 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

The movement of our work was captured by a troupe of gifted Philadelphia dancers in a performance last May called The Jobs Project. When I first posted about it, I promised footage of the ensemble when it became available. Now it is. You can follow this link to the current RealLifePeople(in)Motion newsletter, which includes a video excerpt.

According to the program notes, the dancers’ movements were “in a conversation with” recorded comments by an assortment of local workers about what they do, and remarks from the dancers themselves about their gainful commitments beyond dance.

I was behind one of those interview voices, and can tell you this: while there’s nothing quite like sitting in a darkened theater and suddenly hearing your voice coming through the speakers, the experience jumps several levels when highly accomplished performers start responding to what you’ve just said.

At the time of my interview, I’d just written a post called I am a Work in Progress. It was on my mind that day and the gist of it was captured in one of my recorded comments during the performance. It was these words, along with those from several others, which provided the counterpoint to moves you can now get to see for yourselves.

The medium of voice, music & dance was the message–and a very powerful one at that.

At Work I’m a Dancing Machine

May 19, 2013 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

We hear a lot about work, how it’s wearing us down, or covering the bills, or how much it lets us “contribute to the economy as consumers.”

Less attention is paid to looking at our bodies at work: the rhythm of routine, the mesh of collaboration and the reach of accomplishment. It’s how we’re sometimes reduced to a fist by what others think of the work we’re doing, or elevated to a higher state by the sense of purpose it gives us. It’s man as Icarus but also as machine.

The Jobs Project, playing in Philadelphia through today, is a bold, imaginative, and sharply executed dialogue in words and movement that captures familiar and unfamiliar truths about the work we all do.

We say it with paint or poetry or sculptural forms because they open up levels of meaning that are simply not available any other way. This is true of dance too, but The Jobs Project from a company called RealLivePeople(in)Motion, gets its singular edge by also being a hybrid. It pairs the cadence of one to six dancers with recorded comments from men and women about their work, and mid-dance interviews with the performers themselves about what they do when they’re not dancing—or do so that they can dance—all to an hypnotic score by Ilan Isakov.

This inspired mash-up of inputs provides take-aways about the workplace that add both layers and textures to what we think we know about what happens there every day.

The Jobs Project is the brainchild of Gina Hoch-Stall, its richly gifted choreographer and director. Gina dances too, with the precision clockwork of a troupe that includes Molly Jackson, David Konyk, Sara Nye, Mason Rosenthal and Hedy Wyland.

Ingredients essential to the whole were provided by others too, like Andrea Calderise (artist), Megan Quinn (dramaturg), Patricia Dominguez (costume design), Maria Shaplion (lighting) and those joining Ilya on the sound score (Four Tet, Garth Stevenson, Michael Wall, Nathan Fake and The Books). Grassroots support for a performance that’s been building for more than a year was given a welcomed assist by the Puffin Foundation (“continuing the dialogue between art and the lives of ordinary people”), the Latvian Society (by hosting) and Yards Brewing Company (by wetting the whistle).

Like a start-up company, almost as breathtaking as anything here was the ability of this dedicated core to make something this wondrous come to life.

You can see a bit of the magic for yourself in the rehearsal footage here (with some or all of the piece to be posted later). While you’re watching, I invite you to imagine an element in the performance that made one of the most important points of all.

The Jobs Project was crisp and precise, but improvised and spontaneous too, like the best work. It is one of the dancers, Mason Rosenthal, who interviews the other dancers as they crisscross the space. The fun he had throughout, and how his seemingly off-the-cuff comments both relieve and accentuate the rigor of the forms around him, said something essential about the work we all do.

That it can and should provide a measure of fun while you’re doing it.

Hats off to all!