Allow me, please, to wish you happy holidays.
And now that we’ve got that behind us, let’s acknowledge that they probably won’t.
Be happy, that is.
Too many things are going wrong — in the world, in the country, in your job. If you still have your job. By year’s end, millions of hardworking folks won’t be working anymore. In the old days, this would mean they had been fired by their companies. Today, it’s the workers who are firing their companies.
It’s called the “Great Resignation,” and while leaving your job makes a lot of sense, leaving your paycheck could make a lot of trouble. It’s a difficult situation, made worse by the generally recognized belief that trying to get a job in the holiday season is a useless enterprise. Like most generally recognized beliefs, this is not true.
Ask Stav Ziv, the author of the “13 Best Things You Can Do for Your Career Before the Year’s End,” a happy holiday posting on the TheMuse.com.
Thirteen is a lot, so let’s make it easy on you, and even easier on me, and just discuss a few highlights.
No. 1: Network
Holiday time is party time, and you are sure to be invited to some merry gala event that you don’t want to attend.
Go anyway.
Whether the party is real or virtual, don’t waste your time with people who are interesting and fun. Apply career triage to detect people who could be links to jobs. Once located, bombard your targets with questions to determine if they are willing to recommend someone whose qualifications are sketchy and they don’t know very well, anyway. When the party is over, stand under the mistletoe, giving out kisses and resumes.
No. 2: Reflect
Ziv recommends using holiday time “to reflect on the last two years and set goals for next year.” Horrible idea. The best holiday gift you can give yourself is amnesia. Rather than remembering the flops, failures and fiascoes that occurred with such alarming regularity in the previous 24 months, wipe the slate clean and focus, instead, on the even more spectacular flops, failures and fiascoes that you will accomplish in the year ahead.
Now that’s the holiday spirit!
No. 3: Prep for Reviews
To help you prepare for end-of-year reviews, it is recommended that you “keep a folder of all positive and not-so-positive feedback.” This is problematic. Your not-so-positive feedback folder is so big it could crash the cloud, leaving your skimpy positive folder in the hands of evil Romanian hackers who will laugh in their goulash at your flimsy achievements. Fortunately, as your company moves into the metaverse, you will not have to face up to your annual review in person. In the metaverse, you simply send your avatar. I can see virtual you now. You’re dressed in a suit of shining armor, with a plume on your helmet, riding proud and fearless into the meeting on a white charger.
Alas, the armor won’t shield you completely from the slings and arrows launched from the HR fortress, but digital blows and bruises heal quickly, and you can spend the next twelve months in your virtual workspace, building support from the dark forces in the marketing department to defend you for next year’s attack on your job security.
No. 4: Learn Something New
You are advised to “learn a new skill or further your knowledge in certain areas.” I recommend a deep dive into the company’s annual report. They must be hiding something in all those numbers, like that major investment in a herring pickling factory in Ittoqqortoormiit, Greenland. Or you could learn something really useful, like how to bake fruitcakes. As a fruitcake professional, you will spend January to November watching apricots dry and raisins plump. Trust me, you can do this. Business pressures do increase in December, but don’t worry about making a quality fruitcake. No one eats the darn things anyway.
No. 5: Take Time Off
The holidays are a good time to kick back and relax. On the other hand, as you’ve spent most of the year kicking back and relaxing, why not use these days to actually do some work? Go on! Put the pedal to the metal! Stuff your boss’ inbox with reports and proposals. Overwhelm them with statistics and smother them with footnotes. Since everyone else will be in holiday mode, your work tsunami in the midst of the laid-back holiday period is sure to get you noticed.
Who knows? Make a sufficient splash and you could get promoted to the management team in Ittoqqortoormiit, Greenland.
Bob Goldman was an advertising executive at a Fortune 500 company. He offers a virtual shoulder to cry on at [email protected] To find out more about Bob Goldman and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.
